Europe consumes too much palm oil and cotton
Vegetable oils - palm oil, for example - for all kinds of goods are in particularly high demand in Europe. According to a recent study by WU scientists, Europe now sources around 65 percent of plant-based raw materials for non-food products.
Whether cosmetics, fuel or even bioplastic straws - palm oil, soy, ethanol and other raw materials are used for all these goods. Austria consumes 935000 tons of vegetable raw materials (111 kg per capita) from arable farming every year for the production of non-food products alone. For comparison, the figure in Europe is 52 million tons or an average of 103 kg per capita. A recent study by Martin Bruckner, Stefan Giljum and Victor Maus from the Institute for Ecological Economics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business together with colleagues from the International Institute for Applied System Analysis (IIASA), Stockholm University and the University of Bonn investigated the origin of agricultural raw materials for products consumed in Europe.
It became clear that Europe needs resources far beyond its borders. Around 65 percent of the plant-based raw materials required come from other continents - in many cases from tropical regions. In the food sector, Europe's demand for foreign raw materials is also tending to rise, but at 15 percent it is significantly lower.
Reducing consumption is effective environmental protection
Most of the plant-based raw materials for Europe's use are sourced from Asia. After cotton (1.7 million hectares mainly from India, China and Pakistan), palm oil ranks second here: around 6.4 billion liters - harvested from an area of around 1.6 million hectares annually - are either brought to Europe unprocessed or already in the form of processed goods, mostly from Indonesia or Malaysia. Here it is used, for example, for biodiesel, cleaning agents, soaps, cosmetic products or candles. Asia also supplies rubber from around 1.3 million hectares of cultivated land and coconut oil from 0.7 million hectares. 1.2 million hectares of Asia's arable land is used for livestock to produce leather and wool for consumption in Europe. However, switching from palm oil to domestic rapeseed is not a global solution, says Martin Bruckner: "We would need three times as much land in Europe for the same amount of oil, and the result would be increased greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss. Only by greatly reducing our consumption can the ecosystems of our planet be effectively protected."
Europe is importing corn-based ethanol from the USA, mainly for blending with gasoline.
Massive deforestation, global problem shifting
The massive expansion of oil palm plantations is causing increasing deforestation of natural tropical forests. Study author Martin Bruckner explains: "Severe deforestation leads to a high release of greenhouse gases - we see that the clearing of Southeast Asian forests up to 2002 caused even more emissions than Chinese coal-fired power plants in the same period. In addition, alarming losses of biodiversity are becoming apparent."
For Bruckner and his colleagues, the steps currently being taken by policymakers fall short of the mark: "We see that some environmental policy measures tend to shift problems rather than solve them. For example, although the biofuel regulation led to reduced CO2 emissions in domestic transport on the one hand, it caused an unimagined level of global deforestation and thus the destruction of valuable ecosystems. The current directive banning single-use plastic raises similar fears. While this could reduce plastic in the world's oceans, the business model behind bioplastics is also very resource-intensive," says Bruckner.
About the study
For the calculation of the Footprint, the authors used on the one hand a global trade model, which maps product flows in physical units and allows to track agricultural products along international trade routes. On the other hand, a global economic model (EXIOBASE) was integrated in a complementary way to map industrial value chains. The study was carried out with the support of the German Federal Environmental Agency and is part of the 2 million Euro research program FINEPRINT (www.fineprint.global) of the Institute for Ecological Economics at WU Vienna, which investigates global commodity flows and the associated environmental impacts.
Citation: Bruckner, M., Häyhä, T., Maus, V., Giljum, S., Fischer, G., Tramberend, S., Börner, J., 2019. global land use driven by the EU non-food bioeconomy. Environmental Research Letters 14, 045011. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab07f5
