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Philippine Government Bans Conversion of Agricultural Land to Other Uses
MANILA - The Philippines has taken measures to reduce the its reliance on imported oil, writes Karen Lema (Reuters).The country has also taken care to ensure that its biofuels policy does not squeeze agricultural land.
The National Biofuels Board only allots fallow land to planting biofuel crops, the board's executive director, Ramon Santos, told Reuters in an interview.
A surge in rice prices has badly hit the Philippines, the world's biggest importer of the grain. The government has banned conversion of agricultural land to other uses while globally, biofuels programmes are under attack because of dwindling land supply for food crops.
"The domestic situation is quite different from what is happening globally," Santos said. "We have a very different situation -- biofuels as an industry is not a threat to our source of food supply."
The Philippines spends about $6 billion a year importing crude and oil products from Saudi Arabia and Iran, and, like many Southeast Asian countries, wants to boost biofuel production, using locally produced crops, such as coconuts, sugar, jathropha, palm oil, sweet sorghum and soybeans.
The biofuels law requires refiners to blend biofuels produced from local crops with gasoline and diesel to reduce the country's reliance on imported oil.
It envisages that gasoline will contain a 5-percent mix of ethanols by 2009 and diesel a 2 percent mix of biodiesel.
View the Reuters story by clicking here.
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