Diversification of Household Income in Rural Areas: Opportunities and Risks of Biomass Energy

Within the renewable energy resources, biomasses play a crucial role. The year 2008, might be remembered as the time when the world understood the linkage and interdependence between food and energy. A number of factors including subsidies, high oil prices, increasing demand from emerging countries and lower yields in some countries, as well as lower levels of world food stocks, resulted in soaring food prices. As consequences, number of countries adopted the opportunity to boost the development of biofuel as a solution for energy insecurity, the threat of climate change and to enhance agriculture and rural development. In the Eu rural areas amount for 92 per cent of the EU surface but the per capita income is around the third less. Diversification of household income, aiming at revitalising and avoiding the rural areas' progressive degradation and abandonment is crucial. In fact agriculture can play several roles in addition to its primary function of producing food. The growing attention given to the non agricultural commodity outputs (particularly renewable energy) is a clear example. Rural is not synonymous with decline or with agriculture. The distinctions between rural and urban areas are obsolete and rural areas are not homogenous, with uniform bonds or same opportunity. This study analyses the dimension of renewable energy as a diversification activity in the European rural areas. The objectives of this study are to identify: the key added values of bioenergy production in rural area; the regions/areas benefitting or that might benefit from the promotion of bioenergy production; policies in the agricultural sector that could be designed to ensure benefits to rural areas from the production and provision of bioenergy; which stakeholders are mostly (positively or negatively) affected from the production of biomass