The damage may be just beginning. In 2005 Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, citing surging markets in food and biofuels, urged the country to increase palm production from 750,000 acres to 15 million acres--an area the size of West Virginia. Critics point out that many of the new palm growing regions exhibit patterns of narco-trafficking and paramilitary violence similar to that in Chocó, including massacres and forced displacement. A report by the international organization Human Rights Everywhere found violent crimes related to palm cultivation in five separate regions--all of which fall within Uribe's initiative. Almost all of these regions have also been targeted for palm cultivation support by USAID.
(...) Oil palm, or African palm, is one of the few aid-funded crops whose profits can match coca profits. Since 2003 USAID's alternative development contracts have provided nearly $20 million to oil palm agribusiness projects across the country. Almost half the palm oil produced in Colombia is exported each year--mostly to Europe but also to the United States. The government now has its sights on the stalled US-Colombia free trade agreement, whose passage by Congress--seen as likely, with President Obama's explicit support--would allow Colombian palm oil to enter US markets duty-free. Although the oil finds its way into various US food imports, Colombia is banking on the burgeoning market for biofuels.
(...) In October 1996 the paras had a macabre coming-out party in Chocó, with the murder of eight campesinos in the tiny town of Brisas on the Curvaradó River, an hour's walk from Petro's farm. What followed was a crescendo of terror locals simply call la violencia. In February 1997 the military, backed that year by $87 million in US support, teamed up with its "sixth division" to hammer northern Chocó. Army helicopters and fighter jets rained bombs and high-caliber gunfire on the jungle communities, while the paras "cleaned up" behind them. Military and paramilitary roadblocks cropped up everywhere. International human rights groups documented massacres, torture, murders and rapes. Paramilitaries capped off the year by slaughtering thirty-one campesinos a week before Christmas.
(...) "They said they came here to clean out the guerrillas," recalls Petro, "but it was us, the campesinos, they cleaned out." In interviews, several survivors tell me that when the violence began, paras came to their farms with the same chilling offer: "Sell us your land, or we'll negotiate with your widow."
(...) In January 2003, ARD began administering $41.5 million for USAID's Colombia Agribusiness Partnership Program (CAPP). Urapalma was one of the first palm companies to send an application; the Macaco-linked Coproagrosur received its $161,000 grant the following year (a third of which was returned, unspent). ARD's quarterly reports show that Urapalma requested $700,000 in financing to cover the planting of palm on some 5,000 acres in Urabá--the epicenter of stolen land. The grant application began working its way through ARD's process.
(...) The investigation files include an affidavit by Pedro Camilo Torres, a former Urapalma employee who from 1999 to 2007 handled the company's loan applications, including the USAID grant proposal. His affidavit charges that Urapalma created campesino "front" organizations to secure phony land titles and gain access to public funds.

Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.
(...) It argues that production of biofuels has distorted food markets in three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel, with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU going towards the production of biodiesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for biofuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in grains, driving prices up higher.

the world food crisis:
Of the more than 6 billion people living in the world today, the United Nations estimates that close to 1 billion suffer from chronic hunger. But this number, which is only a crude estimate, leaves out those suffering from vitamin and nutrient deficiencies and other forms of malnutrition. The total number of food insecure people who are malnourished or lacking critical nutrients is probably closer to 3 billion—about half of humanity. The severity of this situation is made clear by the United Nations estimate of over a year ago that approximately 18,000 children die daily as a direct or indirect consequence of malnutrition
(...) At this moment in history there are, in addition to the "routine" hunger discussed above, two separate global food crises occurring simultaneously. The severe and acute crisis, about two years old, is becoming worse day by day and it is this one that we'll discuss first.
(...) The prices of the sixty agricultural commodities traded on the world market increased 37 percent last year and 14 percent in 2006 (New York Times, January 19, 2008). Corn prices began their rise in the early fall of 2006 and within months had soared by some 70 percent. Wheat and soybean prices also skyrocketed during this time and are now at record levels. The prices for cooking oils (mainly made from soybeans and oil palm)—an essential foodstuff in many poor countries—have rocketed up as well. Rice prices have also risen over 100 percent in the last year ("High Rice Cost Creating Fears of Asia Unrest," New York Times, March 29, 2008).
