Americas News
Mar 29, 2007, 19:59 GMT
Castro ends 8-month silence to slam US ethanol plans (2nd Roundup)
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Older Talkback
I think it is important to point out that a major reason that ethanol research takes place is every one with any desgins on the presidency (all the senate, half the house and governors)must bow to the whims of Iowa farmers. First in the Nation. Not sure if Castro is exactly correct I think the states would more likely protect its farmers from forgein competion. Mr Castro should welcome the possiblity of loosened trade aiding the development of the thrid world rather than the knee jerk capitailism bad response that has worked so well in the past for him and his allies.
The issue is not that we do not have enough food. We will always have more than enough food. The problem is getting the food to the people who need it. Castro really does not know what he's talking about and has not done his research.
Fuel from corn and sugar cane is an excellent idea and a great way to take power away from fanatics who are receiving large amounts of money for their oil and spending it to further their religious purposes i.e. killing those who do not agree with their religion.
Fuel from corn and sugar cane will also not only help clean the air but aid non-religious-fanatic countries economically.
It is way past time for Castro to end his tyranny. All that sugar cane being used for fuel would not only help his country economically but help reduce obesity in the world, esp the U.S.
Castro is completely right! If third world countries can educate their citizens to save energy, why not the US? Why the United States have to keep poluting and using all the energy of the planet without thinking on the evironment? Its all a matter of education and consciousness.
Castro, fear by most of his people for being a blood thirsty tirant is still trying to fool the world interfering in other countries internal affairs.
Castro's government of almost fifty years, has damage the Island ecology as in the port of Havana which is constanly polluting the bay and also severely damage what use to be a beatifull river in the same city. Is this the same man that is so concern about protecting the ecology in other coutries and completely disregards his own country?
This is the same dictator who force almost two million Cubans out of their country for political and economic reasons (Cuba is a country of less than 12 million people). Many Cubans have lost their live in the sea trying to find a better live in a free country.These are the Cubans that have kept the economy alive by supporting their relative with the millions of Dollars they sent from foreign countries.
This totalitarian facist dictator has created his own internal economic embargo by not letting the Cuban people work with freedom. Cuba use to be one of the world greatest sugar cane exporters and know there is not enough sugar for cuba itself.The regime does not allow cubans to own busisnes or property and it forces it's people to steal from the government to survive. This is a coutry were a Doctor earn less than $20.00 a month.Castro like to sent medicine to other countries and while the dusty shelf of the Cuban Pharmacies are completely empty.He blameS the U S A for his economic problems when in reality he is to blame.
The is smarter know than years ago, people are not that ignorant anymore. Please don't let this modern blood thirsthy Dracula fool you.
With corn ethanol, you can always shut your car off during a famine or drought. Isn't it better to be dependent on silos of renewable grain? You can't eat crude oil nor even switchgrass.
Biblical Joseph feed the world with stored grain.
Use ethanol in a car and eat meat when times are good. Ride your bike and eat stored grain when times are bad.
With higher grain prices, maybe Afghanistan's farmers can pay the poor to grow grain instead of opium.
Ethanol is misguided but so is the ideal that people are hungry for lack of food. There is plenty of food in the world. It's just not distributed to all those in need. Surely Castro gets that.
How stupid to allow your population to outgrow your food supply.
No matter how much food is pumped into so-called 'third world' countries, there will ALWAYS be millions of hungry people.
In cultures where it seems that the goal in life is to bring as many children into the world as humanly possible, knowing full well there will not be enough food to feed them, demand will always grossly outstrip supply.
So the formula is simple: More food in = more hungry children out. Who would want to contribute to such a pointless endeavor? We're not doing them any favors by making them dependent on our 'generosity.'
This is strikingly similar to the 'welfare' phenomenon we experience here in the states... the more you enable someone to sit at home and do nothing but make babies by handing them other people's hard-earned money, the more they will expect to be given, and the more they will try to take from people who have earned what they have. These people then have kids who grow up expecting to be able to lead the same kind of lifestyle. And so it goes from generation to generation. Just look at pre-Katrina New Orleans!
So, I say let them make Ethanol, and lots of it!
Bush is a Monster.
Fidel never invaded and caused civil war in other countries.
This is just a passing fancy anyways.
Until the Oil countries mellow out.
Bush is a Monster?! We make islamists kill one another? What?? Castro probably has killed god only knows more of his own people. You need to wake the heck up buddy.
Castro sounds like Al Gore, or is Al Gore Castro? Seems like Castro sounds just like the Democratic Party. Makes one wonder what the Democrats really represent. Maybe 'Inconvenient Truths' really represent attempts to effect socialist control over the lives of Americans.
Do we really want our policies and lives run by communists?
PAY THE MIDWEST FARMER AND NOT THE MIDEAST.WE BUY FROM COUNTIES THAT HELP TERRORIST.
Get in yours, gangter!!!
shut up, gangster!!!!
Castro (as any comunist/islamic country) as no credibility. Who care what a criminal low life thinks? The best thing castro could do is expiring... as all the leader who openly oppress they own peoples... (axis of evil anyone?). Corn may not be a good idea as fuel (from a ethical point of view) but sure not because some 80 years old crook who have a transformed a prosperous country into a 3rd world country says so. Now if only the US could use more then peas shooter to exterminate ennemie of democracy criminal like castro whould have long be gone.... islam and communist are the cause of 99% of the world's suffering....
