President Chavez Announces “Socialist Cities” and Constitutional Reforms

Chris Carlson, July 23, 2007, Venezuelanalysis.com

[Note: When i was in Venezuela last year during the Presidential elections, David Valasquez, Minister for Popular Power, showed us the plans to reverse migration to the cities. This is more than just simply about fixing the housing crises, it is about the construction of socialist communities outside of the urban centres to encourage migration away from the cities (90% of Venezuelans live in the cities) and turning the focus to areas long neglected by previous governments (like the Amazons).]

Mérida, July 23, 2007 (venezuelanalysis.com)— President Hugo Chavez made several new announcements during the inauguration of the first "socialist city" near Caracas during his Sunday TV program Aló Presidente, including a proposed constitutional reform that would allow for indefinite reelection of the president, as well as the regulation of the high salaries of some state employees.

"We are fighting against capitalist ideology with the liberating ideology of Bolivarian socialism," declared Chavez on national television. Accused of imposing his ideology on the military and schools, Chavez responded saying that "without a doubt" his government is fighting the "perverse capitalist ideology" that has been imposed on the nation.

"We are fighting against the imperialist ideology that they have sold to us, to our military, and that they bombed us with for 100 years, to make us think like the gringos, and to admire the gringos," said Chavez.

The declarations were made as Chavez inaugurated the construction of a so-called "socialist city" in Camino de Los Indios, just north of the capital city. These new socialist cities will be a part of what the Chavez government has called "The New Geometry of Power," which is one of the 5 "motors" of the revolution in his second full presidential term. According to Chavez, the "socialist cities" will be made up of small productive communes designed around family life, and not "at the service of capitalism," he said.

"The socialist cites are ecological cities for the family, for the people, not for machines nor for consumerism," he explained from the construction site where 800 of an eventual 4,280 apartments will be built.

The construction of these new cities forms a part of a new mission known as the Mission Villanueva, dedicated to attacking the housing crisis in Venezuela. The communities will be made up with people from the poor sectors that lack adequate housing. Whole communities will be moved from the slums into new communities made up of 4 to 5 story apartment buildings. According to reports, these "socialist cities" will be environmentally friendly, using sunlight for illumination of the buildings to save electricity.

Other "socialist cities" are also being built in the state of Miranda, and in the state of Zulia. Communities will have cultural centers, medical centers, and universities among other social structures. According to the president, the objective of these communities is to offer ecological housing that emphasizes human and social value.

"It's not like we are going to give this to some private companies so that they can make apartments and tiny streets that don't even allow any green space, as if it were a place for machines to live," said Chavez.

Chavez approved Bs. 420.7 billion (US$ 195.7 million) for the housing sector, which will go towards housing subsidies and the construction of new housing in the "socialist cities."

Constitutional Reform

President Chavez also spoke about his proposal for a constitutional reform that would allow for an unlimited number of reelections of the president, among other things. Chavez said he would be presenting his proposal to the National Assembly in the next few days to be debated there and from there it must be voted on in a national referendum.

Besides removing the limits on the number of terms for the President of the Republic, Chavez said the reform would also make changes to the classic system of representative democracy, moving towards a participatory model of democracy in which people at the grassroots would play a more active role than in a traditional representative democracy.

"Now, with the constitutional reform that I hope the majority of Venezuelans will approve…one of the central ideas is my proposal to open, at the constitutional level, the roads to accelerate the transfer of power to the people," said Chavez.

In response to certain state governors who have said that the indefinite number of reelections should also apply to governors and mayors, Chavez rejected the idea. As stated last week by the president of the National Assembly, Celia Flores, Chavez affirmed that the possibility of reelection would be only for the president.

"I see in the press that the political parties Patria para Todos (PPT) and PODEMOS want reelection for the governors and mayors too," said Chavez. "No, no, no. If there is continuous reelection is has to be only for the President of the Republic."

Chavez' justification for this was that allowing for mayors or governors to be indefinitely reelected could allow for "regional caudillos" who employ "methods foreign to the project for national integration."

Also included in the reform will be the transformation of the capital city into a Federal District as it once was. This reform would do away with the mayors of the municipalities of the capital city, some of which are in the hands of the political opposition.

The president also mentioned the need to regulate the salaries of some state officials who earn what he referred to as "mega-salaries." According to Chavez, some of the higher officials in state institutions and state companies have salaries that are wasting state revenues.

"They want to make 15 or 20 million Bolivars [$7-9,000 per month]. No! Those that want that can leave," said Chavez who went on to give the example of the old president of CANTV, the national telephone company, who received a salary of about US$ 14,000 per month.

"None of us can think we are going to have that salary. We have to fight against the 'mega-salaries'," he said.

Among other statements, the president announced the beginning of the 4th phase of the national health program Barrio Adentro. According to the president, this stage will include the construction of new hospitals around the country to be finished by 2010.

All of these programs make up the socialist revolution being carried forward by President Chavez. He assured yesterday that this project is not "Marxist-Leninist," but simply "socialist, Bolivarian, and revolutionary." Although Chavez said he respects the theory of Karl Marx and his "contribution to humanity," Chavez assured that he is not a Marxist and that the situation in the times of Marx was "very different from the savage capitalism of our time."

The new United Socialist Party (PSUV) that is being debated in community assemblies around the country will be the official political party of the Bolivarian Revolution and, according to Chavez, will be the fundamental building block of the revolution. Chavez made a call to the people to participate in the formation process being carried out across the country.

"This is the onset of something where we all have to contribute with energy," he said. "I keep trying to motivate [the people] to get involved in the great political party of the 21st Century, the PSUV."

Giuliani Says His Energy Plan Would Aid Planet, Fight Terror

JOSH GERSTEIN, July 24, 2007, The New York Sun

SAN FRANCISCO — Mayor Giuliani is promising that his plan to wean America from foreign oil would aid the planet and curtail funding for terrorism, though some of his energy-related prescriptions could be a tough sell for environmentally conscious California voters.

"This is not just good for the reduction of global warming, pollution, the domestic economy, national security. It is absolutely necessary in defeating the terrorists," Mr. Giuliani told an audience of about 125 supporters gathered at a hotel here yesterday afternoon.

Ending America's dependence on energy from abroad "would be a major factor in our being able to defuse dramatically the reach and the power of Islamic terrorism," the former mayor said.

