People complain about the high price of petrol, but many of the costs of filling up at the petrol forecourt are hidden environmental and social costs.

The situation is likely to become much worse, as the Government has recently decided that all petrol and diesel sold in the UK must include a percentage produced from specially-grown crops.

The aim of promoting these biofuels is stated to be to cut greenhouse gas emissions from transport. Unfortunately, many of these crops release more greenhouse gases than they save during cultivation and conversion to biofuels.

Huge areas of rainforest and grassland are likely to be cleared as a consequence of using millions of acres of land to grow crops such as oil palm and soya. In the UK we could see 40 per cent of our arable land used to grow biofuel crops in order to reach the European target of ten per cent of transport fuels being biofuels by 2020.

The competition between using land for biofuel crops versus food crops has already contributed to putting up the price of everyday foods such as wheat and maize and has lead to food riots in Mexico.

Recent studies have shown that we could cut greenhouse emissions far more if we made cars more fuel-efficient, had better transport policies and if we allowed rainforests to regrow on degraded land.

Please write to your MP to ask the Government to drop the disastrous targets for promoting these crops, stop subsidising their cultivation and ban their imports.

More information about these issues can be found at www.biofuelwatch.co.uk Guy Wallbanks, Co-ordinator, York and Ryedale Friends of the Earth, Kingsway West, York.