REFLECTIONS BY THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF
THE DEBATE HEATS UP
Atilio Borón, a prestigious leftist intellectual who until recently
headed the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), wrote
an article for the 6th Hemispheric Meeting of Struggle against the
FTAs and for the Integration of Peoples which just wrapped up in
Havana; he was kind enough to send it to me along with a letter.
The gist of what he wrote I have summarized using exact quotes of
paragraphs and phrases in his article; it reads as follows:
Pre-capitalist societies already knew about oil which surfaced in
shallow deposits and they used for non-commercial purposes, such as
waterproofing the wooden hulls of ships or in textile products, or
for torches. Its original name was 'petroleum' or stone-oil.
By the end of the 19th century -after the discovery of large
oilfields in Pennsylvania, United States, and the technological
developments propelled by the massive use of the internal combustion
engine-- oil became the energy paradigm of the 20th century.
Energy is conceived of as just merchandise. Like Marx warned us, this
is not due to the perversity or callousness of some individual
capitalist or another, but rather the consequence of the logic of the
accumulation process, which is prone to the ceaseless "mercantilism"
that touches on all components of social life, both material and
symbolic. The mercantilist process did not stop with the human being,
but simultaneously extended to nature. The land and its products, the
rivers and the mountains, the jungles and the forests became the
target of its irrepressible pillage. Foodstuffs, of course, could not
escape this hellish dynamic. Capitalism turns everything that crosses
its path into merchandise.
Foodstuffs are transformed into fuels to make viable the
irrationality of a civilization that, to sustain the wealth and
privilege of a few, is brutally assaulting the environment and the
ecologic conditions which made it possible for life to appear on Earth.
Transforming food into fuels is a monstrosity.
Capitalism is preparing to perpetrate a massive euthanasia on the
poor, and particularly on the poor of the South, since it is there
that the greatest reserves of the earth's biomass required to produce
biofuels are found. Regardless of numerous official statements
assuring that this is not a choice between food and fuel, reality
shows that this, and no other, is exactly the alternative: either the
land is used to produce food or to produce biofuels.
The main lessons taught us by FAO data on the subject of agricultural
land and the consumption of fertilizers are the following:
--Agricultural land per capita in developed capitalism almost doubles
that existing in the underdeveloped periphery: 3.26 acres per person
in the North as opposed to 1.6 in the South; this is explained by the
simple fact that close to 80 percent of the world population live in
the underdeveloped periphery.
--Brazil has slightly more agricultural land per capita than the
developed countries. It becomes clear that this nation will have to
assign huge tracts of its enormous land surface to meet the demands
of the new energy paradigm.
--China and India have 1.05 and 0.43 acres per person respectively.
--The small nations of the Antilles, with their traditional one-crop
agriculture, that is sugarcane, demonstrate eloquently its erosive
effects exemplified by the extraordinary rate of consumption of
fertilizers per acre needed to support this production. If in the
peripheral countries the average figure is 109 kilograms of
fertilizer per hectare (as opposed to 84 in developed countries), in
Barbados the figure is 187.5, in Dominica 600, en Guadeloupe 1,016,
in St. Lucia 1,325 and in Martinique 1,609. The use of fertilizers is
tantamount to intensive oil consumption, and so the much touted
advantage of agrifuels to reduce the consumption of hydrocarbons
seems more an illusion than a reality.
The total agricultural land of the European Union is barely
sufficient to cover 30 percent of their current needs for fuel but
not their future needs that will probably be greater. In the United
States, the satisfaction of their current demand for fossil fuels
would require the use of 121 percent of all their agricultural land
for agrifuels.
Consequently, the supply of agrifuels will have to come from the
South, from capitalism's poor and neocolonial periphery. Mathematics
does not lie: neither the United States nor the European Union have
available land to support an increase in food production and an
expansion of the production of agrifuels at the same time.
Deforestation of the planet would increase the land surface suitable
for agriculture (but only for a while). Therefore this would be only
for a few decades, at the most. These lands would then suffer
desertification and the situation would be worse than ever,
aggravating even further the dilemma pitting the production of food
against that of ethanol or biodiesel.
