21 September 2026 – Over fifty NGOs, including Biofuelwatch, Transport & Environment and the Global Forest Coalition, have signed an open letter calling on the European Commission and the UK government to end the use of biofuels in road transport, aviation, shipping, home heating and energy generation, in light of disastrous food security indicators across the globe. The letter draws attention to the combination of environmental and geopolitical factors that are depressing harvest yields and choking global supply chains, arguing that in such a context diverting land away from food cultivation is profoundly self-destructive.
Conflicts in Ukraine and Iran, alongside worsening climate change and a severe El Niño, have pushed up food prices across the world and threaten many with poverty and scarcity. Recent reports have made it clear that British and European preparation for food supply shocks is insufficient to the probability and scale of future crises.
“This is an incredibly risky time for food security,” said Pax Butchart, Biofuels Campaigner at Biofuelwatch. ‘For governments to be incentivising land use for fuels that don’t even reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, instead of growing food that people desperately need, is an incredibly wrongheaded and short-sighted policy.”
Cian Delaney, Biofuels Policy Manager at Transport & Environment, commented that ‘governments around the world are ramping up biofuels production to combat high fuel prices, but they are playing with fire. Biofuels expansion is incompatible with a rapidly heating planet, and as crop yields come under more pressure, burning food for fuel is becoming increasingly indefensible. With post-2030 energy plans already underway, it is imperative that the EU and the UK maintain existing guardrails against harmful biofuels expansion, and that global leaders shift to clean renewables that don’t drive deforestation or spike food prices.’
Annually, crops that could meet the needs of millions, sometimes over a billion people, are diverted to making biofuels, worsening the crisis of malnutrition that still leaves three million children dead every year across the globe. Meanwhile, industrial monocultures destroy fragile ecosystems and poison farmers, communities and consumers with pesticides, at a time when we desperately need to be transitioning to a regenerative style of agriculture.
Meanwhile, biofuels produced from waste and residues such as used cooking oil (UCO) are frequently fraudulently labelled crude vegetable oil, sold for the higher prices that waste oils receive. Genuine wastes are already in high demand across a variety of sectors, and simply are not produced in the quantities necessary to meet biofuel demand.
The demands of the letter are even more relevant and urgent given recent leaked news of the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive (RED) IV, raising the crop feedstocks cap from 1% to 7%, allowing high-ILUC (indirect land use change) risk crops to count towards targets, and implementing binding national targets for biofuel use by 2040. These disastrous proposals demonstrate that policy is increasingly out of touch with what is required for a stable climate and sustainable society, and emphasises the importance of taking into account the expert guidance of these NGOs.
Background information
Food and feed crops currently make up almost all biofuel feedstocks currently available on the world market, with the small proportion of ‘waste’ feedstocks heavily adulterated through fraud, and sold in quantities much larger than the feasible output of the entire global supply chain. This means that in the vast majority of cases biofuels are implicated in forest loss, wetland drainage and biodiversity degradation.
Under the UK’s Renewable Fuel Transport Obligation (RTFO) and the RED, biofuels are incentivised as supposedly ‘sustainable’ fuels, despite their disastrous impacts on climate and food security. Imports of biofuel into the EU have been increasing over time, making the sector’s impacts a growing problem for sustainability policy.
Meanwhile, farmers are facing catastrophic losses across the globe in one of the worst harvests in living memory, thanks to severe cyclical weather conditions exacerbated by a warming atmosphere. The UN estimates nearly 50 million people could be pushed into acute hunger by these conditions, and supply chain issues threaten even more. Key grain supplies from Ukraine, Europe’s breadbasket, are choked by ongoing conflict, and the petroleum needed to make fertilisers is trapped in the strait of Hormuz due to escalating war in the Middle East. None of these conditions, whether social or climatic, seem likely to ease any time soon.
You can read the letter here.