Bush's Biofuels Push is `The Internationalization of Genocide,' Cuban President Warns

April 4--In the second such blast at the Bush Administration's global bio-fuels drive in the space of a week, a clearly very much alive Fidel Castro Ruz penned an article under this provocative headline, appearing as the lead item in the April 3 edition of Cuba's daily Granma Internacional .

A week earlier, in Granma 's March 29 edition, he had warned that "more than 3 billion people in the world will be condemned to premature death from hunger and thirst," if food is used for fuel. In this latest attack, he takes aim at the March 31 Camp David meeting between Brazilian President Lula da Silva and George Bush, in which ethanol production, and particularly the Brazilian model of ethanol based on sugarcane, was a key topic of discussion. Castro protests that he has no intention of meddling in Brazil's internal affairs, but then goes on to describe in stark detail Cuba's own brutal history of sugar production based on slave labor and colonialism. This, he said, means that "we, therefore, have accumulated more experience than anyone on the social effects of this crop."

As for the "colossal squandering of grains to produce fuel," Castro states, no one "has answered the fundamental question. Who is going to produce--and where--the more than 500 million tons of corn and other grains that the U.S., Europe, and other wealthy countries need to produce the huge number of gallons of ethanol that the large American and other corporations demand in exchange for their costly investments?" The bio-fuel boondoggle will only save rich countries less than 15% of their automobiles' annual fuel consumption, the Cuban leader caustically points out. "Yet at Camp David, Bush has declared his intention to apply this formula internationally, which means nothing less than the internationalization of genocide." "Where," Castro asks, "are the poor nations of the Third World to find the minimal resources for their survival?"