Bioenergy Report: Land - a Scarce Resource
This is a report on bioenergy published by the Danish Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries. This report shows us the the interaction between food, animal feed and bioenergy.

Landuse
In the forthcoming years, the demand for animal feed and foods is expected to increase at global level as a result of population growth and increased prosperity. The expected rise in prosperity will come in particular from a number of countries with high population rates in the third world, such as China, India and Brazil, where there is considerable economic growth. The increase in prosperity is expected primarily to raise the consumption of animal products, for example meat and milk. At the same time, it is expected that the use of biofuels produced from raw materials such as maize, sugar cane, wheat and vegetable oils will continue to increase. Today, crops grown for this type of bioenergy production account for approximately 1 per cent of global cultivated land. With growing demand for biomass, the area of global agricultural land is expected to expand. The expansion will, however, to some degree depend on the extent to which production growth can be achieved through productivity development in the agricultural sector. In recent years, the annual productivity increase regarding vegetable raw materials has been relatively modest (1-1.5 per cent). Expectations are, however, that in third-world countries, parts of Eastern Europe and in some of the new countries that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there may be a greater improvement in productivity as a result of better infrastructure (transport and storage facilities), better farm management, more intensive cultivation, and through the breeding of new varieties. International political agreements may also become of some importance to the pressure on land. Even if biofuels are only of marginal significance to land use, demands for compulsory application of biofuels may impact on the use of land, as long as biofuels are produced on the basis of the land-requiring first generation technology. International trade conditions for bioethanol will be of importance to what areas will see the largest expansion of land. Liberalising trade in bioethanol will reduce the pressure on land in the EU and the USA, but will increase the pressure on land in South American and Asian countries that have a cost-effective production of bioethanol and vegetable oils. In addition to international agreements, national subsidies will also play a part with regard to the increase in the production of raw materials from agriculture. Subsidies targeted at agricultural production as well as subsidies directed at bioethanol/biodiesel favour the production in specific areas. The main reasons for subsidising biofuels are consideration for greater national energy self-sufficiency and consideration for environmental advantages in the form of lower CO2 emissions. The latter consideration is, however, more open to question as biofuels in most cases have only limited positive effects, if the entire production phase is taken into account. It is difficult to predict how much land will be needed in the coming decades. At present, approximately 1.5 billion hectares of land are subject to crop rotation (crop area) at global level. Estimates indicate, however, that it is possible to cultivate another 0.4 billion hectares of land without reducing forest areas. At the same time, there will also be sufficient space for increasing grassland areas for the purpose of livestock production. There are relatively large uncultivated areas in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Ukraine, South Africa, Nigeria and Kazakhstan. Attention should be drawn to the fact that even if the EU agricultural area that is used for the production of bioethanol (maize and wheat) and biodiesel (rape, sunflower) were to increase from 3 million hectares in 2006 to 17.5 million hectares in 2020 according to an EU Commission scenario, it will only to a limited extent lead to an expansion of the EU agricultural area. By contrast, a more likely scenario is that the internal production of animal feed and foods in the EU will be reduced. Expectations are that the abolition of the compulsory set-aside scheme will provide a few million extra hectares, but that environmental restrictions will have a dampening effect on both land expansion and productivity increase in the EU agricultural sector as such. The consequence of increasing the use of land to produce biomass for energy in the EU may be that part of the production of animal feed and foods moves outside the EU.