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This summer visitors to the British countryside were treated to some
exotic changes to the landscape. In place of barley and wheat, there were
sometimes the blue flowers of flax or a carpet of mauve linseed plants.
In some fields the luxuriant foliage of cannabis reached head height, while
others were full of poplar and willow stems. These unusual sights mark a
change for European Community farmers – a move away from traditional crops
and towards production of non-food plants for use in industry and particularly
as fuels.

Since the 1970s, the Community’s Common Agricultural Policy has been
to pay farmers guaranteed prices for basic food crops, so there has been
little commercial incentive to grow anything else. But since 1983, European
farmers have been growing more crops than the Community needs. Overseas
governments, notably the US, objected to the subsidised surpluses being
dumped on the world market, pushing down prices and making it impossible
for their farmers to make a living. The combination of external and internal
pressures to reduce the food surpluses persuaded the Community to impose
stricter food crop production quotas and to lower guaranteed prices.

In 1988 the Community started offering compensation payments for land
set-aside from food production. Last year farmers who set aside 15 per cent
of their cultivated land were paid £200 per hectare. In total the
Community spent £180 million on the set-aside programme, but food
crop production only dropped by about 3 per cent possibly because many farmers
increased production in the fields they did use. Taxpayers resent ‘paying
farmers to do nothing’ and the farmers dislike the bad publicity as well
as being prevented from doing their job. Even environmental groups believe
set-aside offers virtually no environmental benefit, they would prefer to
see a general shift away from intensive agriculture and less reliance on
pesticides and fertilizers.

But the Community still needs to cut food crop production. It plans
to persuade more people to take part in the set-aside scheme by making it
compulsory for any farmer who wants to be paid guaranteed prices for food
crops. It has also revised the scheme and will introduce new rules for the
management of set-aside land this winter. These include instructions on
when to mow and plough in order to protect birds and insects, and minimise
soil erosion and nitrate run-off. Farmers can also opt for a ‘permanent’
set-aside (five years or more) or choose to set aside the perimeters of
each field to create ‘wildlife corridors’.

Alternative lifestyle

These conservation measures still only apply to a small proportion of
the land. They are not as wide ranging as those introduced by the Department
of Environment’s Environmentally Sensitive Areas scheme. This pays farmers
for specific management measures, including those to cut production of food
crops, over the whole farm. This scheme has proved popular with the farmers
because it has created work such as dry-stone walling, unlike the set-aside
approach which has contributed to rural unemployment.

However, the revised set-aside scheme should change all this. One option
open to farmers is to grow non-food crops on the set-aside land. As well
as cannabis (grown for paper-making and fibreboard) and linseed (used in
paints and chemicals), farmers can grow grain for industrial starch, oil
seeds for lubrication products, and a variety of herbs and aromatic plants
for use in the growing number of ‘natural’ cosmetics.

There are several advantages to growing this kind of non-food crop on
set-aside land, the major one being that farmers can be paid lower subsidies
if they are earning money from selling these ‘industrial’ crops. Currently,
set-aside land used for this purpose earns the same compensation as a field
of ‘weeds’. So far, few farmers have chosen to grow non-food crops, suggesting
that potential growers are being put off by the uncertainty of growing an
unfamiliar crop, and the moderate prices paid for the final product. It
may also be that alternative schemes are more attractive to farmers, such
as the Community’s cannabis and linseed support programmes, which provide
farmers with a subsidy of £607 and £478 per hectare respectively.

One way in which the Community could encourage a huge expansion in the
production of other non-food crops is to improve subsidies for set-aside.
In the long term, genetic engineering will allow farmers to ‘grow’ exotic
produce such as pharmaceuticals and plastics. But in the immediate future
biofuels, liquid and solid, are set to become an important farm product.

Production of liquid biofuels is already common in some countries. Fermenting
starches and sugars produces ethanol, a petrol substitute, and there is
already large-scale production of ethanol in Brazil, Zimbabwe and the US.
Rapeseed oil can be burned as diesel; either raw, after modification to
the engine, or in an ordinary diesel engine after esterification to rapeseed
methyl ester. Several European countries including France, Italy and Austria
have begun production. All three countries have built large scale biodiesel
biofuel factories, and the French Government has signed an agreement to
initially use 100 000 hectares of land with 700 000 hectares as the long
term target.

At first sight, replacing polluting fossil fuels with biofuels appears
to be a highly commendable environmental measure. However, the ‘energy accounting’
of biofuel production, in Europe at any rate, reveals that the overall
environmental benefit of the fuels alone is marginal. Intensive cultivation
of rape, cereal and sugar beet all require high inputs of energy. Electricity
is used to manufacture the large amounts of nitrate fertiliser required,
fuel is needed to cultivate and harvest the crop, and yet more fuel to process
and distribute it.

Fuelling the fire

Figures from Britain’s Department of Trade and Industry suggest that
diesel from rapeseed generates at most twice as much energy as is required
to produce it. Furthermore, even if the whole of Britain’s set-aside land
was used for ‘biodiesel’ production it would replace only around 6 per cent
of diesel use – cutting carbon emissions by no more than 4 per cent.

As the overall cost of biofuels is greater than that for fossil fuels,
biofuel production always has to be subsidised. Zimbabwe, Brazil and the
US all make ethanol because they dislike being dependent on imported oil.
The biofuels industry also helps to keep rural unemployment in check, which
makes the farmers happy. Whatever the circumstances, political motivation
is paramount – no government has ever subsidised ethanol or diesel for purely
environmental reasons.

Solid biofuels are more economical and environmentally friendly than
liquid biofuels. These include the wood from fast growth forestry and other
perennial non-tree crops such as the miscanthus, popularly known as elephant
grass, which is a relative of sugar cane. This produces dry biomass for
burning. Short rotation coppicing, which involves cutting back and regrowing
sapling shoots for harvest, is another source of solid biofuel .

