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UN Expert Says Biofuels are a “Crime Against Humanity”

By Manila Ryce
Published Monday, October 29th, 2007, 1:18 am
Filed under: Human Rights, Economic, Environment, World Issues

Jean Ziegler, a UN special rapporteur on the right to food, has condemned the production of biofuels for bringing about more hunger. The prices of some crops have also been pushed to record levels due to the growth in production of biofuels. This is because US farmers, in particular, have switched from producing crops such as wheat and soya to corn for ethanol.

Zeigler says that the right to food is “gravely violated in many, many parts of the world.” 100,000 people currently die from hunger every day. Yet, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the world already produces enough food to feed a global population of 12 billion people. “All causes of hunger are man-made, it’s a problem of access, not overpopulation or underproduction, and can be changed by human decision,” he explained.

“It is a crime against humanity to convert agricultural productive soil into soil which produces food stuff that will be burned into biofuel,” Ziegler said as he called for a five-year ban on the practice. Within that time Zeigler believes technological advances would enable agricultural waste, such as corn cobs, banana leaves, grass clippings, etc, to be used for fuel production.

The growth in production of biofuels has been driven not by a desire to find a less environmentally-damaging alternative to petrol, but by members of congress in bed with the Agribusiness Lobby. Biofuel also makes us more reliant on oil since it may require anywhere from 29-118 percent more energy to create than it yields, depending on the type of crop used and fuel produced.

Ziegler is not alone in his concern. The IMF warned last week that an increased global reliance on grain could have serious implications for the world’s poor. Long before the IMF even, in March of this year, Cuban President Fidel Castro harshly criticized targets set by President Bush to increase the production of ethanol, an idea which Castro claimed could eventually cause the “hunger and thirst more than 3bn people of the world.”

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2 Responses to “UN Expert Says Biofuels are a “Crime Against Humanity””

  1. Remember friends, after WWII big oil and the car manufacturers bought up most of the trolley lines, commuter trains, and bus companies then closed them. The why is obvious. The reason I bring it up is we as a country can reverse that. We need to learn to live within our means.
    The bio-fuel thing is Archer-Daniels and friends conning us into another semi-monopoly crock of shit. It fixes nothing. We as a planet have to change our behavior.

    The biggest problem is bushco. Even out of office, bushco, Carlisle Group etc are going to use their considerable influence to resist necessary changes, even if it means the end of the earth as a bio-diverse planet. Across the board the enemy of the earth opposes population control, opposes a united nations(no caps on purpose)solution to world resource use, opposes citizen protection over corporate protection, and promotes superstition over science and reason.

    moondancer
    10/29/07 at 12:48 pm

  2. Yeah, I read this article on bbc.com a few days ago and I damn near spit at my computer, I was so disgusted. What a fuckin’ moron.

    He implies that biofuels require the edible parts of crops in order to be produced, and that the world should stop biofuel crop production in order to “wait for the technology to improve so that the non-edible parts of the plant can be used.”

    Welcome to the idiocracy, you fuckin’ geniuses! We don’t need to wait for the technology because IT’S ALREADY HERE!! Producing “more crops” for bio fuels is really unnecessary because the US alone produces tens of millions of tons of agricultural waste ALREADY. This stuff is perfectly suited for ethanol and methanol production. Add the fact that the US alone, suffering from a “problem of Abundance,” throws away an additional few million tons of EDIBLE Crop as well, this guy is really just shootin’ out his ass.

    And what’s scarier is that the world’s leaders just might be dumb enough to buy it.

    FUCK!!!

    PapaFigue
    10/29/07 at 2:09 pm

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