LUBBOCK, Texas (RFD-TV) — A long-running debate over indirect land-use change — often called ILUC — is resurfacing as biofuel policy again weighs carbon penalties tied to theoretical global land-use impacts. John Duff of Serō Ag Strategies says ILUC began as a reasonable idea meant to prevent deforestation overseas.
Still, the system that grew around it quickly crossed into modeling assumptions that cannot be seen or measured. The result is a policy structure in which U.S. farmers and biofuel producers are penalized for land clearing that may not actually be happening, while fuels from regions with real deforestation concerns sometimes receive more favorable treatment.
Duff explains that large economic forecasting models mainly drive today’s ILUC penalties. These models aim to predict how farmers worldwide might respond if more U.S. grain is used for ethanol. Because they rely on assumptions about human behavior and international markets, the models often disagree and can drift far from real-world conditions. Still, their projections were built into federal and state carbon rules more than a decade ago, giving hypothetical outcomes the weight of law.
This mismatch has created uneven carbon scores, competitive disadvantages for U.S. ethanol, and a system that can punish farm efficiency rather than rewarding it. Duff says a better approach already exists: a risk-based framework used in Canada and parts of Europe. Instead of assigning blanket penalties, regulators verify whether feedstocks come from established cropland and whether local practices pose any real risk of land conversion.
Duff argues that such an approach keeps the focus on preventing deforestation while grounding policy in observable, verifiable facts —not in global economic guesses.
Farm-Level Takeaway: Duff says farmers and ethanol producers would benefit from a risk-based ILUC system that protects forests without relying on speculative modeling.
Tony St. James, RFD-TV Markets Specialist
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