La biomasse, activité alternative au développement des zones rurales

CONCLUSION

The Community framework is rather favourable with the installation of renewable energies on a level largely higher than that which they currently know. Indeed, as well the European energy policy as the common agricultural policy envisages a greater place for the biomass, as well on the level of the use in the domestic market of energy as in the culture or the collection.

The European situation is worrying, the European Union is increasingly dependant énergétiquement and its agriculture is badly. The demand and the requirements for energy do nothing but increase and the agricultural world is in full change. The structures change and reduce the number of employment, worsen the economic situation of the farmers and the people living of agriculture. The biomass then seems a solution, a remedy for these two evils. It seems to be the ideal culture to cure the problems of employment in the rural zones and a solution to decrease the energy dependence.

The objectives are clear and do not seem too utopian since several countries already set up industrial structures using the biomass like source of energy, as well of heat of electricity. The European Union founded supplementary programmes in order to stimulate the use of this source of renewable energy, the costs of the techniques of use of the biomass being very high. What constitutes an obstacle with the production and any thing being equal, an obstacle with the use, the price the consumer being itself high.

Unfortunately, the opening to the applicant countries does not constitute any prospect for improvement of the energy and agricultural situation. They are, very as much as the European Union, depending énergétiquement and their agriculture goes, it also to undergo modifications for adhesion with the European Union. However their share of use of renewable energies, in particular of the biomass, constitutes a share more significant than in Europe of the fifteen.

Some ones of the ecological problems simplest were solved. The problems of the future are much less easily included/understood, less easily controlled. These problems are the natural consequences of a company where the individuals and the groups do not take account of the incidences of their actions on the environment, of a company which always acts as if the resources of the ground were indefinitely renewable. However the durable development is one « development which meets the present needs without compromising the capacity of the future generations to meet their own needs »^46(*).

The actions of today will dictate the environmental quality and the economic durable development. No country can reach only the durable development, but the European Union hopes to be able to present models of durable behavior which will be useful models for collaboration between States.

Energy is of primary importance for the economic and social development, but its production and its consumption can have a considerable incidence on the environment. The biomass is a largely widespread resource, whose valorization is of double interest to exploit an important source of renewable energy and to contribute to the efforts made to face the climatic changes, with the energy dependence and the rural development.

Water mills, wind, firewood, animal haulage, sailing boat: renewable energies largely contributed to the development of humanity since the night of times. It constituted an economic activity with whole share, in particular in rural medium where they also important and were as diversified as the food production. One of the characteristics of the industrial revolution, the replacement of traditional renewable energies by the fossils (coal initially, oil later), gummed this role. It is only while entering the XXe century that renewable energies lost their primacy... before finding it with 21st?

* ⁴⁶ World Commission Report on the environment and the development (Brundtland Commission)