Very typical of Castro to find something to complain about with the US about. The US produces more than enough corn to feed the world and his actions are more directed at the US than Brazil which produces much more ethanol.
Moreover his ecological and conservation stance is not out of choice but out of necessity since the embargo has hurt him economically. Even with the oil subsidies from Chavez in Venezuela his economy is nearly broken down. If his country produced ethanol in huge quantities he'd be crowing about its possibilites but because the USA is the one doing so in its own country and not anywhere else he has his beef about it.
Not only that he knows what everyone else in the USA knows. Even in an oil-producing country like the USA, the US still depends heavily on imported oil, especially from Venezuela. Castro knows that the USA push toward ethanol would reduce oil supplies from his main ally. His oil subsidies and financial aid that he is getting from there would also be reduced and he is obviously afraid of that.
Besides if Castro is so concerned about ethanol why isn't he criticizing the Brazilian push toward ethanol? It is much more expansive than the American one.
Anyway nothing he says or does will ever change anything. The embargo is still on and the push for American ethanol will continue. Go choke on that Sr. Castro.
Please do a cursory glance at world statistics and facts before making stupid comments.
1. Cuba doesn't have starving people. It is a socialist system, where food is distributed to everyone, and not used as a tool of speculation and profit first and foremost. During the time after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba had to adapt and increase its food production when trade stopped. There was hunger then, but it has been remedied.
2. If you read the quotes from Castro, you will see that he is commenting on third world nations growing food crops or crops that replace food crops in order to export ethanol fuel to the United States. He points out that the US can't make enough ethanol itself to power its fleet of gas guzzling cars, so this fuel would come from third world nations at the expense of food for the people who live there. So saying 'What belongs to USA's crop producers is none of his business' demonstrates you either didn't read carefully or understand what you read.
3. Look up USAID figures. You will see it is not trillions of dollars, and if you investigate this issue of food aid further, you will learn that this is a tremendous subsidy to American farmers first and foremost. In fact, many of those rugged, individualistic western farmers wouldn't stand a chance in business without this form of US subsidy of their products. Maybe biofuels for the US market will help them, but Castro's point is that even they couldn't supply the amount needed to produce fuel for the US market. As for third world nations that receive this food aid, there is much research showing that it keeps domestic farmers in those countries out of business by flooding their markets with cheap, US government subsidized foods. But the US doesn't care because its farmers need that help to stay afloat themselves.
So stop going around saying that the US feeds the world and that you wish the UN would feed the world instead. If you got that wish, our agricultural economy, as presently structure, would collapse. But perhaps that would be a good thing. All this anger directed at others might be replaced by a realization of your own self contradictions and hidden assumptions and prejudices.
Castro's government does need to improve its civil rights record, but compared to the human and civil rights record of the US, it is nothing. We imprison the greatest percent of our population of any nation, and largely for victimless small drug possession charges. We bomb other nations with agent orange and napalm and depleted uranium, causing generations of children to be born with deformities and cancers and die terrible deaths, and then decide we made a mistake and leave others to pick up the mess of ruined lives.
We Americans are hardly in the position to criticize a small island nation that has been under constant attack from the CIA and Cuban Miami mafia for decades, that has one end of its island occupied by the US with a military base in which inmates are tortured routinely and put on secret trials with secret charges and secret kangaroo court rules. Learn a little more before you make baseless, stupid comments, and put things in perspective.
Well, that's enough critique for one night.
Castro should get rid of Bush...HAIL CASTRO!!!
This is hilarious.
Watch how quickly the campus leftists among us will turn from 'we must develop alternative fuels' to 'ethanol is a waste of energy that starves developing nations'.
Irrespective of Castro's political history, he I think he does have a point in that, despite what some others in this comment list have said against him, the world is a very small place and our economies and global food supply are very much tied in to cheap energy -- so moving a substantial part of our agricultural production into what I beleive is more expensive energy will have an effect on other countries we provide aid to in a myriad of ways. Castro particular experience in this topic because Cuba had a 'peak oil' effect forced upon them during the 1990's due to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the trade embargoes placed upon them by the U.S. Because of containerization, the global food supply is very much dependent upon cheap energy. If fuels disappear, we won't get fruit shipped to us from South America in the winter, coffee from Indonesia, nor will our oranges in Florida get shipped to other places, and so on.
Moving into biofuels is somewhat positive, but I don't think it will solve our energy problem. The energy and auto industry lobbyists are very powerful. Changing technologies is very expensive. I don't think Bush will be remembered as a visionary. To me Bush's policies are very short sighted and benefit the bank accounts of his business cronies. Most informed people know that Washington is pretty much a revolving door between government and the corporate world, through which powerful people move from position to position, amassing more and more power and wealth. The biofuel talk is just window dressing to appear to be concerned about it. But his real policies are much more short sighted: secure the pathways for oil to reach the U.S -- i.e. the Persian Gulf. Find more oil. Cuba (and North Korea) had to address the absence of oil and imported food and came up with sustainable agricultural solutions to feed people. Go to the Nation site (www.nation.com) and search for 'peak oil cuba'. So Castro has some authority on this topic. I'm not quite sure of the year but not long ago automakers ran a program in California testing about 800 electric cars. It was very popular, people loved the cars, yet they were recalled and destroyed (crushed) for some reason. I think fully electric cars is the answer. There's no reason why with our technological expertise and adequate financial backing we couldn't develop much more efficient solar technology.
Thanks,
Railer
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