Why well-fed eurocrats love starving Africans

The biggest story this week didn’t get too much media coverage. It was the failure of the US corn crop. This year exports of US corn will be down by about 70%. This is a catastrophe for hundreds of millions in Third World countries as the corn crop failure and speculation by banks and hedge funds will push food prices up by at least 20%� to 30%.

This needn’t have been so catastrophic if it hadn’t been for the bungling, self-righteous, self-serving ‘save us from global warming’ brigade. Believing that changes in the climate are man-made rather than actually being mainly due to solar activity, these fools have pressured the EU into setting mandatory�targets for how much of our fuel�must be biofuel.�This has had 3 effects – the diversion of about a third of agricultural land from food production to biofuels: massive deforestation to meet the biofuel demand: and pushing food prices up leading to mass starvation in poorer countries. The UN’s special rapporteur for food called the EU’s biofuel policy ‘a crime against humanity’. Moreover, repeated studies have shown that production of the fertilizer to grow crops for biofuels releases 270 times more CO2 than would be released by using normal petrol instead of biofuels.

As hundreds of thousands in the world’s poorest countries starve over the next 12 months, you might think the well-fed eurocrats dining out at our expense in Brussels’ finest restaurants might rethink their misguided biofuels policies. But they won’t because bureaucrats can never admit they made a mistake. As for eurocrats, why should they care about mass starvation? They have huge salaries, an easy lifestyle, massive pensions. They’ve got their snouts deep in the trough of our money, so they’re alright Jack.