Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-04-22-Speech-2-271"

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"en.20080422.49.2-271"2
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"Mr President, for 30 years we have had some degree of food stability in the world, and now that has come to an end. It is a dramatic end, it is a sudden end, and it is a shocking end. We see the food riots we have heard of in Haiti – 20 killed, and the price of rice, beans, fruit, going up 50% in a year. The problem is, of course, partly population growth: in my lifetime the world’s population has gone up from two and a half billion to six and a half billion. We cannot do much about that. It is partly the consequence of new wealth in countries such as China, where the demand for, for example, chocolate is going up 15% a year, and that is unsustainable in terms of the supply. We cannot do much about that. It is partly because of climate change, desertification, changes in rainfall patterns, more flooding and so forth, and we are trying to do something about that. We have a package of measures to tackle that, and of course we have the measures we have heard about today from the Commissioner: food aid and farming support for the poorest countries. It is partly, though, a result of the rush into biofuels: the EU proposal of a 10% increase in fuel for transport; in America, the 30% of corn crops now going into ethanol, reducing the land available for food and pushing up the price of cornflour. We have seen the consequences highlighted by the statements by Jean Ziegler about the crime against humanity. That may be overstating it, but there is an element of truth there, and it is certainly true that we have to look for the second-generation biofuels. We have to look for the woody rather than liquid biofuels for transport. We have to grow biofuels sustainably. If we do that – not through monoculture – then we can find biofuels to be part of the solution. But at the moment they are at great risk of being part of the problem."@en1
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