EBB: Unfair Polish biodiesel exports must be stopped

For more than a year, unfair low-price biodiesel exports from Poland have caused serious damage to the EU internal market of renewable fuels, and to fuel operators in many countries. Notwithstanding alerts to national and EU authorities, the export trend affecting the European markets has not yet stopped and is even increasing.

Deliberately exploiting a loophole in the Polish biofuels legislation, Polish fuel market players have caused significant financial damage to the biodiesel production chains in various EU countries; in Romania first, and also in the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and France, among others. In Poland, the accounting of a given biodiesel volume towards the national blending mandate is based on a simple purchase invoice by the fuel distributor. As Polish law does not explicitly require the biodiesel accounted towards the blending mandate to be consumed within its boundaries, some Polish operators have been capitalizing on the export of underpriced biodiesel, which has already been declared as blended. As a consequence, a large part of biodiesel volumes are counted towards EU national blending mandates twice—a first time falsely in Poland, and then at an unfair, dumped price in any other EU country.

As a result, an increasing number of EU stakeholders, from farmers through oilseed producers and crushers to biodiesel producers, are experiencing economic loss and negative impacts on their businesses.

The Polish legislative loophole creates significant distortions by decreasing the overall profitability of local biodiesel producers, prompting job loss along the chain, curbing the progress in local energy and protein independence, and impacting the revenues of farmers and others.

The EBB once again intends to express its strong concern about this unfair and illegal situation that remains unchallenged by EU or national competent authorities. We believe that EU authorities can no longer accept that European renewable legislation is infringed in such an open and wide-scale dimension by an EU member state, and worse, that unfair implementation of the EU Renewable Energy Directive is taken as a basis for unfair traffics in the EU. Our industrial association has confirmed a clear-cut position against such unfair traffics, proceeding to the expulsion of an EBB member company being directly involved with the traffic and refusing to cooperate to fight against such unfair behaviors. In this context, EBB also urges Polish national authorities to tackle the described problem, which casts a severe shadow on the concrete ability of EU renewable mandates to be fulfilled by Poland. The EBB has been collaborating on tackling this issue with a number of industry players, including sustainability certification systems, and is definitively determined to reestablish legality and fair trade in the EU biodiesel market.