Castro Criticizes U.S. Biofuel Policies
HAVANA — Fidel Castro lashes out against U.S. biofuel plans in an op-ed piece published Thursday, a sign Cuba’s 80-year-old leader may be taking a more active role in public affairs after months sidelined by a still undisclosed illness.
The article is written in the same kind of apocalyptic style Castro typically adopts when discussing the impact of U.S. international policies on developing nations, and there was no reason to doubt he was the author.
President Bush’s support for using crops to produce ethanol for cars could deplete food stocks in developing nations, the article in the Communist Party daily Granma asserts.
The headline reads: “Condemned to Premature Death by Hunger and Thirst more than 3 Billion People of the World.”
“This isn’t an exaggerated number; it is actually cautious,” says the article distributed by e-mail early Thursday to international correspondents by foreign ministry officials.
As in some shorter messages signed by Castro in the eight months since he fell ill, the piece does not seem aimed at dispelling rumors about his health, but rather at drawing attention to his stand on world affairs.
It was unclear what the message means in terms of Castro’s future role in domestic affairs.
In recent weeks, Bolivian President Evo Morales and several senior Cuban officials have indicated that Castro could soon take a more active role in public affairs and may even return to the presidency.
Castro temporarily ceded power to his younger brother Raul, the 75-year-old defense minister, on July 31 after announcing he had undergone intestinal surgery. He has not appeared in public since.
Morales recently said from Bolivia that he expects to see Castro in public on April 28 during a meeting in Havana with presidents celebrating a regional trade and cooperation pact.
Castro’s condition and his exact ailment are a state secret but he is widely believed to suffer from diverticular disease, which causes a weakening in the walls of the colon.
His older brother Ramon Castro told reporters Wednesday that Fidel was doing very well but dodged questions about whether he would soon appear in public. “He’s in one piece,” Ramon Castro, 82, said of Fidel as he toured a cattlemen’s fair and rodeo. “These Castros are strong!”
In his Thursday article, Fidel Castro quotes extensively from a Washington-datelined story by The Associated Press reporting on a meeting Monday between Bush and U.S. automakers and their comments about using corn to create ethanol as an alternative to fossil fuels.
“The sinister idea of converting food into combustible was definitively established as the economic line of the foreign policy of the United States,” he writes.
The Cuban leader notes that Cuba has also experimented with extracting ethanol from sugarcane.
But if rich nations decide to import huge amounts of traditional food crops such as corn from developing countries to help meet their energy needs, it could have disastrous consequences for the world’s poor, Castro writes.
“Apply this recipe to the countries of the Third World and you will see how many people among the hungry masses of our planet will no longer consume corn,” the article said. “Or even worse: by offering financing to poor countries to produce ethanol from corn or any other kind of food no tree will be left to defend humanity from climate change.”
© 2007 The Associated Press.
Viva Fidel! He is right as usual.
Well Castro makes some good points. There isn’t enough land on earth to fuel the types of vehicles most people use nowdays. Fuel efficiency would pay much higher dividends. We have had the perfectly wrong people in government to deal with the situation.
While fighting a war of Imperialism in Iraq and Afghnistan the corporate fuel average for domestic car and truck manufacturers has been going backwords. If we are desperate enough to attack innocent nations to steal thier resourses we should at least first address the fuel efficiency of our cars first.
Also much of the government subsidies for these fuels amounts to corporate welfare for big buisness.
Also from my understanding, once you factor in all the fossil fuel used for fertilizer, processing and transporting it is just about not worth the effort you put into it. It’s another way of tranfering wealth to the already rich.
ADM, Cargill, Con-Agra, Monsanto. All very happy with this decision. Castro is dead-on correct.
I hope Fidel ives long enough to bid Shrub (which will be the 10th U.S. president he will have seen come and go)bye-bye. His longevity and presence is a continual (and unfortunately well deserved) middle finger salute to the United States political establishment and orgnaized corporate crime syndicates know as multi-national corporations and crime families.