(...) The reasons for these soaring food prices are fairly clear. First, there are a number of issues related directly or indirectly to the increase in petroleum prices. In the United States, Europe, and many other countries this has brought a new emphasis on growing crops that can be used for fuel—called biofuels (or agrofuels). Thus, producing corn to make ethanol or soybean and palm oil to make diesel fuel is in direct competition with the use of these crops for food. Last year over 20 percent of the entire corn crop in the United States was used to produce ethanol—a process that does not yield much additional energy over that which goes into producing it. (It is estimated that over the next decade about one-third of the U.S. corn crop will be devoted to ethanol production [Bloomberg, February 21, 2008].) Additionally, many of the inputs for large-scale commercial agricultural production are based on petroleum and natural gas—from building and running tractors and harvesting equipment to producing fertilizers and pesticides and drying crops for storage. The price of nitrogen fertilizer, the most commonly used fertilizer worldwide, is directly tied to the price of energy because it takes so much energy to produce.
(...) A second cause of the increase in prices of corn and soybeans and soy cooking oil is that the increasing demand for meat among the middle class in Latin America and Asia, especially China. The use of maize and soy to feed cattle, pigs, and poultry has risen sharply to satisfy this demand. The world's total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the last twenty years alone. (New York Times, January 27, 2008.) Feeding grain to more and more animals is putting growing pressure on grain stores. Feeding grain to produce meat is a very inefficient way of providing people with either calories or protein. It is especially wasteful for animals such as cows—with digestive systems that can derive energy from cellulose—because they can obtain all of their nutrition from pastures and will grow well without grain, although more slowly. Cows are not efficient converters of corn or soy to meat—to yield a pound of meat, cows require eight pounds of corn; pigs, five; and chickens, three (Baron's, March 4, 2008).
(...) A third reason for the big jump in world food prices is that a few key countries that were self-sufficient—that is, did not import foods, although plenty of people suffered from hunger—are now importing large quantities of food. As a farm analyst in New Delhi says "When countries like India start importing food, then the world prices zoom....If India and China are both turning into bigger importers, shifting from food self-sufficiency as recently we have seen in India, then the global prices are definitely going to rise still further, which will mean the era of cheaper food has now definitely gone away" (VOA News, February 21, 2008). Part of the reason for the pressure on rice prices is the loss of farmland to other uses such as various development projects—some 7 million acres in China and 700,000 acres in Vietnam. In addition, rice yields per acre in Asia have reached a plateau. There has been no per acre increase for ten years and yield increases are not expected in the near future (Rice Today, January-March 2008).
(...) Speculation in the futures market and hoarding at the local level are certainly playing a part in this crisis situation to make food more expensive. As the U.S. financial crisis deepened and spread in the winter of 2008, speculators started putting more money into food and metals to take advantage of what is being called the "commodities super cycle." (The dollar's decline relative to other currencies stimulates "investment" in tangible commodities.) While it would be a mistake to see these aspects, however despicable and inhumane, as the cause of the crisis, they certainly add to the misery by taking advantage of tight markets. It is certainly possible that the commodity bubble will burst, bringing down food prices a bit. However, speculation and local hoarding will continue to put an upward pressure on food prices.
(...) As critical as the short-term food crisis is—demanding immediate world notice as well as attention within every country—the long-term, structural crisis is even more important. The latter has existed for decades and contributes to, and is reinforced by, today's acute food crisis. Indeed, it is this underlying structural crisis of agriculture and food in third world societies which constitutes the real reason that the immediate food crisis is so severe and so difficult to surmount within the system.
(...) It seems logical that with higher food prices, farmers should be better off and produce more to satisfy the "demand" indicated by the market. To a certain extent that is true—especially for farmers that can take advantage of all the physical and monetary advantages of large-scale production. Yet, the input costs for just about everything used in agricultural production have also increased, thus profit gains for farmers are not as large as might be expected. This is a particularly difficult problem for farmers raising animals fed on increasingly expensive grains.
(...) Rising crop prices cause the price of farmland to increase—especially of large fields that can be worked by large-scale machinery. This is happening in the United States and in certain countries of the periphery. For example, Global Ag Investments, a company based in Texas, owns and operates 34,000 acres of Brazilian farmland. At one of its farms, a single field of soybeans covers 1,600 acres—that's two and a half square miles! A New Zealand company has purchased approximately 100,000 acres in Uruguay and has hired managers to operate dairy farms established on their land.
