So Much For "Ethanol Diplomacy"

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.’”

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.”

“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’”