What will life be like without you, Fidel?
In [Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s] article, the 80-year-old revolutionary asserted that US President George
W. Bush’s support for using crops to produce ethanol for cars could deplete corn
and other food stocks in developing nations, putting the lives of [3] billion people
at risk [for hunger] worldwide.
The story in the Taipei Times doesn’t mention that Cuba was forced to embark upon a biofuel program of its own after it stopped receiving heavily-subsidized oil shipments from the Soviet Union. El Jefe would presumably defend this, arguing that Cuban biofuels don’t come at the expense of food production, since they’re made from bagasse, a non-edible byproduct of sugar extraction.
At this point, one could observe that Cuba produces tobacco, which is grown on land that could otherwise be used to grow SOME kind of foodstuff. So Cuba’s tobacco production takes food out of people’s mouths too, does it not? Furthermore, Cuba has single-dwelling homes which could be razed (the inhabitants being first moved to high-rise apartments), and the land upon which they stand could be converted to agricultural use. That would certainly feed more people, too. In fact, if Cuba really wanted to, it could help feed that 3 billion Mr. Castro cares so much about by simply taking the land, labor and capital that’s currently being used to make OTHER THINGS and diverting it into food production.
I’m not recommending any of this. But what I AM saying is that I fail to see how American biofuels are somehow any less moral in the grand scheme of things than Cuban cancer sticks.