Private equity firms are purchasing farmland in the United States (Associated Press, May 7, 2007) as well as abroad. A U.S. company is cooperating with Brazilian and Japanese partners to purchase 385 square miles in Brazil, approximately a quarter of a million acres! This is also happening with South American capital taking the lead—a Brazilian investment fund, Investimento em Participacoe, is buying a minority stake in a an Argentine soybean producer that owns close to 400,000 acres in Uruguay and Argentina. Rising crop prices have also led to an acceleration of deforestation in the Amazon basin—1,250 square miles (about the size of Rhode Island) in the last five months of 2007—as capitalist farmers hunger for more land (BBC, January 24, 2008). In addition, huge areas of farmland have been taken for development—some of dubious use, such as building suburban style housing and golf courses for the wealthy.
(...) In China during 2000 to 2005, there was an average annual loss of 2.6 million acres as farmland is used for development. The country is fast approaching the self-defined minimum amount of arable farmland that it should have—approximately 290 million acres (120 million hectares)—and the amount of farmland will most likely continue to fall. As part of an effort to gain access to foreign agricultural production, a Chinese company has made an agreement to lease close to 2.5 million acres of land in the Philippines to grow rice, corn, and sugar—setting off a huge protest in the Philippines that has temporarily stalled the project (Bloomberg, February 21, 2008). As one farmer put it: "The [Philippine] government and the Chinese call it a partnership, but it only means the Chinese will be our landlords and we will be the slaves.''
(...) Although enhanced agricultural production is essential, much of the emphasis in the past has been on production of export crops. While this may help a country's balance of payments, export oriented agriculture does not ensure sufficient food for everyone nor does it promote a healthy rural environment. In addition to basic commodities such as soybeans, export-oriented agriculture also leads naturally to the production of high-value luxury crops demanded by export markets (luxuries from the standpoint of the basic food needs of a poor third world country), rather than the low-value subsistence crops needed to meet the needs of the domestic population. Production of sufficient amounts of the right kinds of food within each country's borders—by small farmers working in cooperatives or on their own and using sustainable techniques—is the best way to achieve the goal of "food security." In this way the population may be insulated, at least partially, from the price fluctuations on the world market. This, of course, also means not taking land out of food production to produce crops for the biofuel markets.

the pleasures of the flesh:
At 2.1bn tonnes, last year’s global grain harvest broke all records(3). It beat the previous year’s by almost 5%. The crisis, in other words, has begun before world food supplies are hit by climate change. If hunger can strike now, what will happen if harvests decline?
(...) There is plenty of food. It is just not reaching human stomachs. Of the 2.13bn tonnes likely to be consumed this year, only 1.01bn, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), will feed people(4).
(...) The World Bank points out that “the grain required to fill the tank of a sports utility vehicle with ethanol … could feed one person for a year”(5).
(...) What new evidence does she require? In the midst of a global humanitarian crisis, we have just become legally obliged to use food as fuel. It is a crime against humanity in which every driver in this country has been forced to participate.
(...) But there is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer. While 100m tonnes of food will be diverted this year to feed cars, 760m tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals(9). This could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If you care about hunger, eat less meat.
(...) Simon Fairlie has updated the figures produced 30 years ago in Kenneth Mellanby’s book Can Britain Feed Itself? Fairlie found that a vegan diet grown by means of conventional agriculture would require only 3m hectares of arable land (around half the current total)(13). Even if we reduced our consumption of meat by half, a mixed farming system would need 4.4m hectares of arable fields and 6.4 million hectares of pasture. A vegan Britain could make a massive contribution to global food stocks.
(...) What level of meat-eating would be sustainable? One approach is to work out how great a cut would be needed to accommodate the growth in human numbers. The UN expects the population to rise to 9bn by 2050. These extra people will require another 325m tonnes of grain(14). Let us assume, perhaps generously, that politicians like Ms Kelly are able to “adjust policy in the light of new evidence” and stop turning food into fuel. Let us pretend that improvements in plant breeding can keep pace with the deficits caused by climate change. We would need to find an extra 225m tonnes of grain. This leaves 531m tonnes for livestock production, which suggests a sustainable consumption level for meat and milk some 30% below the current world rate. This means 420g of meat per person per week, or about 40% of the UK’s average consumption.
(...) I would like to encourage people to start eating tilapia instead of meat. It’s a freshwater fish which can be raised entirely on vegetable matter and has the best conversion efficiency - about 1.6kg of feed for 1kg of meat - of any farmed animal(17). Until meat can be grown in flasks, this is about as close as we are likely to come to sustainable flesh-eating.