To supplant oil imports, Mr. Giuliani called for increased use of ethanol, so-called clean coal technology, nuclear, hydroelectric, solar, and wind-generated power.

While Mr. Giuliani is also touting himself as a tax and budget cutter, he said he had no compunction about implementing widespread subsidies for alternative fuels.

"The government has to organize a program like the government organized putting a man on the moon," he said. "We do it by supporting everything. … This is not just a private enterprise."

Mr. Giuliani acknowledged that many of his proposals were not unique or original. "Most people will agree with most of it," he said. "Who's going to get it done for you? … A lot of people have talked about energy independence, including some pretty good presidents. I will do it."

Still, some of the measures he touted, such the building of new nuclear power plants, seemed certain to face resistance. Mr. Giuliani suggested that the safety concerns were overblown. "We have never in this country lost a life to nuclear power, never," he said. "That says a lot."

The former mayor also said nuclear power would increase America's energy independence. "We don't have to buy it from anybody else. … We have it right here in the United States," he said.

While there are uranium mines in America, imported uranium accounts for 84% of the market here, according to the Energy Department.

Mr. Giuliani backed ending the 26-year-old moratorium on new oil drilling off America's coasts. "We have to expand the use of the oil that's within our control," he said. "In environmentally sound ways, we should take advantage of that oil."

Mr. Giuliani kicked off his 35-minute speech yesterday by challenging the Democratic presidential hopefuls debating in South Carolina last night to acknowledge the threat that America faces from what the former mayor repeatedly labeled "Islamic terrorism." "In order to lead, you have to face reality. The reality is that there are Islamic terrorists. The reality is that they are at war with us," the former mayor said.

Mr. Giuliani said that in the prior debates, none of the Democratic candidates owned up to the nature and the seriousness of the terrorist threat. "We'll see if they do it tonight. If they do, I'll take credit for it," he joked.

The former mayor also bashed the Democrats for being "defeatist," particularly when it comes to the emerging economic power of countries such as China.

"Isn't this what we always wanted, that China would come out of poverty and have some hope of coming out of political oppression?" Mr. Giuliani said. America simply needs to ask, "What to sell them? … It's not that hard. It's not brain surgery," he said.

Western companies have struggled to make a profit in the Chinese market. Some have quit the market after seeing their brand names and proprietary technology stolen with near impunity.

"This is the guy America needs, the only guy that can heal everybody," a public relations executive on hand for Mr. Giuliani's speech, Michael Levinson, 60, said. "You can't have any more Clintons or Bushes. It will be too divisive."

Mr. Levinson said Mr. Giuliani's views on social issues make him palatable to Democrats in a way the other Republican contenders are not. The p.r. man said he liked the ex-mayor's comments on energy but is supporting him mainly because of his tough persona. "We can't have any weaklings in the White House," Mr. Levinson said. Today, Mr. Giuliani's campaign is to begin airing radio ads in New Hampshire and Iowa for the first time. The spots tout his record cutting taxes, government spending, and the welfare rolls during his time as New York City's mayor between 1994 and 2001.

Organising Ecological Revolution

John Bellamy Foster, October 2005, Monthly Review

My subject—organizing ecological revolution—has as its initial premise that we are in the midst of a global environmental crisis of such enormity that the web of life of the entire planet is threatened and with it the future of civilization.

This is no longer a very controversial proposition. To be sure, there are different perceptions about the extent of the challenge that this raises. At one extreme there are those who believe that since these are human problems arising from human causes they are easily solvable. All we need are ingenuity and the will to act. At the other extreme there are those who believe that the world ecology is deteriorating on a scale and with a rapidity beyond our means to control, giving rise to the gloomiest forebodings.

Although often seen as polar opposites these views nonetheless share a common basis. As Paul Sweezy observed they each reflect “the belief that if present trends continue to operate, it is only a matter of time until the human species irredeemably fouls its own nest” (Monthly Review, June 1989).

The more we learn about current environmental trends the more the unsustainability of our present course is brought home to us. Among the warning signs:

• There is now a virtual certainty that the critical threshold of a 2° C (3.6° F) increase in average world temperature above the preindustrial level will soon be crossed due to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Scientists believe that climate change at this level will have portentous implications for the world’s ecosystems. The question is no longer whether significant climate change will occur but how great it will be (International Climate Change Task Force, Meeting the Climate Challenge, January 2005, http://www.americanprogress.org).
• There are growing worries in the scientific community that the estimates of the rate of global warming provided by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which in its worst case scenario projected increases in average global temperature of up to 5.8° C (10.4° F) by 2100, may prove to be too low. For example, results from the world’s largest climate modeling experiment based in Oxford University in Britain indicate that global warming could increase almost twice as fast as the IPCC has estimated (London Times, January 27, 2005).
• Experiments at the International Rice Institute and elsewhere have led scientists to conclude that with each 1° C (1.8° F) increase in temperature, rice, wheat, and corn yields could drop 10 percent (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 6, 2004; Lester Brown, Outgrowing the Earth).
• It is now clear that the world is within a few years of its peak oil production (known as Hubbert’s Peak). The world economy is therefore confronting diminishing and ever more difficult to obtain oil supplies, despite a rapidly increasing demand (Ken Deffeyes, Hubbert’s Peak; David Goodstein, Out of Gas). All of this points to a growing world energy crisis and mounting resource wars.
• The planet is facing global water shortages due to the drawing down of irreplaceable aquifers, which make up the bulk of the world’s fresh water supplies. This poses a threat to global agriculture, which has become a bubble economy based on the unsustainable exploitation of groundwater. One in four people in the world today do not have access to safe water (Bill McKibben, New York Review of Books, September 25, 2003).
• Two thirds of the world’s major fish stocks are currently being fished at or above their capacity. Over the last half-century 90 percent of large predatory fish in the world’s oceans have been eliminated (Worldwatch, Vital Signs 2005).
• The species extinction rate is the highest in 65 million years with the prospect of cascading extinctions as the last remnants of intact ecosystems are removed. Already the extinction rate is approaching 1,000 times the “benchmark” or natural rate (Scientific American, September 2005). Scientists have pinpointed twenty-five hot spots on land that account for 44 percent of all vascular plant species and 35 percent of all species in four vertebrate groups, while taking up only 1.4 percent of the world’s land surface. All of these hot spots are now threatened with rapid annihilation due to human causes (Nature, February 24, 2000).
• According to a study published by the National Academy of Sciences in 2002, the world economy exceeded the earth’s regenerative capacity in 1980 and by 1999 had gone beyond it by as much as 20 percent. This means, according to the study’s authors, that “it would require 1.2 earths, or one earth for 1.2 years, to regenerate what humanity used in 1999” (Matthis Wackernagel, et. al, “Tracking the Ecological Overshoot of the Human Economy,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 9, 2002).
• The question of the ecological collapse of past civilizations from Easter Island to the Mayans is now increasingly seen as extending to today’s world capitalist system. This view, long held by environmentalists, has recently been popularized by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse.

