German online daily DIE WELT reports here on how Nestlé CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe says that the farming of biofuels dramatically exacerbates global hunger. Nestlé is the world’s largest food conglomerate. Hat-tip: oekowatch.org.
Recently a truly lame-brain study (later debunked here) was published claiming that global warming caused war. It would be advisable for the incompetent authors of that study to look at the connection between food prices and war instead.
Die Welt quotes Brabeck-Letmathe:
‘Through biofuels, we have returned hundreds of millions of people back into extreme poverty,’ he said in an interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau with regards to the hunger catastrophe in Somalia and rising food prices.
It is truly amazing that today more than one half of American corn and one fifth of the entire sugar cane harvest gets converted into biofuels while there is not enough food to feed humanity’.”
Brabeck-Letmathe says that the food shortage and spiralling prices are directly caused by the massive biofuel consumption and that the price spiral is leading to civil unrest in poor countries.
Biofuels were once enthusiastically supported by environmental groups, like Greenpeace,and were seen as a way of reducing human CO2 emissions, and thus curbing global warming. Governments worldwide are massively subsidizing the agriculture of biofuels. Farmers now prefer to grow crops for fuels rather than food for feeding the planet because it is simply more profitable.
Now hundreds of millions more people are starving needlessly.
Photo credit: Wikipedia
He is of course quite correct, however some of us have been saying this for years, I wonder if Obarmy USA and Barroso EU – the two big biofuel exponents – have read this timely statement.
It is lunacy only the EU [and US] really are capable of – the taxpayer funds farmers to grow biofuels, taking away farmland for food crops, the price on the world markets of food rises [no sh9t] and the poorest suffer the most hardship.
As the NH sinks into the darker months, some people will have to consider whether they buy bread or buy heat for their homes, this cannot be right.
Heat or food, this though is the consequence of a policy of such utter insanity only the Malthusian eco-lunatics are capable of advocating and enacting. A cold winter in Europe and the USA will bring about many more deaths, due to this extreme political idiocy.
AGW is a duplicitous human engineered fallacy but it will cause deaths, through and because of: political ideologists forcing through, the ‘green agenda’ – how’s that for the: “age of stupid!”
Madness!
We should acknowledge Herr. Brabeck-Letmathe and with gratitude, because it needs pointing out time and again.
The German media fall all over themselves: Germany has produced more eco-electricity than ever before. (Not much of a surprise as ever more wind and solar gets installed)
German article:
http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/0,1518,783173,00.html
They see it as something positive. They say the majority of the population is willing to pay the (outrageous) energy prices and agrees with the policy, according to a poll, for reasons like “Climate Protection” (as usual, the article doesn’t point out that a country the size of Germany cannot significantly influence the world’s climate even if the CO2 AGW hypothesis were true).
Well, I can’t change the fact that my fellow citizens are idiots but I can take the obvious step of not investing in energy-intensive production in Germany, which has no future.
This seems to be a new trick by the renewables lobby. Basically, every year or every half year Germany produces more energy from wind and solar than in the period before so it’s entirely un-newsworthy – yet ALL the papers bring this news as if it was a sensation. “record broken yadda yadda”.
We’re headed for serious grid breakdowns. 20% of all electricity by renewables; the grid must be close to overvoltage shutdown due to spikes nearly all of the time now.
Deutsche Welle has an especially juicy bit of propaganda against traditional electricity providers. I am surprised; i expect writeups like these from the far-left taz. One can only call it anti-capitalist, anti-industry.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15345728,00.html
Perhaps an interesting report:
http://heartland.org/press-releases/2011/08/29/new-report-global-warming-contradicts-uns-ipcc
As I have said before:
Bio fuel production and the Quantitive Easing policies of the USA radically reducing the dollar value = severely reducing buying power for many countries who depend on oil and food imports.
These policies have caused a sharp increase in the price of food, fossil fuels and any other commodity.
For us at this moment in time a nuisance but for millions living from less than 2 US dollar a day it means the difference between life and death.