EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The policy tennis match between biofuels supporters and opponents in the European Union has all but drawn to a close, with the backers of the controversial fuel source securing almost complete victory.

Representatives of EU members states, the European Parliament and the European Commission this week came to a back-room agreement that supports the sourcing of 10 percent of the EU's road transport fuel from renewable forms of energy by 2020 - the same target figure originally proposed by the EU executive in January of this year.

When the proposal was first unveiled, most policymakers assumed that biofuels would make up all or most of the 10 percent figure.

But in the wake of reports from the World Bank through to the UN saying that in many cases biofuels produced more greenhouse gases than fossil fuels and threatened global food supplies, EU lawmakers were under pressure to slim down or abandon the biofuels element of the 10 percent renewable transport fuel target.

In particular, scientists warned that "indirect land-use change" - the creation of new farmland on previous grassland or forest to compensate for farmland lost to biofuels - would put the value of even the "cleanest" biofuels in doubt.

While many in the European Parliament had been convinced of the dangers, the commission and member states remained adamant that the target go ahead largely unchanged.

Under this week's tri-partite agreement, consideration of problems caused by indirect land-use change has been completely junked, apart from a caveat that the European Commission will come up with a report by 2010 on how to minimise this process.