These and other warning bells indicate that the present human relation to the environment is no longer supportable. The most developed capitalist countries have the largest per capita ecological footprints, demonstrating that the entire course of world capitalist development at present represents a dead end.

The main response of the ruling capitalist class when confronted with the growing environmental challenge is to “fiddle while Rome burns.” To the extent that it has a strategy, it is to rely on revolutionizing the forces of production, i.e., on technical change, while keeping the existing system of social relations intact. It was Karl Marx who first pointed in The Communist Manifesto to “the constant revolutionizing of production” as a distinguishing feature of capitalist society. Today’s vested interests are counting on this built-in process of revolutionary technological change coupled with the proverbial magic of the market to solve the environmental problem when and where this becomes necessary.

In stark contrast, many environmentalists now believe that technological revolution alone will be insufficient to solve the problem and that a more far-reaching social revolution aimed at transforming the present mode of production is required.

Historically addressing this question of the ecological transformation of society means that we need to ascertain: (1) where the world capitalist system is heading at present, (2) the extent to which it can alter its course by technological or other means in response to today’s converging ecological and social crises, and (3) the historical alternatives to the existing system. The most ambitious attempt thus far to carry out such a broad assessment has come from the Global Scenario Group (http://www.gsg.org), a project launched in 1995 by the Stockholm Environmental Institute to examine the transition to global sustainability. The Global Scenario Group has issued three reports—Branch Points (1997), Bending the Curve (1998), and their culminating study, Great Transition (2002). In what follows I will focus on the last of these reports, the Great Transition.*

As its name suggests, the Global Scenario Group employs alternative scenarios to explore possible paths that society caught in a crisis of ecological sustainability might take. Their culminating report presents three classes of scenarios: Conventional Worlds, Barbarization, and Great Transitions. Each of these contains two variants. Conventional Worlds consists of Market Forces and Policy Reform. Barbarization manifests itself in the forms of Breakdown and Fortress World. Great Transitions is broken down into Eco-communalism and the New Sustainability Paradigm. Each scenario is associated with different thinkers: Market Forces with Adam Smith; Policy Reform with John Maynard Keynes and the authors of the 1987 Brundtland Commission report; Breakdown with Thomas Malthus; Fortress World with Thomas Hobbes; Eco-communalism with William Morris, Mahatma Gandhi, and E. F. Schumacher; and the New Sustainability Paradigm with John Stuart Mill.

Within the Conventional Worlds scenarios Market Forces stands for naked capitalism or neoliberalism. It represents, in the words of the Great Transition report, “the firestorm of capitalist expansion.” Market Forces is an unfettered capitalist world order geared to the accumulation of capital and rapid economic growth without regard to social or ecological costs. The principal problem raised by this scenario is its rapacious relation to humanity and the earth.

The drive to amass capital that is central to a Market Forces regime is best captured by Marx’s general formula of capital (though not referred to in the Great Transition report itself). In a society of simple commodity production (an abstract conception referring to pre-capitalist economic formations in which money and the market play a subsidiary role), the circuit of commodities and money exists in a form, C–M–C, in which distinct commodities or use values constitute the end points of the economic process. A commodity C embodying a definite use value is sold for money M which is used to purchase a different commodity C. Each such circuit is completed with the consumption of a use value.

In the case of capitalism, or generalized commodity production, however, the circuit of money and commodities begins and ends with money, or M–C–M. Moreover, since money is merely a quantitative relationship such an exchange would have no meaning if the same amount of money were acquired at the end of the process as exchanged in the beginning, so the general formula for capital in reality takes the form of M–C–M´, where M´ equals M + m or surplus value.* What stands out, when contrasted with simple commodity production, is that there is no real end to the process, since the object is not final use but the accumulation of surplus value or capital. M–C–M´ in one year therefore results in the )m being reinvested, leading to M–C–M´´ in the next year and M–C–M´´´ the year after that, ad infinitum. In other words, capital by its nature is self-expanding value.

The motor force behind this drive to accumulation is competition. The competitive struggle ensures that each capital or firm must grow and hence must reinvest its “earnings” in order to survive.

Such a system tends toward exponential growth punctuated by crises or temporary interruptions in the accumulation process. The pressures placed on the natural environment are immense and will lessen only with the weakening and cessation of capitalism itself. During the last half-century the world economy has grown more than seven-fold while the biosphere’s capacity to support such expansion has if anything diminished due to human ecological depredations (Lester Brown, Outgrowing the Earth).

The main assumption of those who advocate a Market Forces solution to the environmental problem is that it will lead to increasing efficiency in the consumption of environmental inputs by means of technological revolution and continual market adjustments. Use of energy, water, and other natural resources will decrease per unit of economic output. This is often referred to as “dematerialization.” However, the central implication of this argument is false. Dematerialization, to the extent that it can be said to exist, has been shown to be a much weaker tendency than M–C–M´. As the Global Transition report puts it, “The ‘growth effect’ outpaces the ‘efficiency effect.’”

This can be understood concretely in terms of what has been called the Jevons Paradox, named after William Stanley Jevons who published The Coal Question in 1865. Jevons, one of the founders of neoclassical economics, explained that improvements in steam engines that decreased the use of coal per unit of output also served to increase the scale of production as more and bigger factories were built. Hence, increased efficiency in the use of coal had the paradoxical effect of expanding aggregate coal consumption.

The perils of the Market Forces model are clearly visible in the environmental depredations during the two centuries since the advent of industrial capitalism, and especially in the last half-century. “Rather than abating” under a Market Forces regime, the Great Transition report declares, “the unsustainable process of environmental degradation that we observe in today’s world would [continue to] intensify. The danger of crossing critical thresholds in global systems would increase, triggering events that would radically transform the planet’s climate and ecosystems.” Although it is “the tacit ideology” of most international institutions, Market Forces leads inexorably to ecological and social disaster and even collapse. The continuation of “‘business-as-usual’ is a utopian fantasy.”

