Wellington, Sept 24 NZPA - The chief proponent of legislation seeking sustainability standards for biofuels, Jeanette Fitzsimons, says it's a pity that world trade rules don't allow imported biofuels to be blocked at the border.

"It would have been very much easier to have achieved a standard for sustainability if we had just said `no imported biofuels'," she told the local government and environment select committee at Parliament today.

But Green Party MP Ms Fitzsimons said neither the previous Labour government nor the present National leadership would accept rules that breached World Trade Organisation principles.

So she has drafted a standards regime which was being backed by National, even though it axed the Biofuel Act brought in by Labour 12 months ago to require a proportion of transport fuels to be biofuels.

Ms Fitzsimons said the standard for sustainability would rule out biofuels produced from food crops and those that were made in ways that destroyed animal habitats. "New Zealand producers of sustainable biofuel are really concerned about being undercut by imported biofuels that are not sustainable," she said.

The risk was that people could invest a lot of money in a tallow-to-biodiesel plant, only to have cheap imports made from palm oil undercut their fuel.

Her Sustainable Biofuel Bill requires biofuel sold in the country after May 1 next year to be approved as sustainable, judged by three key criteria:

* it must reduce greenhouse gas emissions over its life-cycle, compared with other fuels;

* it must not compete for land with food production; and,

* must not reduce indigenous biodiversity.

"We wouldn't accept in New Zealand biofuels made from grain crops which can feed people, we wouldn't accept palm oil grown by clearing rain forests," she said.

The biofuels being produced in New Zealand or proposed to be made here would qualify, she suggested.

Ms Fitzsimons said she expected that Solid Energy's biodiesel made from oilseed rape (canola) grown in the Hurunui district would also qualify, because it was to be grown as part of a rotation with food crops, and the pressing residues would be used as cattle feed.

"In my view, that should qualify as sustainable, because you're not using the land solely for fuel," she said.

If a fuel was imported, an energy minister could inquire about its sustainability, which was likely to lead to a certification system, and other countries were already working on sustainability standards.

She noted there could be complications in determining whether land overseas on which biofuel crops were grown had lost biodiversity. And though much of the ethanol produced from sugar-cane waste in Brazil was sustainable, questions were arising over fuel from sugar plantations planted on bulldozed rainforest.

Energy Minister Gerry Brownlee has said standards would be needed, and the bill would allow New Zealand producers to put a stamp on their products confirming they were produced from sustainable sources. The Government aimed to have the regime in place by May next year, Ms Fitzsimons said.

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