Biotech crops head search for alternative fuel

AT THIS stage it is being portrayed as the magic wand with the capacity to answer a significant part of the fuel dilemma facing us globally.

From an Irish perspective it is probably equally important from a farming point of view because of the alternative it offers hard pressed farmers.

Globally, crops grown for biotech proposes have taken off as the rush for fuel alternatives becomes the new mania.

New figures highlight just how the farming landscape is changing as a result. In 2006, 252 million acres of biotech crops were grown by approximately 10.3 million farmers across 22 countries, home to more than half the world’s population.

Figures from the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), also show the global biotech crop area jumped by nearly 30 million acres, up 13% year on year.

Over the same period the number of farmers involved in the sector was ahead by 21%, up from 8.5 million farmers in 2005. European countries were among the leaders: Slovakia this year became the sixth EU country to plant biotech crops. Spain continues to lead in Europe, with 148,000 acres planted in 2006, while plantings in France, Germany, Portugal, Slovakia and the Czech Republic reported a five-fold increase in plantings — from 3,700 acres to 21,000 acres — in the last year.

Those statistics speak for themselves and it looks as if recent EU rulings on the switch to green fuels should help this process even further.

By 2020 the EU Commission wants Europe to have 10% of all transport fuels by each member state to come from biofuels.

Mariann Fischer Boel said the targets were good news for agriculture because it opened up the way for farmers to grow alternative crops, presumably with higher profits being the core attraction.

This ties in with EU policy to cut CO2 output by 20% back to the 1990 levels over that time.

Farmers have gained significantly from this shift in production and globally they earned $5.6 billion (€4.2bn) in 2006 from their biotech output.

In the decade 1996-2005 the accumulated economic benefit totalled $27bn (€20.7bn), according to the ISAAA.

Apart form the contribution to the fuel crisis the shift in agriculture output over the past decade has been responsible for the accumulated reduction in pesticides of 224,300 metric tonnes of active ingredient.

Those figures make a powerful argument for the substantial economic and environmental benefits of biotech crops.

Marion Byron, director of the Irish BioIndustry Association said the message from these figures was unambiguously clear. “Biotech crops are now firmly established in Europe and are here to stay. The unprecedented growth of biotech crops in the first decade of commercialisation, 1996-2005, continued in 2006 so future growth may well surpass that of the first decade, as more biotech crops will be developed in mega-investment projects to meet ambitious biofuel targets.

“It is clear that biotechnology offers very significant advantages for increasing the efficiency of biofuel production and will be a major factor in biofuel development in the future.”

More to the point she regards our strong tradition in agriculture with the early stirrings of a biofuel industry being well placed to take advantage of what’s happening.

Given that we are no strangers to technological innovation, including biotechnology, she said plenty of opportunities were out there to be exploited. But that would require a strong focus on what’s happening internationally and “we need to maintain strong focus to ensure that modern technologies such as plant biotechnology are available” to help drive this emerging end of the international economy forward in the coming years.

If it sounds like the answer to all our problems, it probably isn’t and already some are questioning the ethanol route as the answer to all our prayers.

One of the difficulties is that many of the alternatives fuels require to be subsidised in order to be profitable.