A far more rational basis for hope, the report contends, is found in the Policy Reform scenario. “The essence of the scenario is the emergence of the political will for gradually bending the curve of development toward a comprehensive set of sustainability targets,” including peace, human rights, economic development, and environmental quality. This is essentially the Global Keynesian strategy advocated by the Brundtland Commission Report in the late 1980s—an expansion of the welfare state, now conceived as an environmental welfare state, to the entire world. It represents the promise of what environmental sociologists call “ecological modernization.”

The Policy Reform approach is prefigured in various international agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and the environmental reform measures advanced by the earth summits in Rio in 1992 and Johannesburg in 2002. Policy Reform would seek to decrease world inequality and poverty through foreign aid programs emanating from the rich countries and international institutions. It would promote environmental best practices through state-induced market incentives. Yet, despite the potential for limited ecological modernization, the realities of capitalism, the Great Transition report contends, would collide with Policy Reform. This is because Policy Reform remains a Conventional Worlds scenario—one in which the underlying values, lifestyles, and structures of the capitalist system endure. “The logic of sustainability and the logic of the global market are in tension. The correlation between the accumulation of wealth and the concentration of power erodes the political basis for a transition.” Under these circumstances the “lure of the God of Mammon and the Almighty dollar” will prevail.

The failure of both of the Conventional Worlds scenarios to alleviate the problem of ecological decline means that Barbarization threatens: either Breakdown or the Fortress World. Breakdown is self-explanatory and to be avoided at all costs. The Fortress World emerges when “powerful regional and international actors comprehend the perilous forces leading to Breakdown” and are able to guard their own interests sufficiently to create “protected enclaves.” Fortress World is a planetary apartheid system, gated and maintained by force, in which the gap between global rich and global poor constantly widens and the differential access to environmental resources and amenities increases sharply. It consists of “bubbles of privilege amidst oceans of misery....The elite[s] have halted barbarism at their gates and enforced a kind of environmental management and uneasy stability.” The general state of the planetary environment, however, would continue to deteriorate in this scenario leading either to a complete ecological Breakdown or to the achievement through revolutionary struggle of a more egalitarian society, such as Eco-communalism.

This description of the Fortress World is remarkably similar to the scenario released in the 2003 Pentagon report, Abrupt Climate Change and its Implications for United States National Security (see “The Pentagon and Climate Change,” Monthly Review, May 2004). The Pentagon report envisioned a possible shutdown due to global warming of the thermohaline circulation warming the North Atlantic, throwing Europe and North America into Siberia-like conditions. Under such unlikely but plausible circumstances relatively well-off populations, including those in the United States, are pictured as building “defensive fortresses” around themselves to keep masses of would-be immigrants out. Military confrontations over scarce resources intensify.

Arguably naked capitalism and resource wars are already propelling the world in this direction at present, though without a cause as immediately earth-shaking as abrupt climate change. With the advent of the War of Terror, unleashed by the United States against one country after another since September 11, 2001, an “Empire of Barbarism” is making its presence felt (Monthly Review, December 2004).

Still, from the standpoint of the Global Scenario Group, the Barbarization scenarios are there simply to warn us of the worst possible dangers of ecological and social decline. A Great Transition, it is argued, is necessary if Barbarization is to be avoided.

Theoretically, there are two Great Transitions scenarios envisioned by the Global Scenario Group: Eco-communalism and the New Sustainability Paradigm. Yet Eco-communalism is never discussed in any detail, on the grounds that for this kind of transformation to come about it would be necessary for world society first to pass through Barbarization. The social revolution of Eco-communalism is seen, by the Global Scenario Group authors, as lying on the other side of Jack London’s Iron Heel. The discussion of Great Transition is thus confined to the New Sustainability Paradigm.

The essence of the New Sustainability Paradigm is that of a radical ecological transformation that goes against unbridled “capitalist hegemony” but stops short of full social revolution. It is to be carried out primarily through changes in values and lifestyles rather than transformation of social structures. Advances in environmental technology and policy that began with the Policy Reform scenario, but that were unable to propel sufficient environmental change due to the dominance of acquisitive norms, are here supplemented by a “lifestyle wedge.”

In the explicitly utopian scenario of the New Sustainability Paradigm the United Nations is transformed into the “World Union,” a true “global federation.” Globalization has become “civilized.” The world market is fully integrated and harnessed for equality and sustainability not just wealth generation. The War on Terrorism has resulted in the defeat of the terrorists. Civil society, represented by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), plays a leading role in society at both the national and global levels. Voting is electronic. Poverty is eradicated. Typical inequality has decreased to a 2–3:1 gap between the top 20 percent and bottom 20 percent of society. Dematerialization is real, as is the polluter pays principle. Advertising is nowhere to be seen. There has been a transition to a solar economy. The long commute from where people live to where they work is a thing of the past; instead there are “integrated settlements” that place home, work, retail shops, and leisure outlets in close proximity to each other. The giant corporations have become forward-looking societal organizations, rather than simply private entities. They are no longer concerned exclusively with the economic bottom line but have revised this “to include social equity and environmental sustainability, not only as a means to profit, but as ends.”

Four agents of change are said to have combined to bring all of this about: (1) giant transnational corporations, (2) intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization, (3) civil society acting through NGOs, and (4) a globally aware, environmentally-conscious, democratically organized world population.

Underpinning this economically is the notion of a stationary state, as depicted by Mill in his Principles of Political Economy (1848) and advanced today by the ecological economist Herman Daly. Most classical economists—including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and Karl Marx—saw the specter of a stationary state as presaging the demise of the bourgeois political economy. In contrast, Mill, who Marx (in the afterword to the second German edition of Capital) accused of a “shallow syncretism,” saw the stationary state as somehow compatible with existing productive relations, requiring only changes in distribution. In the New Sustainability Paradigm scenario, which takes Mill’s view of the stationary state as its inspiration, the basic institutions of capitalism remain intact, as do the fundamental relations of power, but a shift in lifestyle and consumer orientation mean that the economy is no longer geared to economic growth and the enlargement of profits, but to efficiency, equity, and qualitative improvements in life. A capitalist society formerly driven to expanded reproduction through investment of surplus product (or surplus value) has been replaced with a system of simple reproduction (Mill’s stationary state), in which the surplus is consumed rather than invested. The vision is one of a cultural revolution supplementing technological revolution, radically changing the ecological and social landscape of capitalist society, without fundamentally altering the productive, property, and power relations that define the system.

