May 7, 2008 (LPAC)--At an event at the European Policy Center think-tank in Brussels, EU Commissioner for Agriculture Mariann Fischer Boel (Denmark) said "those who see biofuels as the driving force behind recent food prices increases have overlooked not just one elephant standing right in front of them, but two. The first elephant is the huge increase in demand from emerging countries like China and India. These countries are eating more meat. It takes about 4 kilograms of cereals to produce one kilogram of poultry meat. So a dietary shift towards meat in countries with populations of over 1 billion people each, has an enormous impact on commodity markets."

Boel said the "second elephant" was the bad weather effects on the harvests, as causing price increases. "However, long-term price rises are not an entirely bad thing," she added, "they could be good news for the 70 to 80 percent of the world's poorest who live in rural areas and depend on farming for their livelihood. Here we can do much better with our development aid."