The amount of fossel fuel used in the production of ethanol is only part of the problem.
It also uses HUGE amounts of water. Water shortages are already a huge problem around the world.
Another problem is that the majority of the corn grown for biofuels are genetically engineered. The possibility of organic food corn being contaminated is HUGE! The environmental damage will be irreversable.
Using a food crop (corn especially) creates a demand that increases the cost of food and feed for people. The cost of tortillas in Mexico have already gone through the roof! Before riots broke out, Mexico has started to regulate the cost of corn products for human consumption. Eventually biofuels may contain the cost of fuel at the pump, but your tortilla chips and other corn based products will not be affordable at the grocery store.
Production of biofuels is viable as long as food crops are not used. It is also true that other “green” technologies should not take a back seat to biofuels.
Fidel Is right. There is absolutely not enough land on the planet to feed both cars and people. For North Americans this seems a hard choice,but for anyone in the Global South, anyone who is hungry, anyone not hoplessly addicted to oil it is so obvious: of course we must feed the world’s children first. The day no one anywhere dies of hunger, you can start talking about biofuels. Viva Fidel, Si!
Fidel has been around for a while and knows that environmental considerations are always secondary to the profit motive of capitalist economies. The Bush administration wants to have its cake and eat it too - the environmental angle is only be emphasised as long as money is still being made. Regardless, the implications for the natural environment will be disastrous for the developing world. Fewer food crops, more cash crops, land degradation, deforestation - are all these acceptable environmental outcomes?
Fidel is right on with his observation.
He makes some great points that I realize not many main stream Westerners or Americans may see. The only problem is that Fidel has been painted into the mind of many Americans as the southern devil. It is unfortunate but once again I look at this website and see it as our responsibility to help get messages like this out. All in all a great point Fidel, and here is to hoping that he starts making his voice heard more often.
of course Compadre Castro is correct
Cubans still are the mostn educated of all in the Americas
Viva El Frente
only HEMP is the true salvation of the ‘AMERICAN’ farmer
see www.earthpeoplefoundation.org for links to hemp info
I agree with Fonseca. There are always winners and losers in capitalistic societies. It took our own Ameristocracy some wrangling, but I would not doubt that they’ve moved around large portions of their investment portfolios from stocks and bonds to corn futures. (Conspiracy Theorists - Does anyone remember that day within the past month or so that the stock market dropped like an express elevator? Early that day, I heard it was caused by a computer glitch. By the end of that day, there was a completely different explanation, and nothing to do with a power outage or the like. Hmmm…) It’s great to be rich, especially when you know the outcome of the financial choices you make.
The bio-diversity found in the US must determine what types of “alternative, renewable” resources are used to create biofuels that do not continue to pollute our air and water. Wasting land and water from the Great Plains aquifer to grow more corn in the Midwest does not make any sense, especially when fossil fuels must be used to create biofuel from it. These manufacturers are still polluting, heating up the earth, and thinning the ozone layer.
The oil industry must be doubly happy about this news. Watch for $1G retirement packages for the barons next year (is that 2X as much as $500M?)
Corn produces bio-fuels for gasoline engines, but bio-fuel for DIESEL engines comes from leguminous plants, hemp, or algae grown on saline ponds.
The diesel engine was desiged to run on vegetable oil. Leguminous plants fix nitrogen. Hemp too is a regenerative crop, and algae is not grown on tillable land but on saline ponds. Lots of that kind of water surrounds Cuba.
Tractors run on vegetable oil and use only a small fraction of the fuel produced on a given field to farm it.
The diesel engine is very reliable.
Vegetable oil bio-fuels do not contribute to more greenhouse gasses, and come from crops that regenerate farm land. They are the absolute best answer to the current greenhouse crisis with currently readily available technology. Castro aught to read up on it - along with the rest of you.
Well if we are going to use ethanol maybe between Chavez’s oil and Fidel’s sugar the two could give Brazil and the US a real bit of competition.