In my view, there are both logical and historical problems with this projection. It combines the weakest elements of utopian thinking (weaving a future out of mere hopes and wishes—see Bertell Ollman, “The Utopian Vision of the Future,” Monthly Review, July-August 2005) with a “practical” desire to avoid a sharp break with the existing system. The failure of the Global Scenario Group to address its own scenario of Eco-communalism is part and parcel of this perspective, which seeks to elude the question of the more thoroughgoing social transformation that a genuine Great Transition would require.

The result is a vision of the future that is contradictory to an extreme. Private corporations are institutions with one and only one purpose: the pursuit of profit. The idea of turning them to entirely different and opposing social ends is reminiscent of the long-abandoned notions of the “soulful corporation” that emerged for a short time in the 1950s and then vanished in the harsh light of reality. Many changes associated with the New Sustainability Paradigm would require a class revolution to bring about. Yet, this is excluded from the scenario itself. Instead the Global Scenario Group authors engage in a kind of magical thinking—denying that fundamental changes in the relations of production must accompany (and sometimes even precede) changes in values. No less than in the case of the Policy Reform Scenario—as pointed out in The Great Transition report itself—the “God of Mammon” will inevitably overwhelm a value-based Great Transition that seeks to escape the challenge of the revolutionary transformation of the whole society.

Put simply, my argument is that a global ecological revolution worthy of the name can only occur as part of a larger social—and I would insist, socialist—revolution. Such a revolution, were it to generate the conditions of equality, sustainability, and human freedom worthy of a genuine Great Transition, would necessarily draw its major impetus from the struggles of working populations and communities at the bottom of the global capitalist hierarchy. It would demand, as Marx insisted, that the associated producers rationally regulate the human metabolic relation with nature. It would see wealth and human development in radically different terms than capitalist society.

In conceiving such a social and ecological revolution, we can derive inspiration, as Marx did, from the ancient Epicurean concept of “natural wealth.”* As Epicurus observed in his Principal Doctrines, “Natural wealth is both limited and easily obtainable; the riches of idle fancies go on forever.” It is the unnatural, unlimited character of such alienated wealth that is the problem. Similarly, in what has become known as the Vatican Sayings, Epicurus stated: “When measured by the natural purpose of life, poverty is great wealth; limitless wealth is great poverty.” Free human development, arising in a climate of natural limitation and sustainability is the true basis of wealth, of a rich, many-sided existence; the unbounded, pursuit of wealth is the primary source of human impoverishment and suffering. Needless to say, such a concern with natural well-being, as opposed to artificial needs and stimulants, is the antithesis of capitalist society and the precondition of a sustainable human community.

A Great Transition therefore must have the characteristics implied by the Global Scenario Group’s neglected scenario: Eco-communalism. It must take its inspiration from William Morris, one of the most original and ecological followers of Karl Marx, from Gandhi, and from other radical, revolutionary and materialist figures, including Marx himself, stretching as far back as Epicurus. The goal must be the creation of sustainable communities geared to the development of human needs and powers, removed from the all-consuming drive to accumulate wealth (capital).

As Marx wrote, the new system “starts with the self-government of the communities” (Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 24, p. 519; Paul Burkett, “Marx’s Vision of Sustainable Human Development” in this issue). The creation of an ecological civilization requires a social revolution; one that, as Roy Morrison explains, needs to be organized democratically from below: “community by community...region by region” (Ecological Democracy). It must put the provision of basic human needs—clean air, unpolluted water, safe food, adequate sanitation, social transport, and universal health care and education, all of which require a sustainable relation to the earth—ahead of all other needs and wants. Such a revolutionary turn in human affairs may seem improbable. But the continuation of the present capitalist system for any length of time will prove impossible—if human civilization and the web of life as we know it are to be sustained.

Notes

* The authors of the Global Scenario Group’s Great Transition report are Paul Raskin, Tariq Banuri, Gilberto Gallopín, Pablo Gutman, Al Hammond, Robert Kates, and Rob Swart.

* Much of Marx’s analysis in Capital is concerned with where )m or surplus value comes from. To answer this question, he argues, it is necessary to go beneath the process of exchange and to explore the hidden recesses of capitalist production—where it is revealed that the source of surplus value is to be found in the process of class exploitation.

* On Marx’s relation to Epicurus see John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000)

Debt burden fuelling climate change – ‘double injustice’

Practical Action, World Development Movement and WWF, 13 July 2007, Jubilee Debt Campaign

New figures released today by Jubilee Debt Campaign reveal that rich countries owe 27 times more in ‘carbon debt’ than poor countries pay in debt repayments to wealthy nations.

The world’s poorest countries are forced to repay over $100 million daily in often illegitimate debts to rich countries, those same rich countries produce a daily ‘carbon debt’ worth an estimated $2.7 billion per day, which remains unacknowledged, unpaid and hits the poorest countries hardest and first.

The briefing, produced jointly with World Development Movement, Practical Action and WWF highlights that unlike the richest countries, poor countries are currently in ‘carbon credit’. But the unjust and unpayable financial debt is increasingly forcing poor countries into environmentally destructive practices that drive climate change and deprive poor countries of the resources they need to adapt to the rapidly changing climate. The real cost of the ‘carbon debt’ in terms of lives and livelihoods lost is impossible to quantify in financial terms, but for the first time these figures show clearly the debt owed by the rich to the poor.

Benedict Southworth, Director of World Development Movement said:

“The rich world bears a heavy responsibility for creating the twin crises of unpayable debts and looming climate chaos. The impact of these crises include starvation, migration, disease and death. It is crucial that the governments of the richest countries take urgent action to cancel illegitimate debt and reduce their carbon emissions.”

Trisha Rogers, Director of Jubilee Debt Campaign said:

“It is poor countries and poor people who are paying with their lives. We need radically to rethink our perception of who is in debt to whom, and take urgent action to tackle this double injustice.”

