zero hour: nafta and mexico's agrarian collapse
Nor does the President and his cronies identify who it is that is actually benefiting from the NAFTA-TLCOM boom. According to the National Farmers Confederation or CNC, a creature of the once-ruling (71 years) PRI party and once gung-ho for the trade treaty, only 2% of all Mexican producers are sharing the largesse. The other 98%, including 3.5 million corn farmers, 85% of whom grow on five hectares or less (average U.S. corn spreads are 270 acres), have no access to the NAFTA-TLCAN market whatsoever. The big winners? About 20,000 corporate tomato growers, avocado and tropical fruit moguls, and specialty crop niche market sharpies (organic coffee -but organic anything) - plus, of course, the beer barons.

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.

combatting climate change without structural change?:
Most climate experts accept that, in order to avoid catastrophic effects of global warming, greenhouse gas emissions (mostly CO2) must be cut by 60-80% by 2050 (though the figure may need to be a 95% cut in the US). The belief that replacing fossil fuels with solar and wind technology can accomplish this reduction tends to overlook several factors:
1. Corporations bombard the world with the message that everyone should consume like Americans do;
2. Corporations tell those in the US that they should ape after the playthings of the rich;
3. Population is growing;
4. Market economics force pathological expansion; and,
5. Solar and wind comprise a minute fraction of current energy.
Let’s combine these to get an idea of how much solar and wind would need to expand to replace coal, oil, nukes and gas by 2050.First, the US consumes about 25% of the world’s energy while having only 5% of the world’s population. For the rest of the world to consume at the rate of the US would require global production to increase by a factor of 6.33. People in the US constantly hear the message that they do not consume nearly enough. The rest of the world does see skid row as their model for consumption — they also look at the wealthiest in the US. If we use the 5% wealthiest for the standard of comparison, the value of 6.33 should be squared to give 40.0 as the amount that world production would have to increase for everyone to consume at the level of the most affluent in the US. [calculations follow] If there is no challenge to the US being a model of consumerism, there would need to be a roughly nine million percent increase in solar/wind power for them to replace other forms of energy in 43 years.
Total energy use in the US is currently about 100 quads. A quad is equivalent to a quadrillion (a one followed by 15 zeroes) Btu. In his classic The Party’s Over, Richard Heinberg observes that “to produce 18 quads of wind power in the US by 2030 would require the installation of something like half a million state-of-the-art turbines…That is five times the present world production capacity for turbines...most of the energy needed for that undertaking would have to come from dwindling fossil fuels.” People would be consuming voraciously at the same time they were constructing a massive new energy infrastructure. Where would the energy for this gargantuan orgy of consumption/construction come from? Would it mean pumping every drop of oil out of the ground to move the new equipment across the globe? Would it require blowing the top off of every sacred mountain that had coal in it? Would it demand mining enough uranium to melt down nukes in every country? Would it mean extracting every cubic foot of natural gas so there was none left for heating by the time 2050 arrives? Switching to solar/wind by 2050 might require the greatest use of fossil and nuclear fuel the world has ever seen. That’s not a good way to prevent global warming.
(...) This is not to deny that solar panels are absolutely essential for a sustainable energy policy. It is to say that fanaticism about solar power which blinds people to its limitations can also blind them from seeing the need to reduce the total quantity of energy produced in Western countries.
(...) The energy crisis and rising CO2 levels are crises of market economics and the question we must ask is: How do we change society to make it sustainable?
(...) People starve not because there is not enough food, but because available food is not distributed to those who need it. It is more profitable to process food and send it to those who overconsume in rich countries than it is to sell it to those in poor countries who can pay less for it. Local food production for need, combined with aid during times of crisis, could feed everyone. But increased corporate control of food means more production for the international market and food drained away from those who need it the most. Corn for people to eat locally is transformed to corn to feed cattle for international hamburger chains. Less corn is available to solve hunger as American obesity skyrockets. A thousand food commodities and diabetes follow the same path. Just as an increase in the quantity of food can be followed by an increase in starvation, an increase in the quantity of energy available can accompany an energy shortage. If people controlled their energy locally, they could decide how much to produce and, more important, what types of energy-draining activities need to be limited.