Berlin - Amid growing fears that biofuel farming is harming the environment and driving up world food prices, Germany's Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel set out Wednesday an exit strategy from Berlin's controversial fuel blend plans. Gabriel said plans for the petrol at German pumps to include a 10- per-cent biofuel component might be scrapped if it seemed likely that vehicle engines would be damaged by the mixture.
The environmentalist group Greenpeace, which has swung against biofuel, said meanwhile its laboratory tests showed that some of the biofuel already being mixed with the other main motor fuel, diesel, could not possibly be home grown.
Greenpeace said its tests showed that 20 per cent of the bio component in the diesel currently on sale at German filling stations was made from soybeans, a crop that does not grow in Germany, but can grow on land cleared of tropical forests.
German law will require petrol to be 10 per cent "bio" ethanol and diesel to be 7 per cent of plant origin by next year. By 2020, the ratio is supposed to rise to 17 per cent of the mixture coming out the pumps. Other European Union nations have matching targets.
A change of plan now will require an excuse. The main German motoring club, the ADAC, has offered a reason with claims that bio ethnanol will rot the hoses and gaskets in 3 million of the cars on German roads.
Those cars' owners would be forced to buy a more expensive, non- plant super grade of petrol instead.
"We won't put this regulation into effect if more than 1 million vehicles are affected," Gabriel told the newspaper Stuttgarter Nachrichten. Car manufacturers and importers are to brief the government soon on how many cars are likely to be affected.
Deputy government spokesman Thomas Steg conceded the regulation might be scrapped, but insisted government biofuel policy was intact.
In other countries, biofuel plans have come under attack because of the recent run-up in world grain prices. India banned rice exports Monday in response.
Economists say the diversion of land to fuel growing is reducing the world's potential to grow food at a time when grain demand in Asia is soaring.
Greenpeace attacked the biofuel industry, saying tropical forests were being destroyed to grow fuel crops.
The Climate Alliance, a group of 1,400 European municipal authorities, attacked the EU preference for biofuel.
Its chairman, Joachim Lorenz, said in Aachen, Germany that palm- oil plantations destroyed the homes of indigenous people.
