As usual, Mark, the EU is subsidizing something that no-one in their right mind would support. As George Monbiot (yes, George Monbiot) rightly explains:

The European Union wants 2% of the oil we use to be biodiesel by the end of next year, rising to 6% by 2010 and 20% by 2020.(1) To try to meet these targets, the government has reduced the tax on biofuels by 20 pence a litre, while the EU is paying farmers an extra 45 euros a hectare to grow them.

Monbiot goes on to say essentially what Dennis Avery says in the study I linked to earlier: the subsidies crowd out the use of corn/canola/rapeseed for food. That’s going to be a problem, and the EU is quite happily contributing to global hunger now in the effort to stop our descendents going hungry when they’ll be twelve times richer than us. That’s moonbattery in action.

And I haven’t even mentioned what it could do to the price of beer…