(...) Re-reading this article, I see that there is something surreal about it. While half the world wonders whether it will eat at all, I am pondering which of our endless choices we should take. Here the price of food barely registers. Our shops are better stocked than ever before. We perceive the global food crisis dimly, if at all. It is hard to understand how two such different food economies could occupy the same planet, until you realise that they feed off each other.

the EU's agrofuel folly
Despite growing public concern about the risks associated to agrofuels(1), the European Union (EU) is throwing its weight behind the promotion of these often very harmful crops. In March 2007, a proposal set targets to increase the use of agrofuels in all road transport fuel to 10 percent by 2020. The Commission is also planning to channel large amounts of EU public funds towards the research & development of agrofuel projects.
(...) However, a closer look at agrofuels, reveals a devastating picture; a so-called solution accompanied by a raft of new problems.(2) Agrofuels:
- Compete with food for agricultural resources, and their expansion has already resulted in rising food prices which directly threatens the food security of the world's poorest communities;
- Increase the pressure on land which causes, amongst other things, an increased deforestation rate;
- Are farmed in huge mono-crop plantations, involving intensive use of pesticides and fertilisers, and in many cases with the risk of genetically modified contamination. This threatens biodiversity along with other environmental hazards;
- threaten land rights as they are accompanied by plans for monoculture expansion, which tends to be controlled by big agribusiness and wealthy land owners. This threatens the human rights of small farmers and indigenous peoples across the Global South as they are evicted from their lands or face ill-health, poor working conditions and land conflicts.
(...) Furthermore, to add insult to injury, there is growing evidence that agrofuels are indeed aggravating, not mitigating, climate change.
(...) Was the Commission aware of this before backing agrofuels with a host of policy measures? According to an official Commission impact assessment, completed in 2006, they were.(3) This document mentions that, "increased use of biofuels in the EU will be accompanied by an increased external demand for biofuels and their feedstocks, which is likely to have various effects on developing countries... In addition, there are substantial CO2 losses if grassland is ploughed up or forest cleared. These losses can be expected to outweigh CO2 gains from biofuels for many years." It clearly states that "there will be increasing pressures on eco-sensitive areas, notably rainforests, where several millions of hectares could be transformed into plantations." Among the social effects the paper acknowledges the competition with food, the higher food prices which would hit the poor in developing countries and the pressure on vulnerable communities (to move away or drastically adapt their lifestyles).
(...) The Commission's agrofuel policy has not been driven by the fight against climate change, it has sought to secure energy supply and serve the needs of large farmers and agribusiness, alongside the automotive, oil and biotech sectors, all with a direct interest in maintaining the existing status quo. The Commission has enabled these corporate interests to enter into the policy dialogue and design policy outcomes, by setting up advisory groups with a clear industry bias.
(...) There is a need for a broader public debate at EU level about the risks associated with agrofuels set in the context of the problem they seek to address. This must involve a wider range of stakeholders, including those directly affected in the global South. Furthermore, the process for determining policy through research and development where public money is passed to industry players with a direct interest in a certain outcome has no democratic justification and must be challenged.
(...) The automotive, oil and biotech industries are the most involved in the design of the EU agrofuel research policy and they all have their own reasons to pursue the expansion of agrofuels.
(...) "Road transport accounts for 30% of total energy consumption in the EU, and it is 98% dependent on fossil fuels. The growing transport sector is considered to be one of the main reasons for the EU failing to meet the Kyoto targets.(18) It is expected that 90% of the increase of CO2 emissions between 1990 and 2010 will be attributable to transport.(19) Despite the huge negative impact of road transport in the overall EU greenhouse gas emissions and the threats posed by climate change, the European Commission is not putting the required effort into reducing the volume of transport. Current trends show the reverse with freight transport by road, and private vehicles for personal transport on the increase." (20)
(...) ...the negative impacts already associated with large-scale monoculture containing genetically engineered crops will be exacerbated by the large expansion of agrofuels. GM contamination is likely to increase and become more complex, when food crops are engineered with traits designed for non-food purposes.(27) Currently, GM crops are mainly for animal feed, and the same corporations that control these crops and inputs for animal feed are the ones set to benefit from their use for agrofuels.
