Michael Ruppert: Venezuelan Society Showing How to Survive Post Peak Oil

Living in Venezuela has been an amazing, brutal, and illuminating lesson. It is a truly alien culture that I find simultaneously beautiful, hard, giving, unfamiliar, uncomfortable and definitely self-protecting to the extreme. That is why I am confident that Venezuela, and most of Latin America, will survive the coming crash of Peak Oil better than any other region of the world. I believe it is already starting to protect itself. It doesn't need me or any outsider to survive. But as a general rule, only those who are native here will be protected by its blessings.

FTW: Evolution.

Over three million people starved to death in North Korea. But Cuba, after a rough transition period, successfully adopted self-sustaining methods of organic farming, largely because they were not reliant on large scale corporate or state-owned farms.

Castro passed a law limiting privately owned farm to 160 hectarias. Cubans developed methods of crop rotation and natural methods of fertilization, insect and weed control.

I'm not a fan of some of the things Castro has done, but in this case, he got it right.

We in the United States are extremely vulnerable should a shortage of oil present.

In the US, the average piece of food on your plate has traveled 1,500 miles. Most small farms have been put out of business. We have become totally dependant on huge machines and chemicals, none of which will be available or affordable should the supply of foreign oil be interrupted.

Venezuela is planning to grow 276,000 hectacres 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.

From Cuba-Venezuela: Making Biofuels Without Wasting Food by Patricia Grogg of Inter Press Service (IPS).