The research revealed that:

• Rich countries owe poor countries an enormous ‘carbon debt’ – on the basis of per capita carbon emissions beyond a global ‘fair share’. The rich world owes an estimated annual carbon debt of more than $1 trillion – nearly $870 billion of it coming from G8 countries.
• Poor country debt burdens are contributing to climate change and wider environmental destruction by driving the depletion of natural resources through deforestation, oil and gas extraction, mining, and intensification of agriculture.
• Countries like Kenya and Bangladesh are being denied debt cancellation on the basis that their debt is considered ‘sustainable’. Meanwhile, they are already experiencing the frontline effects of climate change, such as desertification or flooding.
• Developing countries need an estimated $50 billion every year to adapt to climate change but the poorest countries are still making debt repayments of $43 billion a year.

Venezuela - An Ecologically Sustainable Revolution

Zoe Kenny, 26/1/2007, Green Left Weekly

At a meeting in Brazil on April 26, 2006, plans moved ahead between Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil for a major transcontinental oil pipeline. The pipeline would be 10,000 kilometres long and would link the four countries plus Paraguay and Uruguay.

Venezuela’s socialist President Hugo Chavez said the pipeline would be integral to economically integrating South America and strengthening it against US imperialism, and was essential in “the fight against poverty and exclusion”.

However, in the August 15 New Scientist an article titled “Is Venezuela’s pipeline the highway to eco-hell?” reported that “environmentalists are furious” about the project. Director of the World Wildlife Fund’s Program for Protected Areas in the Amazon Claudio Maretti said “the proposed pipeline is absolutely insane”. He claimed it would damage the Amazon’s ecology.

The article highlighted a continuing sore spot for the Venezuelan government, which is leading the Bolivarian socialist revolution. On the one hand, the Chavez government needs to keep revenue flowing into its coffers to fund its massive array of social programs in Venezuela. On the other hand, the government’s major source of revenue is from the export of oil - Venezuela’s principal natural resource - by the state oil company PDVSA.

This export income often comes at the expense of the environment. In a stark example of the environmental degradation caused by the oil industry, the December 18, 2000, US Business Week described the impact of the industry on Lake Maracaibo, located in the northern state of Zulia (where the bulk of Venezuela’s oil has come from). Once a pristine habitat for mangroves and flamingoes, the lake is now crowded with tankers, polluted with toxic industrial waste and is the repository for raw sewage from the surrounding area’s 5 million inhabitants.

A more recent problem is the growing infestation of the freshwater duckweed, which is devastating fish stocks and endangering the livelihoods of more than 10,000 fishers. One of the long-term affects of oil drilling is land destabilisation, which threatens 60,000 people who live near the lake.

Venezuela’s daily output of 3 million barrels of oil also contributes to global warming - though only 530,000 barrels a day are used in Venezuela itself.

Legacy of foreign domination

In light of these facts it would be tempting for environmentalists to simply condemn Venezuela as an environmental vandal - part of the problem, not the solution. But where does the blame for this state of affairs really lie?

Venezuela’s economy has not been created by the current government, but has been shaped by centuries of Spanish colonial and then US imperialist domination. By the time Chavez was elected president in 1998, Lake Maracaibo had already been exploited by big, mainly First World-based, oil companies for more than eight decades. A tiny minority of Venezuelans grew rich by appropriating the wealth generated from the export of oil (principally to the US).

Meanwhile, the rest of the economy stagnated as the rich had no need to invest in other industries or in agriculture. The result was a highly distorted economy, with 80% of Venezuelans living in poverty and millions forced to eke out a living in the “informal sector” - selling trinkets from street stalls, shining shoes etc.

The regaining of government control of the country’s nominally state-run oil industry from its corrupt management intent on privatising it in early 2003, after the defeat of a bosses’ lockout, opened the possibility of the oil wealth being used for the benefit of the majority for the first time.

But do the concerns about global warming and the other environmentally destructive effects of the oil industry mean that perhaps Venezuela should leave its oil in the ground?

Obviously not, as this would condemn the majority of Venezuelans to a life of poverty and starvation. The Kyoto Protocol, hardly a document advocating radical social change, gives a nod to the climate justice principle that First World nations need to lead on countering global warming, reducing their emissions and developing clean energy technology. It is these countries (the US, Canada, the EU, Japan and Australasia), inhabited by 15% of the world’s population, that produce 50% of CO₂ emissions.

The main burden for reducing the world’s CO₂ emissions should not fall on the poorest, who have gained least from the profits flowing from the use of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution. This is the reason why underdeveloped nations do not have to abide by binding emission reduction targets.

On the other hand, if the rulers of the rich nations were genuinely concerned about helping the poor countries, they would be selflessly providing major transfers of financial aid and non-CO₂ emitting technology. This, however, is not the case and Venezuela is therefore forced to continue exporting large amounts of oil to earn export income.

Social missions

The poverty-eradicating social missions that the Chavez government is spending oil revenue on are an essential precondition for breaking out of dependence on the oil-export economy. The missions aim to increase the skills, organisation and confidence of the poor majority so that they can participate in creating a new, sustainable economy.

Programs such as Mision Vuelvan Caras (“Turn Your Faces” - towards the enemy, in this case underdevelopment) are aimed at developing and diversifying Venezuela’s economy, thus laying the foundations for decreasing its dependence on oil and other non-renewable natural resources.

Launched in 2004, Mision Vuelvan Caras was created with the goal of “converting - through work - the creative potential of the people into popular power”. Poor Venezuelans are encouraged to organise themselves into cooperatives and to develop skills and knowledge to enable them to engage in stable and socially productive employment. Tens of thousands of cooperatives have been formed covering many sectors of the economy.

Venezuela, a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol, has also started to take some bold initiatives on the environmental front. In June 2006, Chavez launched Mision Arbol (“Tree”), which has as its goal the reforestation of 150,000 hectares of land with 100 million trees over five years. By September, 831 conservation committees, involving more than 10,000 people, had been formed with the task of implementing this plan.

Mision Arbol is also tied in with economic development, promoting the planting of cacao and coffee plants in the shade of the new trees, thus giving poor farmers an economic incentive to move away from environmentally destructive subsistence farming methods.

In November, Chavez launched another environmentally motivated mission, “Energy Revolution”. This is aimed at reducing energy usage in Venezuela over the next five years. The program, inspired by a similar scheme in socialist Cuba, includes projects for increasing the use of natural gas (the burning of which emits 50% less CO₂ than the burning of oil or coal) and installing wind- and solar-powered electricity systems.

