Labour MP Barry Gardiner introduced an adjournment debate on biofuels on Tuesday night.
He told the House there is a global challenge facing the world ahead of the UN conference on climate change meeting in Copenhagen in December.
In its last report, the intergovernmental panel on climate change considered that the 2° C rise in temperature that marks dangerous climate change would be triggered by a CO2 emissions concentration level of 450 parts per million.
Gardiner argued that biofuels and biomass could play an important role in meeting the mitigation targets.
He added that the UK renewable energy strategy, published earlier this year, has indicated that approximately 30 per cent of the UK's renewable energy target could come from bioenergy for heat and power.
Gardiner said that globally, the land cover under biofuel crops is projected to grow by 240 per cent between 2005 and 2030, set against the rising demand for food crops as the planet's population rises from 6 billion towards 9.7 billion by 2050.
The Gallagher report, he noted, confidently predicts that sufficient appropriate land will be available to meet both biofuel and agricultural food needs through to 2020.
However he said: "Very openly, very honestly, the report also states that it has made no estimate of the likely conflicts over land use that may arise after that".
Gardiner proposed that the expansion of biofuels should "not come at the expense of food security or of land of high biodiversity and conservation value".
Government should work with stakeholders to create internationally recognised sustainability criteria that are "credible, consistent and independently certifiable".
Responding for the government, energy and climate change minister David Kidney congratulated Gardiner for securing the debate.
He noted that "land and our natural environment play a vital role in helping the UK to achieve its own goals of decarbonising its energy production and increasing its security of supply".
Kidney recognised that land is not a "boundless resource", and that issues such as rising populations and changes in lifestyles in the developed and developing worlds mean that the demands on space are greater than ever.
The government, he stated, are taking forward several measures to ensure that increases in biomass production in this country are sustainable.
And results will shortly be available on government-funded research identifying idle and marginal land for energy crop production and developing solutions for growing crops so that their potential benefits to soil carbon and biodiversity are realised.
He noted how the government is also active internationally, and the UK has been "instrumental in ensuring that the renewable energy directive contains mandatory sustainability criteria for biofuels", including delivering greenhouse gas savings of at least 35 per cent and making it a condition that they must not be sourced from areas of high biodiversity or from high-carbon soils such as rainforests or wetlands.
Concluding, he said decarbonising energy supply and use is at the heart of the government's efforts to tackle climate change.
"We have put in place a clear strategy and an action plan to deliver significant increases in the production of renewable energy in the UK, and we expect sustainable biomass-based energy and fuels to play an important part in achieving our goals," he said.


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