Page 1 of
2 THE ROVING
EYE What drives biofuel
Bush? By Pepe Escobar
SAO PAULO - It was sweet - literally:
Brazilian President Lula da Silva, the former
metalworker, posing as a world leader in front of
the powerful Sao Paulo industrial/agribusiness
bourgeoisie - delighted that they may soon become
the new sheikhs of a Green Saudi Arabia - as he
struck a biofuel agreement with US President
George "Social Justice" Bush, conveniently
reconverted for his Latin American trip into
compassionate crusader for trabajadores y
campesinos.
If Bush's dream of a Free
Trade Area of the Americas was
bombed in Mar del Plata,
Argentina, in December 2005 - by a Mercosur
alliance of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Argentina's
Nestor Kirchner and Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da
Silva - at least now he can also bask in the glory
of having found the new Green Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile, there are no illusions for the White
House that the US-Brazilian biofuel agreement -
cementing what Lula dubbed Brazil's "energy
revolution" - may be the perfect shortcut for
turbocharging, again, the drive for hemispheric
free trade.
Brazil and the US will be
partners in an international biofuels forum that
will set standards for global trading of ethanol
as a commodity and technology transfer (basically
by Brazil) to third countries. It's a sweet match.
Brazil has the technology - the fruit of an
ethanol program launched during the military
dictatorship in the 1970s - but lacks capital. The
US has the capital plus enormous strategic
interest. Thus the Brazilian desire to become a
global exporter of biofuel technology matches US
financing of ethanol-producing factories in South
America, Central America, the Caribbean and
Africa.
It will be a long and winding
road. Brazil produces 17.5 billion liters of
ethanol a year. It plans to step up to 30 billion
liters by 2012. But the US will need 132 billion
liters a year to reach the goal of 20% reduction
in its consumption of gasoline. For the moment,
90% of Brazil's ethanol is for the internal
market. And the hefty, protectionist 54-US-cent
tariff on every gallon (3.785 liters) of Brazilian
ethanol imported to the US won't be renegotiated
before 2009.
As far as Democratic
presidential hopeful Barack Obama - from Illinois,
a corn-producing state - is concerned, the tax
stays, indefinitely. Congress and corn producers
say the US needs the tariff because Brazil has an
"unfair" advantage of 30 years of
ethanol-technology development. If Brazil were
part of the "axis of evil", one would expect a
preemptive US strike to "liberate" Brazilian
sugarcane fields.
It's tariffs like these
that block any progress in the Doha Round of the
World Trade Organization - as the US and the
European Union refuse to stop subsidizing their
farmers while cynically exhorting the virtues of
"free" trade.
The family
diversifies What's with Biofuel Bush? The
(dirty) secret of the new ethanol craze is that it
is, once again, a Bush family business. Brother
Jeb is one of the three chairmen of the
Miami-based Inter-American Ethanol Commission (set
up in December) along with a former agriculture
minister in the previous Lula administration,
agribusiness tycoon Roberto Rodrigues, and
Colombian Luis Alberto Moreno, president of the
Inter-American Development Bank.
Rodrigues
spent Bush's visit to Sao Paulo perfecting his
bombastic pitch all over Brazilian corporate media
- stressing that "what we are doing here is
launching a new civilization" based on biofuels.
Jeb's pitch is way more pragmatic. In essence it
involves, in the medium term, importing less oil
from Chavez (12% of daily US needs) and more
biofuel from friendly and/or pliable Brazil,
Colombia, Central America and the Caribbean.
What this will mean in practice is
hardcore US neo-colonization of Central America
and the Caribbean - as vast sugarcane plantations
- to feed US demand. The construction of an
ethanol factory in Haiti - the poorest country in
Latin America - has already been broached in the
Bush-Lula discussions. Brazil leads the UN
peacekeeping force in Haiti. The Haiti factory
would be a
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