The struggle against hunger -and there are some 2 billion people who
suffer from hunger in the world- will be seriously impaired by the
expansion of land taken over by agrifuel crops. Countries where
hunger is a universal scourge will bear witness to the rapid
transformation of agriculture that would feed the insatiable demand
for fuels needed by a civilization based on their irrational use. The
only result possible is an increase in the cost of food and thus, the
worsening of the social situation in the South countries.
Moreover, the world population grows 76 million people every year who
will obviously demand food that will be steadily more expensive and
farther out of their reach.
In The Globalist Perspective, Lester Brown predicted less than a year
ago that automobiles would absorb the largest part of the increase in
world grain production in 2006. Of the 20 million tons added to those
existing in 2005, 14 million were used in the production of fuels,
and only 6 million tons were used to satisfy the needs of the hungry.
This author affirms that the world appetite for automobile fuel is
insatiable. Brown concluded by saying that a scenario is being
prepared where a head-on confrontation will take place between the
800 million prosperous car owners and the food consumers.
The devastating impact of increased food prices, which will
inexorably happen as the land is used either for food or for fuel,
was demonstrated in the work of C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer,
two distinguished professors from the University of Minnesota, in an
article published in the English language edition of the Foreign
Affairs magazine whose title says it all: "How Biofuels Could Starve
the Poor". The authors claim that in the United States the growth of
the agrifuel industry has given rise to increases not only in the
price of corn, oleaginous seeds and other grains, but also in the
prices of apparently unrelated crops and products. The use of land to
grow corn which will feed the fauces of ethanol is reducing the area
for other crops. The food processors using crops such as peas and
young corn have been forced to pay higher prices in order to ensure
their supplies. This is a cost that will eventually be passed on to
the consumer. The increase in food prices is also hitting the
livestock and poultry industries. The higher costs have produced an
abrupt decrease in income, especially in the poultry and pork
sectors. If income continues to decrease, so will production, and the
prices of chicken, turkey, pork, milk and eggs will increase. They
warn that the most devastating effects of increasing food prices will
be felt especially in Third World countries.
Studies made by the Belgian Office of Scientific Affairs shows that
biodiesel causes more health and environmental hazards because it
creates a more pulverized pollution and releases more pollutants that
destroy the ozone layer.
With regards to the argument claming that the agrifuels are harmless,
Victor Bronstein, a professor at the University of Buenos Aires, has
demonstrated that:
--It is not true that biofuels are a renewable and constant energy
source, given that the crucial factor in plant growth is not sunlight
but the availability of water and suitable soil conditions. If this
were not the case, we would be able to grow corn or sugarcane in the
Sahara Desert. The effects of large-scale production of biofuels will
be devastating.
--It is not true that they do not pollute. Even if ethanol produces
less carbon emissions, the process to obtain it pollutes the surface
and the water with nitrates, herbicides, pesticides and waste, and
the air is polluted with aldehydes and alcohols that are carcinogens.
The presumption of a "green and clean" fuel is a fallacy.
The proposal of agrifuels is unviable, and it is ethically and
politically unacceptable. But it is not enough just to reject it. It
is necessary to implement a new energy revolution, but one that is at
the service of the people and not at the service of the monopolies
and imperialism. This is, perhaps, the most important challenge of
our time, concludes Atilio Borón.
As you can see, this summary took up some space. We need space and
time; practically a book. It has been said that the masterpiece which
made author Gabriel García Márquez famous, One Hundred Years of
Solitude, required him to write fifty pages for each page that was
printed. How much time would my poor pen need to refute those who for
a material interest, ignorance, indifference or even for all three at
the same time defend the evil idea and to spread the solid and honest
arguments of those who struggle for the life of the species?
Some very important opinions and points of view were discussed at the
Hemispheric Meeting in Havana. We should talk about those that
brought us real-life images of cutting sugarcane by hand in a
documentary film that seemed a reflection of Dante's Inferno. A
growing number of opinions are carried by the media every day and
everywhere in the world, from institutions like the United Nations
right up to national scientific associations. I simply perceive that
the debate is heating up. The fact that the subject is being
discussed is already an important step forward.
Fidel Castro Ruz
May 9, 2007, 5:47 p.m.
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