Strengthening EU farmers as energy providers

Farm Europe calls on the European Commission to unlock sustainable and deforestation-free EU crops in the post-2030 Renewable Energy Directive

Over the last 25 years, the European Union has shifted barely 10% of its transport energy away from fossil fuels. It now intends to deliver the remaining 90% within the next 25 — a pace of change roughly twelve times faster than anything achieved so far. Invited by DG ENER to contribute to the preparatory work on the Renewable Energy Directive (RED) post-2030, Farm Europe argues that this ambition cannot be met without mobilising a resource the EU has long overlooked: its own farmers, as energy providers.

“Europe does not have to choose between its climate, its food security and its farmers,” said Luc Vernet, Secretary General of Farm Europe. “But it has to choose between agriculture and land abandonment here in Europe and between sustainable, deforestation-free EU crops and highly deforesting and often mislabeled imports.”

Part of the EU’s reported progress has, in fact, been on paper — through statistical multipliers and fraudulent imports. Between 2017 and 2023, imports of so-called “advanced” Annex IX biofuels from China rose sevenfold, from 400,000 to some 3 million tonnes — a large share suspected of being mislabeled. This large-scale fraud has undermined EU farmers, refineries and investment alike, and distorted the picture of what has really been achieved.

Farm Europe therefore asks that the cap on food and feed crops be raised, step by step via a targeted revision of RED III and the future RED IV, to 10% — with a clear focus on deforestation-free crops that meet the sustainability standards already embedded in the Common Agricultural Policy. CAP conditionality can serve as a positive eligibility criterion.

Beyond boosting conventional and advanced biofuels, both liquid and gaseous, a 10% objective would generate an additional 30 to 35 million tonnes of protein-rich co-products — cutting the EU’s dependence on imported products linked to deforestation, strengthening European protein sovereignty, and providing the industrial base that advanced biofuels need to finally scale.

Over the past decade the EU’s cereal area has contracted by around 5 million hectares, and the Joint Research Centre estimates that some 20 million hectares are at risk of abandonment. The real choice in Europe today is not food versus fuel, but productive land versus abandonment, with the risk for the EU to increase further its dependencies. Meeting the EU’s climate and bioeconomy ambitions will require roughly 260 million additional tonnes of agricultural biomass by 2050 — about a 25% increase — achievable through innovation and by bringing land back into sustainable production.

Farm Europe also calls for the ongoing revision of Implementing Regulation (EU) 2022/996 to become a building block against Annex IX fraud, and to define intermediate crops in a way that is relevant for EU farmers — clearly excluding tropical and sub-tropical areas from its scope, as long as agro-climatic conditions do not allow a sound definition of intermediate crops that fit with regions producing structurally more than one crop.

“The question is no longer whether European agriculture and EU biorefineries can contribute to the transition,” Luc Vernet concluded. “It is whether the regulatory framework will finally create the conditions for them to do so.”