Brazil's UNICA welcomes parts of European Parliament biofuel vote, cautions about threat to WTO compliance

11 Jul 13

The Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Association (UNICA) issued the following statement on the European Parliament Environment Committee's vote Thursday on biofuels and the issue of indirect land use change, or ILUC: "UNICA welcomes European Union policymakers' diligence and efforts in pushing for the consumption of biofuels that have the highest environmental credentials and technical performance," said UNICA CEO, Elizabeth Farina. "UNICA is encouraged that the Environment Committee voted Thursday to approve measures that would help incentivize the production of more advanced biofuels," she added. A 2% sub-target for promoting the production and consumption of advanced biofuels in transport fuel, as approved by the Environment Committee today, is a step in the right direction even if various details still need to be worked out around this issue. UNICA is also pleased to see that the Environment Committee has looked longer term to provide new and demanding decarbonization targets by voting to raise the Fuel Quality Directive's requirement for fuel producers to reduce the carbon intensity of their fuels by 9% by the end of 2025, up from 6% by 2020, the current requirement."However, UNICA is disappointed that the Environment Committee voted today to put an arbitrary cap on the use of all food-based biofuels," said Geraldine Kutas, Head of International Affairs at UNICA. "Such a cap ignores important differences between conventional biofuels' environmental performance and is vulnerable to being de facto discriminatory and breaching World Trade Organization rules," she said.
http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20130711-909493.html

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