Ultimately, is there enough land for biofuels and production of food?
A. We believe that the world is capable of producing substantially more food than currently, as well as supplying the energy components for biofuel production. There are large land areas still not yet harnessed for food production without the need to touch any sensitive high carbon stock land, as well as a huge potential for increasing the yields of land already in production. As far as Ensus’ own requirements are concerned; by using wheat grown in Northern Europe we can replace some imported soya meal from outside Europe and so free up land. We believe Europe has the capacity to increase its output of wheat by returning set aside land to production, developing better crop varieties and by the considerable improvements already underway in farming productivity in East European countries which have recently joined the EC. To meet the proposed European target of ten percent of bioethanol in petrol by 2020, we estimate that there will be about a 3 percent increase in land under cultivation
