Deutsche Lufthansa AG
Wolfgang Mayrhuber, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Fax: +49 69 / 696 – 95428, E-mail wolfgang.mayrhuber@dlh.de

Dear Mr Mayrhuber,

I welcome Lufthansa’s efforts to reduce kerosene consumption and cut greenhouse gas emissions, which is reported in our latest Sustainability Report. Burning agrofuels, however, puts Lufthansa on the wrong path in my opinion.

Agrofuel production has been subject to major critique for several years, due to the catastrophic impacts on people, environment and climate. You appear to be aware of those problems when saying: : “Lufthansa puts great importance on ensuring that alternative fuels do not compete with food production and that they deliver proven benefits for the environment.”

You have not, however, answered the question of how to fulfil these aims. The Lufthansa Sustainability Report 2010 calls algae and so-called energy crops like jatropha “bearers of hope’”. Even Lufthansa describes algae as a long-term project, since over the next ten years, no commercial quantities of algal biofuels can be expected.

This leaves jatropha, which bears some of the responsibility for the ongoing destruction of tropical ecosystems. The tropical jatropha shrub is being planted on a large scale in Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Swaziland) and in India – with catastrophic effects. The local population is being evicted in order to establish plantations or has to work for the new land owners, planting jatropha for tiny wages.

Jatropha is already being planted on a large scale by European investors in Africa and India – with catastrophic impacts for nature and the people living in those areas. Jatropha is supposed to be an ‘easy’ plant, which can reach yields on poor soils. In reality, however, this has not been the case. Commercial yields can only be reached on fertile soils and with irrigation. This puts jatropha into direct competition with food production, something that you have said you want to avoid. The water requirement for growing jatropha is enormous, too. According to a scientific study, one litre of biofuels from jatropha require 20,000 litres of water during cultivation.

Furthermore, it is not true that biofuels release no CO2 other than what the plants had previously absorbed for their growth. Cultivation, fertilisers, irrigation, harvests, transport, storage and refining of agrofuels all require significant amounts of energy and this needs to be added to the CO2 balance.

In order to establish agrofuel plantations, natural ecosystems are, directly or indirectly, destroyed. In the case of jatropha, those are in particular very biodiverse and carbon rich savannah areas. The conversion of those ecosystems to agrofuel plantations destroys biodiversity and fuels climate change through the massive release of carbon from vegetation and soils. If those CO2 disasters are fully included in the calculations, the CO2 balance of agrofuels is catastrophic. There can be no talk of a “closed ecological cycle”.

The use of agrofuels therefore does not agree with a responsible environmental and business strategy. I would therefore ask you to end the two-year long test series and to abandon Lufthansa’s plans for up to 10% agrofuel blends.

Yours sincerely,