Venezuela announces massive drive to convert food into fuel, reversing Chavez policy

In Venezuela, the state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela announced that it will commence making sugarcane and cassava into ethanol, reversing the previous Chavez government policy opposing the conversion of staple foodstocks into ethanol.

Petroleos said it will construct four plants and will commence production in the first quarter of 2010. Total capacity was not announced, but one of the plants was reported to have a capacity of 92 Mgy. President Chavez recently introduced an E7 national ethanol target, and said at the time that his government is no longer opposed to the use of ethanol, but opposes the use of foodstocks for ethanol production.

The President said Chavez said that for each acre planted to grow sugarcane for biofuels, his government would plant two acres for food production. This would require 36 million acres of land to be converted to food production, based on 780,000 barrels a day of oil consumption for Venezuela as reported in the New York Times. This is equivalent to an area the size of the state of Iowa.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Venezuela’s and Cuba’s opposition to food-based biofuels is based in their policy of opposing the US. Castro was quoted in Znet’s “Maize of deception: How corn-based ethanol can lead to starvation and environmental disaster“, stating that “using corn, or any other food source, could result in the premature death of upwards of three billion people.”

When Castro struck out against biofuels, it was not only in articles in party-controlled newspapers on the island of Cuba. Cuba, Bolivia and Venezuela supported a draft report to the UN General Assembly calling for a five-year moratorium on ethanol production produced from sugar cane. The author of the report, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, said that “transformation of agricultural land for the production of bio-fuels in America” is a “huge problem. This had resulted in the rise of the price of corn, especially in Mexico. This would lead to massive hunger in the world.”

Ziegler spoke also about the situation in Brazil, stating that “the scale of sugar cane plantations was spreading to the detriment of domestic agriculture in Brazil. The landless peasants in Brazil had campaigned against bio-fuels – all 6 million of them.”

Castro received strong initial support from close ally Hugo Chavez of Venezuela as well as continuing support from Bolivia, but Chavez subsequently introduced an E7 national ethanol target. Chavez said that his government is no longer opposed to the use of ethanol or the use of foodstocks to produce it, but opposes the use of corn for ethanol production.

Chavez said that for each acre planted to grow sugarcane for biofuels, his government would plant two acres for food production, which would require 36 million acres of land to be converted to food production, based on 780,000 barrels a day of oil consumption as reported in the New York Times. This is equivalent to an area the size of the state of Iowa.

Ironically, Castro’s Marxist formulation of a zero-sum struggle between the forces of “food” and “fuel” has found a welcoming home in US-based NGOs and media outlets. Even more ironic that it is the conservative forces supporting conventional oil & gas interests who have most enthusiastically adopted the Marxist outlook, not excluding usually reliable anti-communist media such as the Wall Street Journal.

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