Castro article criticises US environmental policies

Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro today criticised US environmental policies, emerging from months of silence on political matters during his long recuperation from intestinal surgery.

“Condemned to premature death by hunger and thirst more than 3 billion people of the world,” read the headline in Castro’s article in the Communist Party daily Granma, which asserted that US President George Bush’s support of using crops to produce ethanol for cars could deplete food stocks in developing nations.