The National Corn Growers Association (NCGA) has taken issue with comments made last week by Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the billionaire chairman of Nestle, during a “CEO Speaker Series” moderated by Time editor Michael J. Elliott at the Council on Foreign Relations.
It’s an interesting conversation in which Brabeck-Letmathe comes off as insufferably arrogant, discussing how he and a bunch of other wealthy do-gooders like Charles Schwab, Angelina Jolie, Sharon Stone and Bono gathered for the World Economic Forum in Switzerland to decide how they are going to “give back to society.” After spouting a bunch of philanthropic gobbledy-gook he gets to the issue of child labor, something Nestle has faced criticism about. Brabeck-Letmathe calls it a “very bad issue” which is “not very easy to tackle.” In fact, he calls it “almost natural” and “almost impossible” to stop.
While Brabeck-Letmathe considers child labor on African cocoa plantations “natural,” he calls the biofuels policy of Europe and the United States “immoral.” He says that biofuels policy is using too much water and driving food prices up. “I think it is absolutely immoral to push hundreds of million(s) of people into hunger, into extreme poverty because of such a policy,” he stated. “And therefore I think — I insist no food for fuel.”
Needless to say, corn growers were not pleased with those remarks. “Perhaps if Nestle is so concerned about food prices, its board will consider putting more of their $35.7 billion in 2010 profits back into poor communities,” said NCGA President Bart Schott. “Just their profits alone represent more than half the entire farm value of the 2010 U.S. corn crop.”
In an interview with Chuck at the St. Louis Agribusiness Club meeting on Monday, NCGA CEO Rick Tolman called Brabeck-Letmathe that “crazy guy who’s chairman of Nestle” who got headlines by saying that biofuels are killing people. “Now he has no facts to back it up and the facts don’t support what he says, but that gets headlines,” Rick said.
Rick noted that he just recently returned from a trip to South Africa where they have a 200 million bushel surplus of corn. “We had much higher levels of poverty and starvation between 2000 and 2005 when we had $2 corn and we were accused then of driving farmers off their farms because our prices were too low,” he said.
You can listen to or download the interview with Rick here: NCGA's Rick Tolman
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