How Fidel Castro biofooled the world on biofuels; “global starvation” no longer an issue as Cuba rockets forward with sugarcane ethanol; a Biofuels Digest News analysis
“‘Change, change, change!”‘ Fidel Castro wrote, regarding the US Presidential campaign, in a column published this morning in Havana. “I agree, ‘change!’ but in the United States,” he continued. “I enjoyed seeing the embarrassing position of all the U.S. presidential candidates.”
However, change appears to be coming more quickly for Cuba’s biofuels policy than for Castro’s US targets. And some level of embarrassment may follow.
It is becoming increasingly clear that Castro’s opposition to food-based biofuels is based in his policy of opposing the US. Castro was quoted in Znet’s “Maize of deception: How corn-based ethanol can lead to starvation and environmental disaster“, stating that “using corn, or any other food source, could result in the premature death of upwards of three billion people.”
In fact, Castro has been building up a food-based biofuel empire, striking quiet distribution deals with Nigeria and Venezuela. Further, the potential for Cuba to produce between 2 billion and 3.2 billion gallons per year of sugar cane ethanol has been projected by industry analysts.
Ironically, Castro’s Marxist formulation of a zero-sum struggle between the forces of “food” and “fuel” has found a welcoming home in US-based NGOs and media outlets. Even more ironic that it is the conservative forces supporting conventional oil & gas interests who have most enthusiastically adopted the Marxist outlook, not excluding usually reliable anti-communist media such as the Wall Street Journal.
Finally, Comrade Castro has found common ground among US conservatives! These writers and policy wonks have been so determined to spread his message of “food vs fuel” in their own name that virtually no one remembers that it was Castro’s idea in the first place. How ironic that conservative forces have propelled the Marxist dialectic into which the global dialogue over biofuels has fallen.
Castro’s, and Cuba’s, expansion into ethanol began as the result of a failed policy of sugar cane expansion, which was predicated on the sale of sugar to the Soviet Union, in return for oil and manufactured goods. In the 1970s and 1980s, Castro’s policies increased Cuban sugar production from an infamous initial target of “Ten Million Tonnes”, which required almost every able man on the island to work in the sugar industry, to more than 80 million tonnes of sugar cane production by late 1989. Cuba exported more than 10 million tonnes of sugar by the 1980s, making it the largest exporter of sugar in the world.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union came the collapse of the Cuban sugar trade with the Eastern bloc, and production tumbled to as low as 1.5 million tonnes of sugar by 2006, with only 1 million tonnes exported. And, by 2007, record sugar cane harvests in Brazil and India were threatening the collapse of global sugar prices. India pressed forward with an emergency introduction of an E5 mandate in October 2007 to soak up excess production, and is prepared to go to E10 in October 2008 despite widespread chaos in implementation.
By 2006, Cuba has shuttered 40 percent of its more than 150 sugar cane processing plants, and with rising international oil prices, the island has naturally turned to sugar cane ethanol as an export product. The country has constructed 17 ethanol production plants to date.
Castro may not have regretted a decision to block ethanol development in Cuba by Archer Daniels Midland in the 1990s, but Cuba has faced severe capital shortages in modernizing its 17 ethanol plants, and questions about potential export markets. The US has remained implacably opposed to Cuban imports, and the EU has become a less attractive market for ethanol in light of rising opposition to biofuels among the European intelligentsia, and an increase in European sugar beet ethanol production capacity.
When Castro struck out against biofuels, it was not only in articles in party-controlled newspapers on the island of Cuba. Cuba, Bolivia and Venezuela supported a draft report to the UN General Assembly calling for a five-year moratorium on ethanol production produced from sugar cane. The author of the report, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, said that “transformation of agricultural land for the production of bio-fuels in America” is a “huge problem. This had resulted in the rise of the price of corn, especially in Mexico. This would lead to massive hunger in the world.”
Ziegler spoke also about the situation in Brazil, stating that “the scale of sugar cane plantations was spreading to the detriment of domestic agriculture in Brazil. The landless peasants in Brazil had campaigned against bio-fuels – all 6 million of them.”
Castro received strong initial support from close ally Hugo Chavez of Venezuela as well as continuing support from Bolivia, but Chavez subsequently introduced an E7 national ethanol target. Chavez said that his government is no longer opposed to the use of ethanol or the use of foodstocks to produce it, but opposes the use of corn for ethanol production.
Chavez said that for each acre planted to grow sugarcane for biofuels, his government would plant two acres for food production, which would require 36 million acres of land to be converted to food production, based on 780,000 barrels a day of oil consumption as reported in the New York Times. This is equivalent to an area the size of the state of Iowa.
Land conversions that have resulted in 6.5 billion gallons of ethanol production, or 15 million acres of land-use conversion, were the subject of articles in Science magazine and have prompted anti biofuels articles in more than 30 major US print and online media. Not a single commentator, among an ocean of opinion about the greenhouse gas consequences of devoting 15 million acres to corn ethanol, mentioned Venezuela’s policy.
