Castro hits out at US biofuel use

BBC ^ | Thursday, March 29, 2007

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"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

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

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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

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FreedomWorks July 25, 2006

On behalf of more than 800,000 FreedomWorks members nationwide, I write to urge you to support S. 3711, The Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act. This legislation would take an important step towards greater energy security for the U.S. and lessen dependence on foreign sources of energy such as oil.

Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) told the media, the Senate proposal would yield more than 5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, "enough to make sure all the homes in Florida have enough natural gas for 10 years." The proposal would make over 8 million acres available for leasing within one year of enactment. These lands would yield over 1 billion barrels of oil and over 5 trillion cubic feet of gas, thus lessening our dependence on foreign sources of energy.

The chart below from Minerals Management Service (MMS), shows undiscovered oil and natural gas in the U.S. Exploration of these spaces would help alleviate the U.S. energy crisis and is the future of natural gas production in the U.S. http://www.secureourenergy.com. http://www.secureourenergy.com/files/Undiscovered.pdf