So Much For "Ethanol Diplomacy"

Posted by BoRev, BoRev at 5:32 AM on May 1, 2008.

Feel that rumbling in your tummy? That’s because the world is OUT OF FOOD. Thanks to greedy Iowa farmers and some deal between Bush and Brazil, Americans have been putting the last of Earth’s ingestible resources into our gas tanks instead of our mouths and yet we’ve all still managed to invade Iraq for oil and become morbidly obese. Anyway now we’re out of corn and everyone is dying and it’s all the press can talk about.

Obviously experts had seen this global food crisis coming for years now, so we’d been warned, right? Here’s what “Perfect Latin American Idiot” Alvaro Vargas Llosa wrote in the Washington Post last spring:

“Incidentally, ethanol is making Chavez and Castro nervous. One proof is the hysterical article Castro wrote for Granma, Cuba's official newspaper, lashing at those who want ‘to convert food into combustibles’ and accusing them of wanting to condemn to ‘premature death and thirst more than 3 billion people of the world.’”

Ha ha, oops! We’ve got a treasury of embarrassingly so-last-year ethanol predictions, after the jump.

Investor’s Business Daily:

“Could lowly switch grass mow down the petropower tyranny of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez? A U.S.-Brazil ethanol pact signed this week may supply the fuel to do just that.”

Huffington Post:

“Almost immediately Fidel Castro weighed in from his sickbed writing an article for the Communist Party newspaper 'Gramma', that food stocks for millions of people would be threatened, "...you will see how many people among the hungry masses will no longer consume corn". Forever in lockstep with his mentor, Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, the purveyor of OPEC rigged prices of oil, fleecing both the rich and poor throughout the world, echoed Castro's outrage. This, in an effort to embarrass the Brazilian American initiative and to protect his turf as the local pusher to the neighborhood oil ‘addictionados’”

National Public Radio:

DAN GRECH: The U.S. and Brazil recently formed a partnership on ethanol. The deal is modest, and it won't do much to reduce American dependence on oil. But The Miami Herald's Phil Gunson says it was enough to threaten Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

PHIL GUNSON: He was severely irritated by the Bush initiative and has been stung into responding.Chavez said recently the land should be used to feed people, not to fill "rich people's cars."

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva:

"I still don't know the technical or scientific basis of [Chavez’] criticisms [of ethanol]”

The Heritage Foundation:

“The memorandum of understanding signed in Sao Paolo may well be the first building block of a biofuels alliance that could provide an alternative to the anti-American oil-and-gas, quasi-socialist alliance that is emerging between Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, and Ecuador.”

Yeah, either that or "massive starvation." But hey at least we finally defeated socialism.

Tagged as: chavez, castro, socialism, ethanol, food