[Marxism] The internationalization of genocide-- Fidel

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The internationalization of genocide

Fidel Castro
April 4, 2007

THE Camp David meeting has just ended. We all listened with interest to
the press conference by the presidents of the United States and Brazil, as
well as news about the meeting and opinions stated.

Confronted by the demands of his Brazilian visitor regarding import
tariffs and subsidies that protect and support U.S. ethanol production,
Bush did not make the slightest concession in Camp David.

President Lula attributed to this higher corn prices which, according to
him, had gone up by more than 85 percent.

Previously, The Washington Post newspaper published an article by Brazil?s
top leader discussing the idea of converting food into fuel.

It is not my intention to hurt Brazil, or to meddle in the internal
politics of that great country. It was precisely in Rio de Janeiro, where
the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development was held
exactly 15 years ago, where I vehemently condemned, in a 7-minute speech,
the environmental dangers threatening the existence of our species.

At that meeting, Bush Sr. was present as president of the United States,
and in a gesture of courtesy he applauded my words, just like all the
other presidents.

Nobody at Camp David responded to the main question. Where and who is
going to supply the more than 500 million tons of corn and other cereals
that the United States, Europe and the rich countries need to produce the
volume of gallons of ethanol that the big U.S. companies and those of
other countries are demanding as compensation for their sizeable
investments? Where are who is going to produce the soy beans, the
sunflower and colza seeds, whose essential oils are going to be converted
by those same rich countries into fuel?

A number of countries produce and export their surplus food. The balance
between exporters and consumers was already tense, making the prices of
those foodstuffs shoot up. In the interest of brevity, I have no other
alternative but to confine myself to pointing out the following:

The five top producers of the corn, barley, sorghum, rye, millet and oats
that Bush wants to turn into raw materials for producing ethanol supply
679 million tons to the world market, according to recent data. In their
turn, the five top consumers, some of which are also producers of these
grains, currently need 604 million tons annually. The available surplus
comes down to less than 80 million tons.

This colossal waste of cereals for producing fuel, without including
oleaginous seeds, would serve only to save the rich countries less than 15
percent of what is annually consumed by their voracious automobiles.

In Camp David, Bush has stated his intention of applying this formula on a
world scale, which means nothing else than the internationalization of
genocide.

The president of Brazil, in his message published in The Washington Post,
right before the Camp David meeting, affirmed that less than one percent
of Brazil?s arable land is dedicated to sugar cane for producing ethanol.
That surface area is almost triple the size of that used in Cuba when
almost 10 million tons of sugar were being produced, before the crisis of
the USSR and climate change.

Our country has been producing and exporting sugar for a longer time,
first based on the labor of slaves, who eventually totaled more than
300,000 in the early years of the 19th century and made the Spanish colony
into the top exporter in the world. Almost 100 years later, in the early
20th century, in the pseudo-Republic, whose full independence was thwarted
by U.S. intervention, only West Indian immigrants and illiterate Cubans
carried the burden of the sugar cane cultivation and cutting. The tragedy
of our people was the so-called dead time, due to the cyclical nature of
this crop. The cane fields were the property of U.S. companies or large
Cuban landowners. We have accumulated, therefore, more experience than
anyone else on the social effects of that crop.

Last Sunday, April 1, CNN was reporting the opinion of Brazilian experts,
who affirmed that much of the land dedicated to sugarcane cultivation has
been purchased by rich individuals from the United States and Europe.

In my reflections published on March 29, I explained the effects of
climate change in Cuba, compounded by other traditional characteristics of
our climate.

On our island, poor and distant from consumerism, there would not even be
sufficient personnel to withstand the harsh rigors of the crop and
attention to the cane fields in the midst of the heat, rain or growing
droughts. When hurricanes hit, not even the most perfect machines can
harvest the tumbled, twisted sugar cane. For centuries, the custom was not
to burn it, nor was the soil compacted under the weight of complex
machinery and enormous trucks; nitrogenous, potassic and phosphoric
fertilizers, now so expensive, did not even exist, and the dry and wet
months alternated regularly. In modern agriculture, no high yields are
possible without crop rotation.

On Sunday, April 1, the Agence France-Presse news agency published
worrying news on climate change, which experts brought together by the
United Nations believe to be something that is now inevitable, and with
serious consequences in the coming decades.

Climate change will affect the American continent significantly, by
generating more violent storms and heat waves, which in Latin America will
cause droughts, with the extinction of species and even hunger, according
to a UN report to be released next week in Brussels, the AFP reported.

At the end of this century, every hemisphere will suffer from water
problems, and if governments do not take steps, higher temperatures could
increase the risk of ?mortality, pollution, natural disasters and
infectious diseases,? warns the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), according to the article.

In Latin America, global warming is already melting the Andes icecaps and
threatening the forests of the Amazons, which could become grassland, the
article says.

Because of the large numbers of people living near coasts, the United
States is also exposed to extreme natural phenomena, as was demonstrated
by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the AFP notes.

This is the second in a series of three IPCC reports, which began in
February with an initial scientific diagnosis establishing the certainty
of climate change, the article continues.

This second, 1,400-page report, which analyzes the changes by industry and
region, and a copy of which was obtained by the AFP, states that even if
radical measures are taken to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the
atmosphere, higher temperatures throughout the planet in the coming
decades is now a certain fact, the AFP reported.