(...) According to Berkeley professor Miguel Altieri and Food First executive director Eric Holt-Gimenez, the agrofuel agenda offers biotech companies like Monsanto "the opportunity to irreversibly convert agriculture to genetically engineered crops. Presently 52% of corn, 89% of soy and 50% of canola in the US is genetically modified (GM)." The authors argue that "the expansion of corn genetically tailored for special ethanol processing plants will remove all practical barriers to the permanent contamination of all non-GMO crops."(28)
(...) In the EU consumer resistance has to a large extent kept GM crops out. With agrofuels, the biotech industry has a chance to gain access by the back door, presenting GM crops as energy crops, not food crops. However, the risks of contamination to non-GM crops remain.
(...) Both industry and governments are responding to growing concerns about the large expansion of agrofuels by advocating second-generation agrofuels. Using the whole plant instead of isolated parts, it is claimed can achieve a better CO2 performance and reduce production costs. Furthermore, there is advantage because a wider range of feedstocks can be used, such as trees, plant waste, grass or straw. So for example, using trees instead of food crops is offered as an opportunity to avoid agrofuel's competition with food supplies. Yet, this approach is certainly not without problems. For example, large tree plantations will still compete with food in terms of land and water use. An additional problem of using whole plants is that more is being taken out of the soil as reduced organic matter remains, and this has a negative impact on ecosystems. More fundamentally, irrespective of the pros and cons and risks of individual agrofuels the main problem will still be the scale needed to meet governments' targets. There is no way of avoiding the fact that this means large monoculture plantations, in most cases controlled by big agribusiness firms and wealthy land owners, so is accompanied by the predictable negative environmental and social costs that this way of organising agricultural production brings.
(...) Activist and writer George Monbiot puts it clearly: "It used to be a matter of good intentions gone awry. Now it is plain fraud. The governments using biofuels to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good. But they plough on regardless."(33) The reality is that the EU's agrofuel folly, with its corporate bias, will do nothing to stop climate change and will have a severe impact on the global South. "While Europeans maintain their lifestyle based on automobile culture, the population of Southern countries will have less and less land for food crops and will loose its food sovereignty"(34) warned Latin American networks of civil society groups when they asked the EU not to adopt agrofuels mandatory targets.
(...) If the EU is genuinely interested in averting climate change then policies need to reflect opportunities for fundamental change focusing on reducing energy consumption and the EU's global ecological and social footprint. In the meanwhile the only sensible thing would be to establish a moratorium on all EU agrofuel targets.
(...) Large scale expansion of agrofuels creates competition for the use of agricultural resources pitting food production against fuel production. In other words, the over 800 million people suffering from hunger in the world, will compete for food/energy crops with over 800 million motor road vehicles (a figure that is fast increasing), in a highly unbalanced struggle. In reality, world food reserves are already at their lowest for decades, and for several years demand for grains and oilseeds has surpassed supply. Already, expansion of agrofuel production is resulting in rapid food price rises. For example the increasing demand for ethanol in the US has driven maize export price up by 70%. The knock-on effect of this has been a contributory factor to social unrest in Mexico, where tortillas (corn) is a staple diet.
(...) Increased demand for agrofuels in industrialised countries undermines food sovereignty across the globe. Hot-spot countries for agrofuel crop production such as Malaysia or Argentina, are being encouraged to turn land into fuel export zones, rather than concentrate on local, diverse agricultural production for domestic need.
(...) As an attempt to balance up these consequences, agrofuels are presented as an 'opportunity' for the developing world, with many studies taking as given, that they will help rural development and create employment. Yet the development of agrofuels is likely to follow the typical market-led pattern of monoculture expansion controlled by big agribusiness and wealthy land-owners. The connection between mono-agricultural production and the demise of small scale farming systems bringing with it increasing impoverishment is well documented. It leads to 'farming without farmers', where people are evicted by economic pressure (which can involve the use of violence and irregular 'land buying') and poisoning by agrochemicals. In employment terms, people are often replaced by mechanisation or face very poor working conditions. Growing popular resistance to the large-scale expansion of agrofuels in some countries of the South reinforces this case that the poor are not the ones who will benefit.
(...) Optimistic proponents of agrofuels as energy efficiency and CO2 neutral, have not taken into account the massive land use issues thrown up by their production. Nor have they considered the energy inputs involved, mainly derived from burning fossil fuels, in the growing process (fertilizers, pesticides, etc), processing crops into fuel and transporting to their final use point.
