Combining agriculture with market and climate protection policies

In Germany, the Union for the Promotion of Oil and Protein Crops formulated its policy expectations and presents it in their third edition of the Global Market Supply Report. UFOP refers to the generally good global supply situation for the most important agricultural commodities. The updated report also takes into account the raw material requirements for biofuel production and material utilization as a renewable raw material. UFOP criticizes that this supply situation does not play a role in the political assessment of harvest results and calls for maintaining the sales outlook in the fuel markets.

So far, international politics is failing regarding the “limits” of globalization and the liberalization of agricultural trade. From the viewpoint of UFOP, this is one more reason to include the material and energy use of cultivated biomass in a climate protection strategy.

In the course of the revision of the Renewable Energy Directive (RED II), the European Union failed to properly integrate this potential into climate protection policy. On the contrary: the cultivation of renewable raw materials from cultivated biomass is being gradually put on the shelf, without showing sales prospects in new markets at the same time, UFOP criticized sharply.

The European agricultural policy is still obligated to combine the requirements for economically viable and sustainable agriculture with a sustainable agricultural market or climate protection policy and to maintain and further open up sales prospects in the fuel markets. In doing so, ambitious sustainability requirements have to be taken into account, which must also be applied in third countries. Against this background, UFOP eagerly awaits the submission of the German Federal Government’s Climate Protection Act with sectoral targets for greenhouse gas reduction and the agricultural strategy announced for autumn 2019.