The DTI’s Energy Technology Support Unit at Harwell estimates that
energy output from solid biofuels is up to 30 times that required to produce
them – perhaps even higher for miscanthus. Moreover, they require fewer
nitrates and other chemical fertilisers than do annual energy crops. They
can also be used as ‘sieves’ between arable fields and watercourses to mop
up nitrate run-off. The permanent root system means they can counter soil
erosion. Tree crops do not deplete the soil in the way that annual crops
do, as the wood is harvested when the leaves have fallen. And a broad-leaved
coppice with mown access tracks attracts more insects, birds, flowers and
butterflies than an intensively grown annual arable crop.

Despite their many advantages, biofuels will not take off without further
financial incentives from the Community. But biofuels are not the only non-food
crops that would benefit from changes in Community policy. There are new
plants on the horizon which, given some financial backing, could alter the
face of Europe’s farmlands. For example, the British government and Zeneca
Seeds are experimenting with a genetically engineered variety of rape which
will synthesise polyhydroxybutyrate – the biodegradable plastic Biopol –
within the plant. Biopol is currently a ‘premium’ product which is produced
by fermentation.

The British government’s Food Research Institute in Norwich is also
working on a genetically modified rape which will double the maximum proportion
of erucic acid in the oil from around 40 to 90 per cent. Erucic acid is
valuable in coatings for the plastics industry and has many other applications.

One long-term goal is to produce substitutes for palm oil and cocoa
butter, which are widely used for soaps, detergents and cosmetics, in plants
that thrive in temperate climates. Genetic engineering could also yield
plants that produce protein molecules. For instance, the Agricultural Genetics
Company of Cambridge is working on the bulk production of virus coat proteins
in cow peas, for use in vaccines.

While many want to see European Community policy changed to promote
industrial crops, some environmentalists are opposed to the idea of set-aside.
This view is expressed by Paul Wynne from the Council for the Protection
of Rural England: ‘We have a big problem with set-aside. We do not think
there is surplus land, even if there is a surplus supply of food in Europe.
We would say land is being farmed too intensively.’

The new proposals for set-aside management attempt to tackle what concerns
the public most about the environment. The scheme proposes a variety of
management options geared to creating habitats for birds and wild flowers;
protecting watercourses; creating otter havens, and so on. However, environmentalists
say that these changes are little more than cosmetic alterations, and that
the overall thrust of agricultural policy still favours intensive farming.

In practice, the grants, fees, allowances and prices which will influence
the pattern of agricultural land use will be hammered out as a compromise
between competing interests. With the Community’s Common Agricultural Policy
under review, the future of Europe’s countryside is up for grabs, so now
is a good time to shout.

Kate de Selincourt is a journalist who writes about science and the
environment. Rupert Howes is a research assistant at the International Institute
for Environmental Development. David Hall is professor of Biology at King’s
College London.

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Britain adds wood fuel to the energy debate

British farmers are becoming more interested in coppicing. At a recent
agro-energy conference there was standing room only as more than 300 delegates
crammed into the South of England Showground, one of Britain’s agricultural
exhibition sites, to hear about the potential of wood fuel energy.

Where coppicing has already been introduced the favoured species are
poplar and willow. At the end of the first growing season saplings are cut
back to increase the number of shoots. Three years later, when the shoots
are harvested, they yield around 60 tonnes of dry wood per hectare. When
burnt each tonne provides around 20 gigajoules of energy – equivalent to
two-thirds the energy output of coal. The farmer then allows the trees to
resprout and continues to harvest them every three to five years.

The case for wood fuel can be justified on employment, economic and
environmental grounds. It provides an opportunity to reduce carbon dioxide
emissions and so could help the Community to keep to its commitment to stabilise
emissions at their 1990 level by the year 2000. It also offers an opportunity
to decrease the intensity of agricultural production through the use of
fewer pesticides and fertilizers: the buyers of wood fuel are not as concerned
about appearance or texture as the consumers of food crops.

However, at present the production of coppice is virtually unsubsidised
by the Community. A move to swap subsidies from food to biofuel production
is starting in Britain, but so far less than 0.3 per cent of the country’s
energy requirements are met by wood fuel.

The Swedish government does subsidise wood fuel and at the same time
it collects taxes on carbon dioxide and sulphur emissions from more traditional
fuels. As a result of this policy, biofuels already provide about 16 per
cent of the national energy demand.

In Austria biomass accounts for about a tenth of the energy demand.
But this does not come cheap. Austria plans to spend £3 billion
over the next 15 years to double biofuel capacity. The aim is to supply
half the annual 18 million cubic metres of woodchip for the biofuel from
more than 150 000 hectares of short rotation plantations, with the rest
coming from forest residues (the wood normally left behind after felling
useable timber). The US is also investing in biofuels. The country has more
than 8000 megawatts capacity available (enough to satisfy the electricity
needs of a city such as San Francisco with six million people), and plans
to expand this capacity rapidly.

In July, the British government took a first step towards supporting
wood fuel. The Department of Trade and Industry introduced its third Non
Fossil-Fuels Obligation Renewables Order, which pays premium prices for
electricity generated from renewable sources. The special provision for
converting biofuels to electricity will help to create markets for the Farm
Woodfuel Project, started in 1991 with £12 million of government
support promised over six years. More government intervention is needed
to create a ‘level playing field’ between energy forestry, other sources
of energy and agriculture. This is necessary to ensure that the complete
cost cycle of the fuel and food industries, including the pollution they
cause and the subsidies they enjoy, is taken into consideration.

Rupert Howes and David Hall