Mr. James Cogan:

I would like to come back to the land use change question simply because it is always there bubbling away. The idea of indirect effects, that is, if we use land to produce biofuels then we do not have it for food and somebody else has to use other land for food, is a kind of scary Hallowe'en ghost in so far as it is definitely the single most widely used rationale for the change in direction in the biofuels policy in Europe. I remind everybody that while it is a legitimate phenomenon, it does not happen. It is not happening in Europe for the biofuels that are produced in Europe for European use.

Even under a more optimistic or ambitious biofuels policy in Europe, as long as it was restricted to European crops processed into biofuels and used in Europe, those land use change dynamics would never kick in in a way that would be worrying. That is not just an opinion; it is scientific.

With regard to Senator Mulherin's point on the import of Asian palm oil diesel and possibly even the African example she used, to my knowledge not a drop of biofuel has arrived in from Africa, although people feared that would happen. It is tightly monitored. Every single drop, or at least every tanker load, of biofuel that is used in Europe is traced. At a load basis, it is all extremely closely monitored and, to my knowledge, nothing has ever come in from Africa. Unjust things can happen in Africa but there is no evidence of any connection to European biofuels.