Brussel - The European Union's top climate and energy officials have agreed to delay by up to seven years rules that would penalise individual biofuels for their indirect climate impacts, details of the deal showed.
The political compromise is designed to protect EU farmers' incomes and existing investments in the bloc's 17 billion euro-a-year (14.8 billion pound) biofuel sector, while discouraging new investments in biofuels that do nothing to fight climate change.
At issue is an emerging concept known as indirect land use change (ILUC), which states that if you divert food crops to biofuel production, someone, somewhere, will go hungry unless those missing tonnes of grain are grown elsewhere.
"The introduction of feedstock-specific factors would seem to be the most effective solution to address ILUC... However, scientific uncertainties still exist with regard to the exact level of such factors," said the internal minutes of the July meeting, seen by Reuters.
