TODAY, more than a third of corn production in the US goes to biofuel production for energy and transportation. The US aims to boost production to 35 billion gallons by 2020. The Americans claim that biofuel reduces greenhouse gas emissions, thus combating global warming, of which carbon dioxide is the primary cause. However, to produce 35 billion gallons of biofuel requires the US's entire annual production of corn and soybeans. As for the European Union, it will take dedicating 70 percent of their arable lands for crops that go into making biofuel. So how can the Western world possible balance the runaway demand for these crops with the population's food needs and limited land? Easy! All they have to do is pressure southern countries – especially the poorer ones – to supply the West with its needs of biofuel crops. The crazy deforestation we see in Malaysia and Indonesia today to cultivate palm oil is little more than submission to the masters of the globe. It's just amazing how millions of impoverished people in the third world have to die for the sake of protecting the climate for the convenience and luxury of the white man. The Americans who only recently argued zealously that global warming is part of a normal universal climate cycle, and that greenhouse gases have nothing to do with it, are the same Americans who are now investing billions in the production of biofuel under the pretext of environment protection and fighting global warming. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose country is the world's largest biofuel producer, accused third world countries of being the primary culprit in today's global food crisis. She blamed India for what she claimed were more Indians who changed their eating habits by taking two meals a day instead of one, thus posing a threat to the world's food security. She also blamed China for rising numbers of babies who need milk - while ultra-rich Germans swim in bathtubs of milk to keep their skin all nice and smooth. Are they blind, just plain audacious, or are they just ignoring the facts? The average European consumes many times as much food as the average Asian or African. An average American consumes as much as 10 times the meat as the average Asian, which amounts to twice his weight annually. On average, American individuals use up to 100 times as much energy as Africans According to World Watch, an independent research organization, raising cattle for meat consumption uses up some 35 percent of the world's cereal production. If we were to cut our meat consumption by as little as 10 percent, then 200 million more people around the world would have access to much-needed grain. The World Bank had warned that at least 33 countries are at risk of political turmoil and mass chaos because of the dramatic rise in the prices of basic food items that depend on agriculture. What's happening in Egypt today – the so-called Loaf Crisis – is evidence of these risks. Save the Children, an independent organization, estimates that 200 million more hungry children will be added to the already hungry 800 million all over the world. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) assures that the biofuel industry is one of the prime movers that drive up the prices of food globally. The West knows full well that what it is doing is detrimental to the environment and harmful to humans. However, it has its own agenda that completely disregards the safety of others. Some might argue that the West's unethical and immoral attitudes towards others are perfectly normal, saying that there's nothing wrong with their pursuit to provide the highest possible security and wellbeing for its citizens and to secure their ever-increasing needs. They might say that the blame should be put on the lazy, backward retards that bogged down their countries instead of developing them. We might be forced to agree, but we always know that these arguments have no ethical or moral basis. They always brag about their support for human rights and protecting the environment, but at the end, they all kneel to their ultimate god: money. In the US, which vehemently rejected the Kyoto protocol that called for fighting global warming and reducing the dependency on fossil fuels like petroleum and coal for energy and industry, there exist the world's largest carbon-trading and carbon dioxide quota companies. The US opposed the protocol, claiming that CO2 has nothing to do with global warming. But today, as economic calculations change, the US trades in biofuel – ostensibly to reduce CO2 emissions, and brag about its role in saving the planet from global warming. And it's OK to make a few bucks or euros on the side. This is a strange about-face that imparts rock-bottom ethics. Adding insult to injury, industrialized countries demand southern countries to make sacrifices and contribute in solving the food crisis and global warming – the very crisis the West created and manufactured in their own factories, nuclear reactors and lands. The Indians should suffice with one meal a day, and the Chinese should leave the milk to blue-blooded white children. The Malays and Indonesians should chop down their forests and plant crops to produce biofuel for Western factories, all the while puncturing the world's breathing lung. They don't care who else dies of hunger or suffocation as long as the smog from forest fires doesn't get to them. They want to squeeze us and tame our behavior so that we become sheep in the flock, eating what they throw to us and submitting to what they decide. They decided to sacrifice the third world at the altar of their own luxury and excessive way of life. – Alwatan __