(...) A very relevant example for Europe, is the case of palm oil from South East Asia. If the EU is to meet the mandatory targets that it has proposed, a big bulk of the crop for agrofuel use in the EU will be palm oil from Indonesia and Malaysia. A study by Delft Hydraulics and Wetlands International(36) reveals that the decomposing of peatland can release 70 to 100 tonnes of CO2 per hectare per year. The report shows that European use of Southeast Asian palm oil would generate up to 10 times more CO2 than the equivalent emissions from burning fossil diesel. Indonesia alone holds 60% of all tropical peatlands, and most of these are predicted to drain, mostly for plantations, in coming years or decades leading to more than 40 billion tones of carbon emissions.(37) This is the equivalent of around six years of global fossil fuel emissions.(38) In spite of the Commission's claims to the contrary, EU imports will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

castro on may day:
Possibly, the population of the world then was not more than 500 million. We know that in 1830, world population reached the first billion mark, one hundred and thirty years later it multiplied by three, and forty-six years later the total number of inhabitants on the planet had grown to 6.5 billion; the immense majority of these were poor, having to share their food with domestic animals and from now on with biofuels.
(...) The large American transnationals, which produce this biofuel investing tens of billion dollars at an accelerated pace, had demanded from the imperial leader the distribution in the American market of no less than thirty-five billions (35,000,000,000) of gallons of this fuel every year. The combination of protective tariffs and real subsidies would raise that figure to almost one hundred billion dollars each year. Insatiable in its demand, the empire had flung into the world the slogan of producing biofuels in order to liberate the United States, the world's supreme energy consumer, from all external dependency on hydrocarbons.
(...) History shows that sugar as a single crop was closely associated with the enslaving of Africans, forcibly uprooted from their natural communities, and brought to Cuba, Haiti and other Caribbean islands. In Brazil, the exact same thing happened in the growing of sugar cane.
(...) Today, in that country, almost 80% of sugar cane is cut by hand. Sources and studies made by Brazilian researchers affirm that a sugarcane cutter, a piece- work laborer, must produce no less than twelve tons in order to meet basic needs. This worker needs to perform 36,630 flexing movements with his legs, make small trips 800 times carrying 15 kilos of cane in his arms and walk 8,800 meters in his chores. He loses an average of 8 liters of water every day. Only by burning cane can this productivity per man be achieved. Cane cut by hand or by machines is usually burned to protect people from nasty bites and especially to increase productivity. Even though the established norm for a working day is from 8 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon, this type of piece-work cane cutting tends to go on for a 12 hour working day. The temperature will at times rise to 45 degrees centigrade by noon.
(...) The great agricultural yields of the United States were achieved by rotating the gramineae (corn, wheat, oats, millet and other similar grains) with the legumes (soy, alfalfa, beans, etc.). These contribute nitrogen and organic material to the soil. The corn crop yield in the United States in 2005, according to FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) data was 9.3 tons per hectare. In Brazil they only obtain 3 tons of this same grain in the same area. The total production registered by this sister nation that year was thirty-four million six hundred thousand tons, consumed internally as food. It cannot contribute corn to the world market.
(...) The prices for this grain, the staple diet in numerous countries of the region, have almost doubled. What will happen when hundreds of millions of tons of corn are redirected towards the production of biofuel? And I rather not mention the amounts of wheat, millet, oats, barley, sorghum and other cereals that industrialized countries will use as a source of fuel for its engines.
(...) We know that the poorest workers from various states are the ones who gravitate towards cane cutting out of necessity. Sometimes, they must spend many months away from their families. That is what happened in Cuba until the triumph of the Revolution, when the cutting and hauling of sugarcane was done by hand, and mechanized cultivation or transportation hardly existed. With the demise of the brutal system forced on our society the cane-cutters, massively taught to read and write, abandoned their wanderings in a few years and it became necessary to replace them with hundreds of thousands of voluntary workers.
(...) Nothing could prevent American and European capital from funding the production of biofuels. They could even send the funds as gifts to Brazil and Latin America. The United States, Europe and the other industrialized countries would save more than one hundred and forty billion dollars each year, without having to worry about the consequences for the climate and the hunger which would affect the countries of the Third World in the first place. They would always be left with enough money for biofuels and to acquire the little food available on the world market at any price.
(...) Another risk of a different nature facing the world is an economic recession in the United States. In the past few days, the dollar has broken records at losing value. On the other hand, every country has most of its reserves in convertible currencies precisely in this paper currency and in American bonds.