Saturday, January 19, 2013

Colombian guerrilla denounces the use of land for biofuels while the people suffers malnutrition

The Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC), which are now in negotiations with the government at Havana, have denounced the use of huge swathes of land in the South American country for the production of biofuels such as ethanol derived from sugar beet and sugar cane. 

Guerrilla speaker Andrés París (pictured) read a communication at the Palace of Congress of Havana, where negotiations go at slow pace, saying that:

It is inconsistent with the social problems that the country suffers (...) Now it seems that agricultural produce is not to solve the problems of famine and malnutrition but that agricultural industry thinks it is to generate ethanol to feed cars and airplanes.

12% of Colombians suffer malnutrition and five thousand children die yearly of hunger in this country. The FARC denounce that, instead of feeding them, the capitalist regime of the country uses the land of all for private business often foreign multinationals who care not for the well being of the people, such as Cargill, which has designed a project to use 90,000 Ha to grow corn for biofuels, in spite of the acknowledgment by Bogota recently that further legal constraints on multinationals are needed. 

The issue of land, wildly appropriated by the mafioso gangsters who control the death squads, is central to the ongoing negotiations of Havana. Another hot issue is the demand by the FARC, the most veteran American guerrilla, to elect a Constituent Assembly, something that President Santos opposes. 

Last week the FARC presented a plan for land reform in Colombia from what they describe as a socio-environmental, democratic and participative angle. The Conservative government in turn offered a "new" plan respecting private property (i.e. the robbery of what belongs to all).

While biofuels are technically renewable energy sources, they are not at all sustainable.

Source: LINyM[es].

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