Blazing Brazilian biofuel beatdown
The Food and Agriculture Organization will have a new director-general, José Graziano da Silva. Among Graziano’s accomplishments is the Zero Hunger programme, which has been partly responsible for getting 40 million people out of hunger. But you don’t get to run an international organisation without the support of your home country, and you don’t get that support in Brazil without deep debts to agribusiness. At his first press conference, Graziano started to pay them off, announcing that biofuels should not be “demonised” for their role in driving up food prices. That this contradicts the latest evidence is only surprising for as long as it takes to remember quite how big Brazil’s biofuel industry is.
June 30, 2011