As could be expected, Dan Fisk, National Security advisor for the region,
stated on the same day in the Camp David meeting that in the discussion on
regional matters, the Cuba issue would be one of them, and not exactly to
address the subject of ethanol ? about which the convalescing President
Fidel Castro wrote an article on Thursday ? but instead about the hunger
he has created among the Cuban people.

Given the necessity of responding to this gentleman, I feel obliged to
remind him that the infant mortality rate in Cuba is lower than that of
the United States. He can rest assured that not a single citizen lacks
free medical care. Everybody is studying, and nobody lacks the possibility
of useful work, despite almost half a century of economic blockade and the
attempt by U.S. governments to bring the Cuban people to its knees through
hunger and economic asphyxiation.

China would never use even one ton of cereal or legumes to produce
ethanol. This is a nation with a prospering economy that has beaten growth
records, in which all its citizens receive the income necessary for
essential consumer goods, despite the fact that 48% of its population, in
excess of 1.3 billion inhabitants, work in the agricultural sector. On the
contrary, it has been proposed to save considerable energy by eliminating
thousands of factories that consume unacceptable levels of energy and
hydrocarbons. Many of the foodstuffs mentioned are imported by China from
all corners of the world after being transported thousands of kilometers.

Scores of countries do not produce hydrocarbons and cannot cultivate corn
and other grains, or produce oleaginous seeds, because they do not have
enough water even to meet their most elemental needs.

In a meeting convened in Buenos Aires by the Oil Industry Chamber and the
Exporters Center on the production of ethanol, Dutchman Loek Boonekamp,
director of Markets and Agricultural Trade for the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development, informed the press:

?Governments got very enthusiastic; but they should take a good look as to
whether there should be such robust support for ethanol.

?Ethanol production is only viable in the United States; not in any other
country, except when subsidies are applied.

?This is not manna from heaven and we don?t have to blindly commit
ourselves,? the cable continues.

?These days, developed countries are pushing for fossil fuels to be mixed
with bio-fuels at close to 5% and that is already putting pressure on
agricultural prices. If that mixture is raised to 10%, it would need 30%
of the sown surface of the United States and 50% of Europe?s. That is why
I am asking if this is sustainable. An increase in the demand for crops
for ethanol would produce higher and more unstable prices.?

Protectionist measures have risen today to 54 cents per gallon and real
subsidies are much higher.

By applying the simple math that we learn in high school, as I stated in
my previous reflections, it can be confirmed that the simple replacement
of incandescent light bulbs by fluorescent ones would contribute a saving
of investment and energy recourses equivalent to trillions of dollars
without using a single hectare of agricultural land.

Meanwhile, news coming from Washington is affirmed textually by the AP:

?The mysterious disappearance of millions of bees across the whole of the
United States has beekeepers on the verge of a nervous breakdown and is
even worrying Congress, which this Thursday is to debate the critical
situation of a key insect for the agricultural sector.

?The first serious signs of this enigma emerged shortly after Christmas in
the state of Florida, when beekeepers discovered that the bees had
vanished.

?Since then, the syndrome that experts have christened Colony Collapse
Disorder (CCD) has reduced the country?s swarms by 25%.

??We have lost more than half a million colonies, with a population of
around 50,000 bees each,? said Daniel Weaver, president of the American
Beekeeping Federation, noting that the disease is affecting 30 of the
country?s 50 states. The curious part of the phenomenon is that in many
cases no mortal remains have been found.

?The hardworking insects pollinate crops valued at $12-14 billion,
according to a study from Cornell University.

?Scientists are considering all sorts of hypotheses, including one that a
certain pesticide has provoked neurological damage in the bees and altered
their sense of direction. Others blame the drought, and even cell-phone
waves, but what is certain is that nobody knows for sure what the real
trigger is.?

The worst could be still to come: a new war to ensure supplies of gas and
oil, which would place the human species on the brink of a total
holocaust.

There are Russian news agencies that, citing intelligence sources, have
reported that the war on Iran has been prepared in all its details for
more than three years, from the day that the United States decided to
totally occupy Iraq, thus unleashing an interminable and odious civil war.

Meanwhile, the United States government is directing hundreds of billions
to the development of highly sophisticated technological weapons, such as
those utilizing microelectronic systems, or new nuclear weapons that could
be over their targets one hour after receiving the order.

The United States is totally ignoring the fact that world opinion is
against any type of nuclear weapons.

Demolishing every single Iranian factory is a relatively easy technical
task for a power like that of the United States. The difficult part could
come afterwards, if another war is launched against another Muslim belief,
which merits all our respect, as well as the other religions of the
peoples of the Near, Middle and Far East, before or after Christianity.

The arrest of British troops in Iran?s jurisdictional waters would seem to
be a provocation exactly like that of the so-called Brothers to the Rescue
when, in violation of President Clinton?s orders, they advanced over
waters in our jurisdiction, and the defensive action of Cuba, absolutely
legitimate, served as a pretext for the government of the United States to
promulgate the infamous Helms-Burton Act, which violates the sovereignty
of other countries. The powerful mass media have buried that episode in
oblivion. More than a few people are attributing the price of oil,
reaching close to $70 per barrel on Monday, to fears of an attack on Iran.

Where are the poor nations of the Third World going to find the minimal
resources for survival?

I am not exaggerating or using untempered words; I am going by facts.

As can be seen, the polyhedron has many dark sides.

April 3, 2007

Fidel Castro Ruz

Translated by Granma International




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