European Economic and Social Committee: "Bioeconomy is a way of transitioning away from fossil fuels"

"The bioeconomy is one way, albeit a modest one, of transitioning away from this fossil fuel-based economy", said Arnaud Schwartz, member of the Natural Resources Commission (NAT) of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) and author of one of the two opinions on the bioeconomy issued by the EESC at a public hearing on 16/04/2026.

"We have to ask our competitors to respect the same social and environmental standards as we do", Schwartz continues. "Otherwise, the economy based on fossil fuels, or even the bioeconomy abroad, which will be based on non-circular conditions that do not respect human rights, will compete with us and destroy all the efforts and public investment that we are planning in our European bioeconomy."

"At present, we have no definition of biodegradable materials derived from natural resources," points out Stoyan Tchoukanov, President of the EESC's NAT Commission and author of the second opinion. "There is a default definition, dating from 2019, to differentiate them from single-use plastics. But a lot has happened since 2019 in the research and…