The internationalisation of genocide

Fidel Castro Ruz
The Hindu, 9 April

The colossal squandering of cereals for fuel production will serve to save rich countries less than 15 per cent of the annual consumption of their voracious automobiles.

AT A recent meeting at Camp David between the Presidents of the United States and Brazil, no one answered the following questions. Where will the more than 500 million tonnes of corn and other cereals, which the U.S., Europe and other wealthy nations need to produce the quantities of ethanol that their big companies demand in exchange for voluminous investments, be produced? Where will the soy, sunflower, and rapeseed that these nations are to turn into fuel, come from?

Some countries export their food surpluses. Others face a precarious situation as food prices skyrocket. According to recent data, the five chief producers of corn, barley, sorghum, rye, millet, and oats — that President Bush wants to transform into raw material for ethanol production — supply the world with 679 million tonnes of them.

Similarly, the five chief consumers, some of which also produce the grain, currently need annually 604 million tonnes of them. The available surplus is then less than 80 million tonnes.

The colossal squandering of cereals for fuel production — and these estimates do not include oilseeds — will serve to save rich countries less than 15 per cent of the annual consumption of their voracious automobiles.

At Camp David, President Bush declared his intention to apply the formula around the world. This spells the internationalisation of genocide.

In statements published by Washington Post on the eve of the Camp David meeting, Brazilian President Lula affirmed that less than 1 per cent of Brazil's arable land is used to grow cane destined for ethanol production. This is nearly three times the land surface Cuba used when it produced nearly 10 million tonnes of sugar a year, before the crisis that befell the Soviet Union and the onset of climate change.

Cuba has been producing and exporting sugar for a longer time. First, it depended on the work of slaves, whose numbers swelled to over 300,000 in the first years of the 19th century and who turned the Spanish colony into the world's No 1 exporter. Nearly a hundred years later, at the beginning of the 20th century, when Cuba was a pseudo-republic that was denied full independence by U.S. interventionism, it was immigrants from the West Indies and illiterate Cubans who bore the burden of growing and harvesting sugarcane on the island. The scourge of our people was the off-season, inherent in the cyclical nature of the harvest.

Sugarcane plantations were the property of U.S. companies or powerful Cuba-born landowners. Cuba, thus, has more experience than anyone else with regard to the social impact of this crop.

On our poor and anything but consumerist island, one will be unable to find enough workers to endure the rigours of the harvesting and to care for the sugarcane plantations during the ever- more intense heat, drought or rain. When hurricanes lash the island, not even the best machines can harvest the bent-over and twisted cane. For centuries, the practice of burning sugarcane was unknown and soil was not compacted under the weight of complex machines and enormous trucks. Nitrogen, potassium, and phosphate fertilizers, that are today extremely expensive, did not exist. And the dry and wet months succeeded each other regularly. In modern agriculture, high yields are not possible without crop rotation.

Impact of climate change

According to a United Nations report, climate change will have a significant impact on the American continent, generating more violent storms and heat waves and causing droughts, the extinction of some species and even creating hunger in Latin America. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that by the end of this century, every hemisphere will face water-related problems, and that if governments do not act, rising temperatures could increase the risks of mortality, contamination, natural catastrophes and infectious diseases.

In Latin America, global warming is melting glaciers in the Andes and threatening the Amazon forest, whose perimeter may slowly be turned into a savannah, it has been reported. Because a great part of its population lives near the coast, the U.S. is also vulnerable to extreme natural phenomena, as Hurricane Katrina demonstrated in 2005.

The U.N. report points out that, even if radical measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions are taken, the rise in temperatures around the planet in the coming decades is unavoidable.

As was to be expected, at the Camp David meeting, Dan Fisk, National Security Adviser for the region, declared that "in the discussion on regional issues, [I expect] Cuba to come up (... ) if there's anyone that knows how to create starvation, it's Fidel Castro. He also knows how not to do ethanol."

I should remind him that Cuba's infant mortality rate is lower than that of the U.S. All citizens in Cuba enjoy free medical services. Everyone has access to education and no one is denied employment — in spite of nearly half a century of economic blockade and U.S. attempts to starve and economically asphyxiate the people of Cuba.

China will not devote a single tonne of cereals or leguminous plants to the production of ethanol, and it is an economically prosperous nation that is breaking growth records. In China, all citizens earn the income they need to purchase essential consumer items, despite the fact that 48 per cent of its 1.3-billion-plus population works in agriculture. On the contrary, it has set out to reduce energy consumption by shutting down thousands of factories that consume unacceptable levels of electricity and hydrocarbons. It imports many food products.

Scores of countries do not produce hydrocarbons and are unable to produce corn and other grain or oilseeds, for they do not have enough water to meet even their basic needs.

At a meeting on ethanol production held in Buenos Aires by the Argentine Oil Industry Chamber and Cereals Exporters Association, Loek Boonekamp, the Dutch head of the commercial and marketing division of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), told the press that governments are enthused about this process but that they should objectively consider whether ethanol should be given such resolute support. According to Mr. Boonekamp, the U.S. is the only country where ethanol can be profitable; without subsidies no other country can make it viable.

Today, developed countries are pushing to have biofuels mixed with fossil fuels by around 5 per cent and this is already affecting agricultural prices. If this figure goes up to 10 per cent, 30 per cent of the U.S.' and 50 per cent of Europe's cultivated surface will be needed to meet the demand. That is why Mr. Boonekamp is asking himself whether the process is sustainable, as an increase in the demand for crops destined for ethanol production will generate higher, and less stable, prices.

By simply replacing incandescent bulbs with fluorescent ones, millions of dollars in investment and energy could be saved — without the need to use a single acre of farmland.

The worst may be yet to come: a new war aimed at securing gas and oil supplies that can take humanity to the brink of total annihilation. Where shall poor Third World countries find the basic resources needed to survive? I am not exaggerating or using overblown language. I am confining myself to the facts. As can be seen, the polyhedron has many dark faces.

(The writer is the President of Cuba.)