Objection on Soy: EU biofuels policy should focus on fact-based, regionalised sustainability criteria
The European Parliament today adopted, by 388 votes in favour, 248 against and 24 abstentions, the objection to the delegated act, which would have classified soy as a high indirect land-use change (ILUC) risk feedstock and phased out its contribution to the EU renewable energy targets by 2030.
Farm Europe welcomes this vote, which should not be read as a step back from the Union’s commitment to fight deforestation but as an opportunity to improve Europe’s approach to biofuels. The Parliament rejected today a methodology that would have applied a general principle of exclusion to soy, without differentiating the actual risk across diverse regional situations and without recognising the important contribution of EU-grown soy to the Union’s food and feed challenge.
Farm Europe fully supports the phasing out of feedstocks highly connected to deforestation, in particular palm oil. However, in Europe, soy is a multi-purpose crop, all value chains being equally important to the viability of this crop. Within EU biorefineries, the complementarity between biofuels, food and feed should be fully recognised, in particular in the context of the protein strategy presented by the European Commission on the 7th of July. Excluding soy from the biofuels market would have further undermined the business model for growing soy in the EU, at the very moment when the Union is seeking to strengthen, not weaken, its protein autonomy and strategic resilience.
Farm Europe now calls on the European Commission to come forward swiftly with a revised delegated act that maintains the phase-out of feedstocks for which a significant expansion into land with high carbon stock is observed, while introducing a robust, science-based, origin-differentiated assessment. Since soy is covered by the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), country benchmarking under that Regulation provides a ready-made basis: soy originating from countries classified as low deforestation risk — including soy cultivated in the EU under stringent Union environmental, climate and biodiversity standards and contributing to diversified rotations and soil fertility — should remain eligible for the purpose of RED sustainability compliance.
Farm Europe further reiterates its call for the creation of a Sustainable Biofuels category, deforestation-free and CAP-compliant, recognising the specificities of food and feed crop-based biofuels that meet the sustainability standards attached to the Common Agricultural Policy, in particular conditionality.