From the prognoses that indicate the aim of the oil production at international level - in next the 15 to 20 years, the Bush administration sets out to expand the biocombustibles significantly to reduce its dependency of foreign petroleum, considering that the United States concerns the 61 percent of the crude one which it consumes, to a cost of 75 trillions of annual dollars.
At the moment, the agricultural earth area in the Union is of about 625 thousand square acres, reason why to reach the demand of oil after biocombustibles would require 1.4 million square miles of maize for ethanol and about 8.8 million square kilometers of soybean for biodiesel.
The soybean, at the present time is the main power culture for the production of biodiésel in that country. Nevertheless, near a 1.5 percent of the harvest it produces only 68 million gallons of biodiésel, equivalent to less of the one percent of the gasoline consumption in all U.S.A. According to specialists, if the totality of that harvest were destined to the production of biodiésel, single would reach to cover a six percent with the national demand.
The United States never would be able then to produce biomass sufficient to satisfy their appetite with energy. However, cultures with power aims are seeded to the south of the Latin American continent. Great cane plantations of sugar, African palm and soybean are supplanting extensive areas of food cultures, of forests, pastizales, Pampas… in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador and Paraguay. The culture of the soybean has caused, to date, the deforestation of 21 million hectares of forests in Brazil, of 14 million hectares dedicated to food for the cattle in Argentina and of two million in Paraguay. In answer to the pressure of the global market, next it is expected, single in Brazilian ground, the additional deforestation of 60 million hectares. From 1995 the total of earth destined to the production of soybean in Brazil was increased in a 3.2 annual percent (320 thousand hectares per year); today the soybean - together to the sugar cane they occupy a 21 percent of the total of cultivateable area in that country.
In Paraguay, this product occupies more of the 25 percent of all agricultural Earth, simultaneously that the extensive deforestation has accompanied this expansion. For example, good part of the Paraguayan Atlantic forest has been deforested, partly, for its culture.
Also, great indices of erosion accompany their production, specially in areas where long cycles of rotation of cultures are not implemented. Esteem that in Brazil and Argentina the averages of loss of ground are between the 19 and 30 tons by hectare. In that second South American nation the intensive culture of soybean is causing a massive exhaustion of the nutrients of the ground simultaneously that - in agreement to experts, the continued production of this product has brought with himself the loss of a million metric tons of nitrogen and 227 thousand tons metric of phosphorus at national level. Numbers that speak in case single about which a new destiny, but echo-genocida, considers for great population groups of our continent. To decide if to inject food in the fuel tanks of 800 million American automobiles, or to make it more accessible to the stomachs of, practically, more than three billion human beings of the orb, is a insoslayable problem that many governments are not analyzing seriously and .reason.
COURTESY PATRIALIBRE.ORG
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