Dar Es Salaam — AS Tanzanian villagers regret to allocate huge tracts of land to multinational corporations for the production of biofuels, British charity ActionAid has released a report calling on European Union to stop fuelling hunger in poor countries.

The 53-page detailed report which was compiled by ActionAid researchers in several developing countries including Mozambique and Tanzania last year warns against the EU target of deriving 10 per cent of its energy needs from renewable sources.

The report christened 'the impact of industrial biofuels on people and global hunger: Meals per gallon,' said the EU's ambitious biofuel consumption target is threatening rural survival in poor countries.

"Industrial biofuels made on an industrial scale from agricultural crops have been put forward as an answer to energy security, climate change and rural development.

ActionAid believes they are unlikely to be the solution to any of these challenges," the report said.

The British charity warns that biofuels have in fact become a major cause of the food shortage and hunger crisis is likely to get worse. Industrial biofuels are currently made from maize, wheat, sugar cane and oil seeds such as palm oil, soy and rapeseed.

"The rapidly rising demand for crops for fuel has put them into competition with those grown for food, driving food prices higher and affecting what and how much people eat in developing countries," ActionAid noted.

This is a significant issue in a world where a billion people are already going hungry. But despite such threats, in 2008 European Union member states committed themselves to obtaining 10 per cent of transport fuels from renewable sources by 2020.

Member states will fill almost all of this commitment through industrial biofuels, meaning the 10 per cent target is, in effect, a biofuels target.

Consumption of industrial biofuels in the EU will jump four-fold, ActionAid forecasts. As much as two-thirds are likely to be imported, the majority from developing countries.

The 10 per cent target is not the only driver of increased consumption in the EU. In 2006, it was conservatively estimated that the EU biofuel industry was supported by financial incentives to the sum of -4.4 billion.

Assuming the same level of subsidies continues, the industry would be subsidised to the tune of about -13.7 billion per annum to meet the 2020 target. The case against industrial biofuels has been mounting for a number of years.

This is borne out by evidence in this report, collected from the countries in which ActionAid works. This report focuses on three main broad impacts.

The report noted that biofuels are conservatively estimated to have been responsible for at least 30 per cent of the global food price spike in 2008.

It was estimated in 2008 that the food crisis had already pushed a further 100 million people into poverty and driven about 30 million more people into hunger.

If all global biofuel targets are met, it is predicted that food prices could rise by up to an additional 76 per cent by 2020. An estimated 600 million extra people may be hungry because of industrial biofuels by this date.

Industrial biofuels are having disastrous local impacts on food security and land rights in many of the communities where they are grown. The scale of the current land grab is astonishing.

"In just five African countries, 1.1 million hectares have been given over to industrial biofuels - an area the size of Belgium. All of the biofuel produced on this land is for export," the report noted.

EU companies have already acquired or requested at least five million hectares of land for industrial biofuels in developing countries - an area greater than the size of Denmark.

The local impacts range from the displacement of people, rising local food prices and food scarcity, broken promises by the companies about job opportunities and lack of consultation and compensation. Some have described this land grab as the next era of colonialism in poor nations.

The ActionAid report also warns that biofuels will be making climate change and hunger worse because crops being cultivated do not have lower greenhouse gas emissions compared to fossil fuels.

"This is because: converting forests, peatlands or permanent grasslands to grow biofuel crops is an important cause of GHGs (direct land use change); converting existing food crop land to biofuel crops often has a displacement effect," said ActionAid report.