The first stage involves the distribution of 52 million energy-efficient light globes that use half the electricity of traditional light globes and should reduce consumption by 2000 megawatts per year, also saving US$2 billion in fuel costs. Venezuelan youth are being mobilised to implement this project with the help of young Cuban social workers, many of whom would have participated in a similar project in Cuba.

One of the most significant missions that will transform the way the Venezuelan environment is treated is Mision Guaicaipuro. Launched in 2003, its aim is to make the 1999 constitution’s goal of restoring indigenous peoples’ rights a reality. Along with increasing the recognition and respect for indigenous history and culture, it also sets out new guidelines for the return of land to its traditional indigenous custodians.

Once land is demarcated back under the control of an indigenous group, any resource extraction from that land has to be taken through the community first. This will ensure that any development that is deemed to be destructive to the environment or the cultural, social or economic integrity of the community itself is unlikely to be approved.


The key to understanding the paradox of oil money being used to fund environmental programs is the trajectory that Venezuela is moving along. Chavez has repeatedly stated that Venezuela is developing a “new socialism of the 21st century”, in order to create a society that breaks from the rapacious corporate-profits-first logic of the capitalist system to a society run by and oriented to meeting the needs of working people.

Socialism

The potential of a socialist economic system to solve environmental problems is indicated by Cuba’s example. According to the Living Planet Report 2006 issued last October by the World Wildlife Fund and the Global Footprint Network, Cuba is the only country in the world that has a high level of social development, including good health and education systems, and does not use up more resources than is sustainable. It was thus rated as the planet’s only ecologically sustainable nation.

Cuba’s achievements are all the more extraordinary because they have been made in a poor country subjected to a five-decade-long US economic blockade. They were made possible by a planned economy based on fulfilling the needs of the people rather than corporate profits.

Of course Venezuela’s trajectory and its ultimate goal of a sustainable and just society will not happen overnight and will not be free of problems and contradictions. While the Chavez government may not always be able to balance the needs of all and will make errors, the voices of Venezuela’s long-marginalised majority are being heard for the first time and they are being encouraged to fight for their interests.

Chavez has said that “the only way to defeat poverty is to give power to the people”. It’s also the only way that the environmental crisis will be solved.

Venezuela Environment Fact Sheet

This is the information regarding Venezuela's environment gains and plans i have accumulated for the Australia Venezuela Solidarity Network.

Venezuela's Environment Revolution

“We are now going to change all of the Venezuelans into conservationists.” Jacqueline Faría, Venezuelan Minister of the Environment, speaking at the inauguration day of Mision Arbol, in 2006.

Misiones

Mission Tree

• Plans: In 5 years, to collect 30 tons of seeds, plant 100 million plants, reforesting 150,000 hectares of land. They have already collected 15,000 bags of seeds and have 15 million seedlings growing in nurseries, under the second phase of the program.[1]
• With the collaboration of local communities and students, the first stage is the collection of seeds, the second is the construction of nurseries, the third is the planting of the germinated small trees and the fourth is the maintenance of plantations.[2]
• Between September 2005, 831 Conservation Committees have been formed with a total of 10,532 members across Venezuela. As of June last year, 468 community projects had been organized on nearly 8,000 hectares of land, beginning with seed collection, nursery plantation, education programs, and the planting of trees and agricultural products such as coffee and cacao. US$5 million has been allocated for these projects. [1]
• $23 million budget for the Reforestation Plan.[1]
  

Mission Guaicaipuro

• Launched in 2003, its aim is to make the 1999 constitution’s goal of restoring indigenous peoples’ rights a reality. Along with increasing the recognition and respect for indigenous history and culture, it also sets out new guidelines for the return of land to its traditional indigenous custodians.[3]
• Particularly this involves not engaging in extraction of natural resources without prior consultation with indigenous groups.[3]
• This program has led to the establishment of over 5,000 land committees representing 5 million Venezuelans (20 percent of the population).[4]
• In April 2007 the Government banned construction of all new coal mines on Indigenous land in the opposition controlled, major oil producing state, Zulia.[5]
  

Mission Energy Revolution

• Mission is aimed at reducing energy usage in Venezuela over the next five years.
• Some 53 million light bulbs in more than 5 million homes have been replaced with energy-efficient fluorescent bulbs[6]
• The next step is to substitute almost 27 million inefficient incandescent light bulbs by energy saving light bulbs in the official, industrial and commercial sectors.[7]
• The second phase of the mission, to be completed in 2009, aims at the promotion of alternative energy sources and encouraging the shift from petrol to natural gas-fuelled cars. The third phase, 2009-12, will involve a transition from diesel to natural gas.[6]
  

Mission Piar

• Part of the Integral Plan of Sustainable Development for Mining Communities advanced by Chávez. Executed by the Ministry of Energy and Mines, the Mission seeks to improve the quality of life of small-scale miners while promoting environmental sustainability.[8]
  

Gains

• Venezuela has ratified the Kyoto Protocol reducing greenhouse gas emissions.[9]
• Chavez Government has placed large rubbish bins throughout Caracas to deal with the huge waste problem.
• Built the largest waste recycling station in Guacara.[10]
• Constructing national train network and upgrading existing train lines in the major cities.[11] Three more extensions are being built to the Caracas Metro, with plans to extend it to the international airport.[12]
• In 2004, the Venezuelan Government halted plans by US GMO Company Monsanto from planting genetically modified soybean crops. They instead used the land to plant Yuca (an indigenous crop) and Chavez announced plans to form a seed bank facility to maintain indigenous seeds for peasants’ movements around the world.[13]
• In 2005 eliminated the use of lead-based gasoline.[14]
• PDVSA has been implementing an environmentally-friendly plan over the past few years that includes recuperating green areas, decontaminating rivers, lakes and land, and reducing emissions.[15]
• Added 10% ethanol to all petrol, to reduce green house emissions and as an alternative additive to methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE) which has been banned in the US.[16] According to PdVSA, ethanol and sugar cane fermentation "cuts dependence on oil and promotes other economic activities."[14]
• Venezuela will commence construction of 15 sugar cane mills in 2007 and hopes to complete 21 distilleries by 2012. Chavez has pledged to invest $900 million to plant sugarcane and construct processing plants over the next several years. These will be turned into ethanol as an alternative fuel source to petrol. [14]
• Set up phone a 24 hour hotline 0800-AMBIENTE [Environment], that anyone can ring if they see any company or individual polluting Lake Valencia.[17]
  

