Castro hits out at US biofuel use

BBC ^ | Thursday, March 29, 2007

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

Officials expect Mr Castro to return to public life soon

Cuban President Fidel Castro has strongly criticised the use of biofuels by the US, in his first article since undergoing surgery last year.

He said George W Bush's support for the use of food crops in fuel production would cause 3bn deaths from hunger.

The article in the Granma newspaper did not mention Mr Castro's health.

Officials say they expect Mr Castro - who temporarily handed over power to his brother last July - to resume activities in government soon.

Last month, Mr Castro appeared in a live radio broadcast for the first time since falling ill.

The Cuban leader's failure to appear in public - and the silence from the Cuban authorities - had fuelled speculation about the seriousness of his condition.

Ethanol targets

Mr Castro's article appears in Thursday's edition of Granma, under the headline: "Condemned to premature death by hunger and thirst more than 3bn people of the world."

The sinister idea of converting food into combustibles was definitively established as the economic line of foreign policy of the United States Fidel Castro Quick guide: Biofuels

In it, he says he has been "meditating quite a bit since President Bush's meeting with North American automobile makers".

During that meeting on Monday, Mr Castro writes, "the sinister idea of converting food into combustibles was definitively established as the economic line of foreign policy of the United States".

Mr Bush has set targets for an increased use of ethanol - which in the US is mainly made from corn. The US government hopes this will reduce the country's dependence on foreign oil.

The US and Brazil recently signed an agreement to develop biofuels, and their presidents are expected to hold further talks on the matter at the weekend.

[anglian]

"The United States has no more responsibility to provide the world with cheap grain than Saudi Arabia does to supply us with cheap oil. We do not own the world anything."

Mark Muller and Richard Levins of the Institute for Agriculture and Policy Trade, point to evidence that we are net extractors of food from the Third World.

For example, many of the foods that we have encouraged (and sometimes forced) second and third world producers into growing for us are high value luxury foods, rather than traditional staple foods of that country.

Vandana Shiva, for example, has documented the large-scale replacement of traditional coastal rice farms with shrimp farms for the export market (Shiva, Stolen Harvest 23). Much of the best land in South America, Asia and Africa is now covered with coffee plantations, producing for export to wealthy nations. Suggesting that poor nations, who have now entirely adapted their agriculture and their land to grow food for rich nations should now live on their coffee and shrimp comes with some logistical problems at best. Some second and third world nations, like Brazil, which exports quite a lot of grain, or uses it for meat production for export, would be able to avoid hunger in this scenario, others would not.

Ethics of Biofuels by Sharon Astyk

[anglian]

The US began dumping cheap corn on Mexican farmers and caused what? http://gristmill.grist.org/images/user/2988/oxfam_report_corn.pdf

[anglian]

The argument over energy used to make ethanol is moot in any case. It has enough environmental and economic negatives to bury it without that argument.
Moreover, every $1 of profits earned by ADM’s corn sweetener operation costs consumers $10, and every $1 of profits earned by its ethanol operation costs taxpaying suckers $30. Even if we were to produce 10%-20% of our fuel energy from biofuels, we reduce US reliance on OPEC oil to zero,
while using up our existing farmland, and the grain it produces. Add in the environmental degredation and it’s a clear loser. http://www.globalsubsidies.org/IMG/pdf/biofuels_subsidies_us.pdf

[anglian]

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