This week, an editorial by David Ridenour of the National Center for Public Policy Research, linking biofuels to higher retail food prices in the US, and “chronic hunger, malnutrition and starvation” in the poverty-stricken nations of Africa and Southeast Asia, has been widely syndicated in the United States.
For Cuba, the attractions of tweaking the United States in foreign capitals, or saving three billion people from premature death, has proven less appealing than paying for the country’s 1.5 billion gallons of oil imports, which will cost Cuba 3.65 billion based on the current world oil price of $100 per barrel. The country currently meets only 33 percent of its consumption needs through production. Export of 3 billion gallons of ethanol would provide roughly $7 billion in export income, more than enough to pay for Cuba’s oil needs.
As the strident calls for a moratorium on biofuels over the issue of food shortages have fallen to a whisper in Caracas and Havana, the din has been replaced by the racket of the keyboards of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, who have lately discovered a sympathy for the plight of the world’s poor.
When the problems of global food supply no longer threaten the interests of Big Oil, and the advertising projections of the Wall Street Journal, it is an open question how long the poor will continue to be steadfastly defended by the Journal. They certainly have been jettisoned quickly enough by Castro and Chavez.
Meanwhile, the African and Asian small farmer continues to look at the potential for a rising income, and some food security for their villages, from much maligned biofuels. They would point out that, despite the best efforts of many to link their plight to the escalating cost of grain, food and grain are not the same thing. Energy inputs are required to turn grains and plants into food.
Just ask the 27 children who died in the Philippines in 2005 from eating undercooked cassava. The world’s fifth most important staple food, cassava is a deadly poison if eaten raw, and requires energy inputs to make it edible. In fact, 80 percent of the cost of food is not the grain or biomass it is made from; it is the cost of energy to plant it, harvest it, process it, transport it and package it.
It has never been a case of “food vs. fuel” since time out of mind when humankind discovered fire and the preservative powers of baking bread and roasting meat.
Biomass + fuel = food.
Expensive fuel, or expensive food, is an inconvenience in the West. In developing nations, the lack of access to affordable fuel will kill more children than anything else. The West has been donating food and grains for years, and will continue to do so. Who has ever donated a drop of fuel, among all the world’s oil-rich powers?
Who will give a drop of oil to help a mother cook the cassava long enough to remove the cyanide? Or bake the bread? Or cook the vegetables to soften them for babies’ teeth?
They don’t donate, they sell it. At inflated prices, happy to remind the West of their obligation to provide low-cost grain to the world’s poor, so that the poor can afford the East’s high-price fuel to turn grain into food.
Unaffordable fuel forces mother to put out the cooking fire as quickly as possible, raising the specter of bacterial poisoning. It forces children into the forest to search for firewood, and anyone who thinks that the world’s deforestation crisis is happening in the soy farms of the Amazon hasn’t been to Africa, or seen the devastation of Haiti.
Kerosene is no longer affordable and people are turning back to the stone age of the three-stone firepit fueled by firewood and charcoal. Put that in your land-use conversion model and see where it gets you. Doubt it? Visit a village in Africa or India, and see for yourself, and leave the Amazon to rich ecotourists who care nothing about the root causes of poverty, or alleviating real suffering. Who are, in fact, Castro’s and Chevez’s greatest allies in a war of deception over agricultural nationalism.
The battle is not between the world’s consumers of food, and the world’s consumers of fuel, although it has been convenient to frame it this way, because the prospect of starving the world’s children by driving an SUV filled with E85 is upsetting to soccer moms. People who like to exploit soccer moms for donations, votes, and page views like to frame the issue in this way. Most soccer moms, they know, have never been on a farm, and can be emotionally manipulated by images of starving Mexican children, whom they are told cannot afford tortillas because biofuels have taken their corn away.
People who exploit soccer moms, know that few of them have ever eaten a tortilla in Mexico, and don’t know that the white corn used to make them is grown almost exclusively in Mexico and has never been used to make a single drop of ethanol. Mexicans have increased their population by 19 percent since 1994, but corn consumption is up 57 percent.
The CEO of Nestle this morning was, refreshingly, honest about the issue. Peter Brabeck told the Financial Times that the “food industry will remain in competition with the biofuels industry for land as rapid global economic development increases demand for food…the consumption habit changes in emerging markets will not revert.”
But small farmers know that, from Nigeria to Iowa, just as they know that biomass + fuel = food. Which begs the question, how many of the people who have spoken about the prospect of a worldwide food shortage have actually, with their own hands, ever cultivated a single straw of that which they speak?
Jim Lane
Editor, Biofuels Digest
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- From Greentech Media: Green Light » Blog Archive » Cuba Libre, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Ethanol on Feb 22, 2008
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NathanSchock | Feb 22, 2008 | Reply
You mean, we shouldn’t listen to a third-world dictator on our energy policy? Go figure.