Future Plans

• Chavez also said recently that he will raise gasoline prices to encourage Venezuelans to drive less, although he hasn't said by how much.[18]
• Chavez plans to open a solar energy research center to eventually produce solar panels "in massive quantities" to supplement hydroelectric dams and reduce the need for oil-fired power plants. It remains unclear when that project may begin.[18]
• The government plans a windmill farm to generate electricity on the Caribbean coast and is exploring more uses for cleaner-burning natural gas.[18]
• Long-term aim environment aims are to clean up the River Guaire that flows through Caracas and is currently little more than a sewage drain. Other aims include setting free the Arrau turtle, eliminating toxic rubbish, cleaning up Lake Maracaibo (home of Venezuela’s largest oil reserves), saving the Orinoco alligator and bringing drinkable water to all of Venezuela.[19]

---

[1] http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1758#_ftn12

[2] http://www.greenleft.org.au/2006/674/6322

[3] http://www.greenleft.org.au/2007/696/36160

[4] http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1645

[5] http://www.greenleft.org.au/2007/706/36653

[6] http://www.greenleft.org.au/2007/708/36762

[7] http://www.cubanews.ain.cu/2007/0618chavez.htm

[8] www.geocities.com/embaven/misionesinglesfinal.doc

[9] http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=1411

[10] http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1320

[11] http://www.greenleft.org.au/2006/688/35757

[12] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4581402.stm

[13] http://www.greenleft.org.au/2004/581/32569

[14] http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1948

[15] http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1968

[16] http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=36823

[17] http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1508

[18] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/04/AR2007020400601.html

[19] http://www.greenleft.org.au/article.php/article.php?id=6322&__plain=1&__print=1

CUBA-VENEZUELA: Making Biofuels Without Wasting Food

By Patricia Grogg, March 6,Inter Press News Agency Service

HAVANA, Mar 6 (IPS) - The governments of Cuba and Venezuela are planning to move forward together on biofuels production, but they will rely on producing alcohol from sugarcane, in order to spare food crops.

Official Cuban sources described the cooperative alcohol programme between the two countries as part of their "joint efforts" to protect the environment, reduce consumption of fossil fuels and promote alternative energy sources, while holding fast to the principle of not using edible crops to make fuels.

At present Venezuela imports Brazilian ethanol to mix with gasoline distributed in the eastern part of the country, in preference to methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE), an oxygenate additive which is a pollutant.

The Venezuelans "are planning to add eight percent ethanol to petrol in the first instance," said the head of the state Cuban Institute of Research on Sugarcane Derivatives, Luis Gálvez, on a television panel programme on alternative energy, in which experts warned that the rush to produce fuel alcohol could threaten food production.

Venezuela is planning to grow 276,000 hectares of sugarcane, to produce some 25,000 barrels per day (bpd) of fuel ethanol from bagasse, the plant matter left over after the sugar has been extracted.

Along with a wide range of cooperation projects totalling 1.5 billion dollars agreed on Feb. 28, the two governments signed an agreement to instal 11 ethanol plants in Venezuela and develop sugarcane production there.

On that occasion, Cuban Sugar Minister Ulises Rosales del Toro and Venezuelan Energy Minister Rafael Ramírez also signed contracts for supplying the first four plants, according to a detailed report published in the local daily Granma.

"Cuba is playing an important role, not only in supplying Venezuela through several of our sugar mills, but also with cooperation on technological aspects," Gálvez said.

The official defended alcohol production from sugarcane rather than from cereals like maize, which the United States uses as raw material for its entire ethanol consumption. The U.S. is the world's second largest producer of alcohol, after Brazil.

According to Gálvez, sugarcane is the best answer to three of humanity's pressing concerns, namely food, energy and the environment.

"Sugarcane production today is inevitably linked to alcohol and energy, for economic and market reasons," said Gálvez, citing Brazil, the world leader in producing fuel alcohol, as a prime example of "flexible production."

Expert sources consulted by IPS estimated that a ton of sugarcane bagasse can yield between 65 and 90 litres of alcohol. They emphasised that as the source is biomass, the fuel alcohol produced does not contribute to global warming.

Other experts participating in the forum on Cuban state television were insistent on the danger posed by the global biofuels fever to developing countries, as industrialised nations "talk of substituting one (energy) source for another, without changing their current patterns" of high consumption.

"What they are considering is a scheme in which most of the biofuels are produced in underdeveloped countries in Asia, Latin America or Africa, to be exported to the industrialised world," said Ramón Pichs, of the World Economy Research Centre (CIEM).

According to this model, developing countries would provide large areas of their cultivable land and cheap labour, and suffer a negative impact on food production and the environment, he said.

According to Pichs' calculations, filling a car's five-gallon tank with biofuel for two weeks would consume the amount of grain that would feed 26 people for a year.

The surge of interest in biofuels is caused by the drawbacks of using fossil fuels: high oil prices, their role in global warming, and their non-renewable nature as an energy source.

In 2002, Cuba restructured its sugar industry, closing down half of its 156 factories and cutting sugarcane cultivation. Now it is interested in manufacturing fuel alcohol, primarily for export.

It has therefore modernised at least 11 of its 17 distilleries, and intends to build seven new plants. These will be devoted to producing fuel grade dehydrated (anhydrous) ethanol, treated to remove the four percent of water contained in ordinary distilled alcohol.

The programme requires an investment of between 100 and 150 million dollars, and will increase ethanol production to about 500 million litres a year, from its current base of between 100 million and 150 million litres a year.

Cuba and Venezuela have close political and economic ties, and are promoting an integration strategy known as the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), which Bolivia joined in 2006, as did Nicaragua after Daniel Ortega became president on Jan. 10.

Under the terms of an energy agreement in force since 2000, Venezuela supplies Cuba with 93,000 to 100,000 bpd of oil, as well as technological support for developing oil and gas production on this Caribbean island.

After the meeting in Havana to assess the progress of a wide-ranging integrated cooperation agreement in force for over six years, the two countries agreed to stimulate development of new energy sources in Cuba and Venezuela that will also benefit "other sister nations."