Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | N | NotiCen: Central American & Caribbean Affairs

EL SALVADOR A MICROCOSM OF THE BIOFUELS MACROCOSM.

Article Excerpt
Having proved itself a worthy ally in the Iraq war by steadfastly continuing to send its troops into that inferno, El Salvador has earned a place on a new front in US global policy, the ethanol wars. US President George W. Bush has chosen El Salvador as the site of a feasibility study for producing the fuel. The plan calls for a biofuels plant to be built in the country, even though El Salvador is already producing and exporting ethanol to the US under the provisions of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). The recently ignited conflagrations pit biofuel producers like the US and Brazil against fossil-fuel producers like Venezuela and Cuba (see NotiCen, 2007-04-07).

The stakes are not so much energy consumption as they are influence in the hemisphere. Biofuel advocates cite cost and cleanliness as rationale for touting the burgeoning industry, even though current research leaves both those claims in doubt. Fossil-fuel advocates claim greater thermal and economic efficiency and play the environmental card differently. Increasing cultivation of biofuel crops is no less devastating than is oil drilling, they say, and burning ethanol pollutes the atmosphere and warms the planet even more than do the petroleum derivatives (see NotiSur, 2007-04-27).

In El Salvador, the global argument is reduced to fit the size of Central America's smallest country. Representing the anti-ethanol side, Bishop Medardo Gomez of the Salvadoran Lutheran Synod says, "Since corn and sugarcane are the raw materials for producing ethanol for fuel...