This from The Council of Foreign Relations:
Food shortages and skyrocketing prices are putting pressure on many of the world’s poorest nations. The Wall Street Journal reports that at spring meetings of policymakers from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, some assigned partial blame to U.S. biofuels policies. The meetings produced “few concrete results” on the way forward. World Bank President Robert Zoellick is calling for a “New Deal on Global Food Policy.” and said the bank plans to double agricultural lending to sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile, street riots have broken out across Latin America (Miami Herald), and in Haiti, where the prime minister was ousted from office on Saturday after protests against rising food prices ground the country to a halt (NYT). East Asia is also feeling pinched, with many countries limiting exports—particularly of rice—to meet domestic demand (ISN Security Watch). The Philippines has called for an emergency regional meeting to discuss the region’s food crisis (Bloomberg).
Coming from the CFR, the problem is big enough to attract the attention of even the most conservative of venues. The problem has been linked to the use of biofuels to power vehicles and this practice has been used to offset our energy independence from the Middle East. While it may help us in our balance of payments, we are instrumental in causing food shortages around the world.
Even Fidel Castro who since leaving power has become sort of a blogger himself, here’s what he said the other day about biofuels:
“Afterwards will come beautiful examples of what experienced and well-organized U.S. farmers can achieve in terms of human productivity by hectare: corn converted into ethanol; the chaff from that corn converted into animal feed containing 26% protein; cattle dung used as raw material for gas production. Of course, this is after voluminous investments only within the reach of the most powerful enterprises, in which everything has to be moved on the basis of electricity and fuel consumption. Apply that recipe to the countries of the Third World and you will see that people among the hungry masses of the Earth will no longer eat corn. Or something worse: lend funding to poor countries to produce corn ethanol based on corn or any other food and not a single tree will be left to defend humanity from climate change.”
Fidel is completely right. Maybe the world should start listening to what he’s saying. I doubt that they will because our industrial center in the United States has already put in the infrastructure to produce the ethanol from corn and soybeans and other edible products. The result being that the world may well starve is an insignificant event to them. As long as the profits roll in from this “new” source of energy, the process will continue and according to Castro, will result in “More than Three Billion Premature Deaths from Hunger and Thirst”.
Americans are basically decent people. We have been sold down a road that makes life unsustainable in other nations for our own comfort and mobility. Meanwhile we are spending over 13 Billion Dollars a month to sustain the wars we are fighting throughout the globe. At this time America doesn’t look so good in the eyes of the world. We can continue down this self-centered path of conquest and the destruction of vital food that could feed many in the world, or we can ignore the rest of the world at our own peril.
The government isn’t going to do anything about this reckless destruction of food for the sake of adding 10% ethanol to our motor vehicles while the many nations that can’t feed themselves starve. This is a question of conscience. We must tell our government in explicit terms that this course of action has too many destructive ramifications to the well being of people on Earth that can barely feed them. The problem isn’t only the people outside the US, but we are already seeing food rise in price as grains are being used for the energy companies.
This must stop. Food should be eaten, not turned into alcohol to run our vehicles. This is a shameless attempt by the energy cartel not only to make profits, but to corner the grain market to keep the automobile business thriving. Think about the consequences. Is it worth it to starve people in the world so that we can drive around sightseeing? Humanity is asking us to stop this practice. We will see wars and uprisings due to starvation and we will have only ourselves and greedy corporations to blame.
That’s the way I see it.
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Timothy V. Gatto
