Food or Fuel?
In Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, women farmers make a subsistence living by growing food in the fields. This is pretty consistent with the way humans beings have survived for countless millennia.
Unfortunately, these women do not own the fields but have been allowed to work on them by the people that do. Now the women are being turned off the lands because there is a lot of money to be made in cash crops – for biofuels.
This is patently wrong from a humanitarian point of view. But you can’t really blame the guys who own the fields from doing it. There is so much money to be had from biofuels right now.
What is it with human beings? Where there is quick money to be made, we lose all our concerns about living in peace alongside our fellows in a rush to make a profit. I know this does not apply to everyone living on the planet but is seems to infect a goodly proportion of us.
Food, clothing, fuel. All basic human needs and, surely, all basic human rights. Yet in all these fields we a guilty of exploitation. If our lifestyle means that our neighbour, who is prepared to work in the fields to stay alive, is denied these rights, the system should raise alarm bells. Instead, it raises a few bank balances.
——————–
On the subject of fuel, with Shell and BP dropping out of the renewables market whilst reporting record profit, its is interesting to note that they intend using their winnings to extract even more oil from the hither to difficult (and therefore too costly) sources. Presumably, part of this will have to be spent on a new advertising spin.
But then I read in the Guardian that the Rockefella’s give Exxon a ticking off :
“There are an awful lot of people who are getting increasingly annoyed with Exxon,” said economist Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, a great-granddaughter of the company’s founder, calling for Exxon’s chief executive Rex Tillerson to hand the role of chairman to an outsider. She spoke of “serious disjunctures” between Exxon’s short-term actions and “the long-term health both of this company and of the world’s economy”.
Good on her, I say.