Lula urges everyone to plant little "oil plants" to produce energy

Buoyed by the high price of oil, Brazilian President Ignacio Lula da Silva is trumpeting biofuels as an alternative. And now he says they could be a boon for the poor. And Lula, as quoted by Al Jazeera, seems to be taking a page out of Mao's little red book:

[E]veryone has the technology and the knowledge to dig a little hole of 30 centimeters to plant an oil plant that could produce energy, the energy they couldn't produce in the 20th century.

It's a sentiment that recalls one of Mao's famous exhortations during the Great Leap Forward—that every Chinese should smelt steel in his or her backyard. Lula's economics is not quite as bad as Mao's, but he's still full of it. Lula was responding to a recent report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation, who are decidedly less enthusiastic. The rise of biofuels, the report makes clear, is no panacea for poverty.

In fact, Oil-exporting countries, net food importers, and the urban poor are all in for a rough ride thanks to biofuels. As gasoline starts to become so expensive that the world turns en masse to alternative fuels, oil-exporting countries in the Middle East will see their main source of revenue dry up. And since many types of biofuel are made from feedstock, the rising prices of crops such as corn will increase the cost of raising livestock and, ultimately, the price of food. Indeed, this is already happening, and it's bad news for the poor, who spend a significant chunk of their meager incomes on food. (It's also bad news for beer drinkers.)

So while Brazil's sugar producers may be cashing in on the ethanol boom, the hundreds of thousands of Brazilian favelados aren't exactly eager to ride the biofuel wave. After all, many of these people don't have yards in which to grow little "oil plants" ... nor running water, for that matter.