MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Top UN economist blasts EU for promoting bio-fuels

European efforts to promote bio-fuels should be rethought because of the contribution they have made to rising food prices, according to Jeffrey Sachs, a top economic advisor to the United Nations.

During a visit to Brussels this week Sachs insisted that the EU support for bio-fuels is at least partly responsible for the extra hardship the world's poor have faced lately, as a growing proportion of their meager incomes has gone on basic groceries. Sachs, who counsels UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon on the Millennium Development Goals for reducing extreme poverty, said that Europe's bio-fuels policy is having a "real impact" on food prices because wheat is being used on this continent to meet its energy demand, rather than to feed people. While Sachs, an economics professor in Columbia University, New York, admitted that the US decision to give its farmers a subsidy of 51 cents per gallon of ethanol made from corn is more culpable than the EU more modest support for bio-fuels, he voiced concern about how the latter's diversion of food crops to fuel is set to "multiply considerably in the years ahead under current plans". "The US program has a larger impact (on food prices), but neither of them makes much sense in terms of environmental effects, energy balance or food policy" he added. "I would advocate reconsideration of both". Last year EU leaders stipulated that 20% of EU transport requirements should be met by bio-fuels by 2020. Since then a chorus of critics, including the EU own scientific advisors have called for this target to be dropped. Peter Mandelson, the European commissioner for trade, has said that the EU bio-fuels policy has only had a "minimal impact" on world food prices. The real culprit, according to Mandelson, was the US. Olivier de Schutter, the UN newly appointed special rapporteur on the right to food has argued that the EU policy is misguided. "The ambitious objectives for the production of bio-fuels that have been set by the United States and the European Union are irresponsible" he told French newspaper Le Monde. "The production of rapeseed, palm oil destroys the forests in Indonesia. The use of one-quarter of corn in the United States is a scandal, in which taxpayers' money is used solely to serve the interests of a small lobby. I call for a freeze on all investment in this sector". Sachs also criticized the decline in the amount of development aid that Europe has been giving to poor countries in the past year. Between 2006 and last year, European aid dropped from almost 48 billion euros to 46 billion euros. This was the first such fall since 2000