In a series of reflections published in the Cuban press Fidel Castro has described how the use of ethanol as an alternative to fossil fuels threatens billions of people with hunger, poverty and environmental destruction.
In a meeting with US car manufacturers in March 2007 George Bush set a target of reducing petrol consumption by 20% by 2017, to be replaced by 35 billion gallons of ethanol produced each year from agricultural products, principally maize, sugar cane and soy bean.
This amount of ethanol would require 320 million tonnes of maize. In 2005, the entire US maize crop was 280 million tonnes. According to figures from the US Development Agency (May 2007) 86 million tonnes of maize will be used in the US during 2007 for the production of ethanol, a staggering 30 million tonne increase from the record amounts used during 2006.
The US has signed a deal with Brazil, with whom it controls about 70% of world ethanol production, to promote it as an internationally traded commodity in Central America and the Caribbean – a deal which Castro has criticised. The US will maintain its tariff on ethanol imports, to protect the US ethanol industry, until at least 2009.
The European Council has set a target for biofuels to account for 10% of EU fuel use by 2020. The Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimates that meeting this target would require 72% of arable land in the EU. Clearly these plans will cause a devastating increase in global crop prices, as ethanol manufacturers look abroad to meet demand.
According to the latest forecast given by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), in 2007 world cereal production (which includes maize) will rise by 6.2% from 2006. Despite this, supplies will barely meet demand, which has risen as a result of expanding biofuel production and growing demand from India and China. The FAO has predicted that price increases will raise the cereal import bill of low-income food-deficit countries by a quarter in the current season. The Financial Times reported in May that global food prices are headed for their biggest annual increase in as much as 30 years. In Britain annual food price inflation for the second quarter of 2007 was 5.1 %, the highest in six years.
Biofuels are being promoted as environmentally friendly because the CO2 emitted when burning them is no more than is absorbed by the plants used to make them. However, this ignores the considerable CO2 emission associated with planting, cultivating, harvesting, transporting and processing the crop to turn it into ethanol. Furthermore, in order to meet world demand for ethanol, millions of acres of rainforest in countries like Argentina and Brazil will have to be cleared to make way for crops. Another devastating effect is due to the enormous amounts of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, whose residues are washed into rivers, lakes and seas. The Gulf of Mexico now has a dead zone bigger than Wales because fertilizer residue which drains from the US corn belt has created huge blooms of algae that suck all oxygen from the water.
As Castro pointed out: ‘Transforming food into fuel is a monstrosity…regardless of official statements assuring us that this is not a choice between food and fuel, reality shows that this is exactly the alternative: either the land is used to produce food or to produce biofuels.’ The idea of using food for fuel as a response to oil shortages and climate change is indicative of capitalism, which cannot accept measures that put limits on growth of consumption. As Fidel Castro said, if the world followed the example of Cuba’s Energy Revolution by investing in energy efficiency, hydrocarbon reserves would last twice as long and environmental devastation would be halved.
http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2007/reflections-of-president-fidel-castro.html
Sam Baker
FRFI 198 August / September 2007
