Biofuels have been receiving a lot of favorable publicity recently. You can buy biodiesel at selected gas stations, and, if you are adventurous, you can drive your diesel-powered car or motor home with discarded cooking oils from fast food restaurants. I have heard that the oil from Chinese restaurants is the most desirable.

Biofuels are being widely acclaimed as the solution to the energy crisis.

There's one catch, however. Crops grown for fuel require the same land as food crops, and given the increasing demand for fuel and current world population trends, the transformation of crop lands to fuel lands will inevitably collide with the need for food, a development which has ominous implications for the vast majority of the world's peoples who barely have enough to eat even now. The price of corn has already doubled since last year, principally due to the demand for biofuel.

There's even a bigger catch, however: It takes energy to produce biofuels. In the case of ethanol, the cost of fertilization, harvesting, fermentation and distillation require so much energy input that gasohol, for example, a popular blend of gasoline and alcohol, must be subsidized through tax breaks to make its production possible.

So how does Fidel Castro, communist dictator of Cuba, come into the picture?

Simple. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, and thus the cessation of its oil subsidies to Cuba, the latter has been forced to adapt to an energy-poor and petroleum-poor (and thus fertilizer-poor) economy that likely foreshadows our own future here in the U.S. Considering the unremitting hostility of the U.S. to the Castro regime and the resulting long-term economic sanctions imposed by the U. S. government on Cuba, the Cuban people have done admirably well under the circumstances.

Via Stan Goff's Feral Scholar, Casto, who has earned the right to comment upon such matters, has written a thoughtful paper based on the writings of Atilio Borón, a prestigious leftist intellectual who until recently headed the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), on the pitfalls of biofuels. He spares no words:

Transforming food into fuels is a monstrosity.

Capitalism is preparing to perpetrate a massive euthanasia on the poor, and particularly on the poor of the South, since it is there that the greatest reserves of the earth’s biomass required to produce biofuels are found. Regardless of numerous official statements assuring that this is not a choice between food and fuel, reality shows that this, and no other, is exactly the alternative: either the land is used to produce food or to produce biofuels.

Read the paper and the comments, many of which are very insightful. Castro may be an odious dictator, but he is no fool and he is now approaching the end of his life, a time when persons are supposed to become mellower and wiser.

We Can’t Have Our Ethanol and Eat It Too — Castro on Biofuels

Update (5/21/2007): The Wall Street Journal is running an article (subscribers only) today on the problems pig farmers are having with the rising cost of corn. Many are feeding their pigs trail mix. Even the pig farmers who grow feed corn are selling their corn to ethanol producers and using discarded trimmings from the food industry. The article points out that the 51-cent tax credit paid to producers that blend ethanol and gasoline has encouraged this trend. Like many other subsidies that indirectly benefit farmers, it seems to me that we would be better off simply paying the money to the farmers.

On the other hand, the entire corn, livestock and gasahol carnival is an economic, agricultural, environmental and public health disaster. Economic, because the market is distorted by unwise subsidies and fuel addiction on the part of the public; agricultural, because corn erodes the topsoil, especially when it is the exclusive crop; environmental because of the wastes from livestock farming and a host of other pollutants introduced into the environment, including carbon; finally, the excessive consumption of meat is a major factor in cardiovascular diseases. This is merely a sample of the hidden costs of our multiple addictions and their enabling by our industrial-financial system.

And you heard it right; any sane economic theory would consider addiction to be a form of market failure.