May 16, 2008 (LPAC)--Maximiliano Londono, president of the LaRouche Association of Colombia, issued the following statement on May 14, 2008:

Colombia should not only be food self-sufficient, but it could generate surplus for export. Of the 20 million hectares available for cultivation, no more than 4.5 million hectares have been cultivated for the past 40 years. And currently, we are annually importing more than 8 million tons of food. We are importing 3.4 million tons annually of corn alone, and another 1.4 million tons of wheat. Immediately, one million additional hectares of land should be incorporated, to reduce dependency on grain imports. To put an end to corn import, we would need to cultivate some 700,000 additional hectares.

All subsidies and advantages that have been conferred on biofuel, at the expense of the public treasury, should be immediately cancelled. Once the purchase of gasoline mixed with ethanol is no longer required by law, and without the financial advantages that have been granted to biofuels, these will no longer be profitable.

Finally, some U.N. officials, like Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Jean Ziegler, have acknowledged that biofuels are a crime against humanity. U.S. statesman Lyndon LaRouche had warned that biofuels, fanatically promoted by Al Gore, are not only a fraud but an instrument of genocide. German leader Helga Zepp-LaRouche has issued a call for the immediate doubling of world food production. The next meeting of the FAO in early June should mark the beginning of the abandonment of the free-trade policies imposed by the World Trade Organization (WTO).

It is shameful that, in addition to the import of corn and wheat, there are also yearly imports of 260,000 tons of barley, 70 tons of sorghum, 332,000 tons of soy, 820 tons of soybean cake, 30,000 tons of beans, and 40,000 tons of chickpea. The economic opening imposed by Finance Minister Rudolf Hommes in the early 1990s, during the government of Cesar Gaviria, reduced the area under cultivation from 4 to 3 million hectares. From that period onward, the dependency on food imports--and especially on grain imports--became worse. Also, in the short term, another 5 million hectares of land could be added for the production of food. We must recover land for agriculture by reducing the area that today is absurdly dedicated to extensive ranching. Ranching should be intensive, through feed-lots.

Once again, the policy of food self-sufficiency must be reestablished.