US policy on aid is 'wicked' - Meacher

Independent ^ | 01 December 2002 | By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor

[lavaroise]

US policy on aid is 'wicked' - Meacher By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor 01 December 2002 Forcing starving countries to accept genetically modified (GM) food in aid is "wicked", Michael Meacher, the environment minister, said late last week. He called for "anger to be harnessed" against the policy, which is being vigorously pushed by the United States government.

Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique and other southern African countries have refused to accept GM food from the US even though some 12 million people in the region are threatened with famine.

The US , for its part, refused to supply the non-GM grain they requested. Top American officials claim that Americans were eating GM food without ill-effects. One said: "Beggars can't be choosers."

But the African governments say the effects of GM food on health are unknown. They add that poor farmers would be bound to plant GM grain to grow new crops, and would no longer be able to export produce to Europe.

Mr Meacher has been told by experts that plenty of non-GM food is available. He told a meeting last week: "It is wicked, when there is such an excess of non-GM food aid available, for GM to be forced on countries for reasons of GM politics. If there is an area where anger needs to be harnessed, it is here."

Meanwhile Dr Tewolde Egziabher, the manager of Ethiopia's Environmental Protection Authority and one of the Third World's leading authorities on GM food, accused the US of "using the famine to push" GM food. Ethiopia is also facing famine, with 14 million people at risk. He said that his country would not accept GM food aid unless it was milled to prevent it being planted

[lavaroise]

Apparently they want the luxury good, or, rather, they just want to make aid Politicaly correct, using politicaly correctness cleansing of AMericans. This is evil.

[lavaroise]

bump

[dighton]

Right, I've seen that clown's name before.

[Fixit]

"Beggars can't be choosers."

Ummm, it isn't the starving folks that are making this decision, it is their well fed leaders, using starvation as a weapon, who have the luxury of choosiness.

[Bikers4Bush]

F em', if they don't want it fine but DEMANDING something be not GM when they are being given it for free is insane.

Let them starve and kill each other off. Mother nature has her own way of handling the ungrateful.

[exmarine]

It's "wicked" according to what standard - the goddess Mother Earth's? I'm shaking in my boots. These earth worshippers are hilarious.

[lavaroise]

MICHAEL MEACHER, the environment minister who proposed a ban on owning second homes, has been revealed as a serial property purchaser, with two houses and three flats.

My goodness, the guy is wicked. He is obviously not applying logic of deed but logic of evil heart and soul. he must perform his enviro cleansing around so he must own all those things to do those things... Yep. I heard that one before.

[theFIRMbss]

>He called for "anger to be harnessed"...

Perhaps this fruit cake
would like to see some "third world
anger" get "harnessed,"

strapped into a plane,
and crashed into a building.
Really, it's this kind

of "establishment"
acceptance of the West as
evil that powers

the total psychos
to their self sacrifices
and mass homicides.

If the press didn't
cover these nuts, nobody
would ever hear them!

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Residents of Harare wait on the roadside for a lift next to part of a kilometer-long fuel line, December 18, 2002. Zimbabwe is suffering its worst fuel shortage and economic crisis due to a critical shortage of foreign currency. REUTERS/Howard Burditt

GM Foods Debate Hits Latin America (OneWorld.net) ***... Argentina are all at very different points on the path to acceptance of genetically modified (GM) foods....... the European Union proposed stricter labeling and traceability of all food and animal feed containing more than 0.9 percent genetically modified ingredients......."The fear of Europe is keeping food out of the mouths of hungry people in Africa," Hegwood said, adding that African governments are needlessly concerned that the food aid... *** - Dec 17 6:52 AM ET

[JasonC]

Thing is, it is "fear" only in the most charitable sense. The reality is that protectionists are purposefully ginning up ignorant luddite fears in a conscious effort to create discriminate against American exports. There hasn't been non-GM food, strictly speaking, since the paleolithic age.

Agriculture is -based- on selective breeding of grains and of livestock lines for characteristics we find more useful. The ideology being peddled by "deep ecologists" on the subject is in fact based on an "ideal" of hunter gatherer existence, pre-agriculture. Which only supported a human population on the order of 1% of the present figure. Taken literally, it would condemn not a few millions in Africa, but 99% of the human race, to death by starvation.

In the early 1970s, econuts predicted a global food shortage and mass starvation by, at the latest, the 1980s. They were completely wrong, because science has boosted the productivity of agriculture several fold, faster than increases in population. As a result, the calories available per person are higher today than they have ever been.

But the scaremongers built their whole "key to history" prophecies on food scarcity. Fundamentally because they don't know economics, and still believe Malthusian claptrap that has been dated for over 100 years - but which they have re-imported from Marxism, etc. When the prophecies of a leftist ideology do not come true, they never admit they were wrong or revise their ideas. Instead, they seek power and use that power to revise reality, to fit their ideology.

That is what is going on here. The same people who told you in the 1970s that everyone was going to starve by the mid 1980s are frustrated it hasn't happened. They discovered the reason their prediction was wrong: they ignored the link between growing scientific knowledge and food productivity.

Rather than celebrate this as a wonderful thing for humanity, they then attack it, trying to destroy the thing that made their prophecies fail to come true. They want to break the link between scientific progress - which is unlimited - and food supply. Because they want a limited food supply. Because a limited food supply is behind their demands for all sorts of other limits to growth.

And their demands for all sorts of limits to growth is behind their argument against capitalism and free economics. It is behind their claims to run everything by central planning by boards of ideologues. Their power, their prophecies, their belief systems, are all predicated on world wide failure, catastrophe, and famine. If those don't occur, they must bring them about.

They are really quite exactly that nuts, and that evil.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Excellent post. They are evil.

[Bob Buchholz]

But the African governments say the effects of GM food on health are unknown.

However the effects of starvation are well known. Let's take the possible evil we don't know over the certain evil we do know. IDIOTS!

[theFIRMbss]

>Agriculture is -based- on selective breeding of grains and of livestock lines for characteristics we find more useful.

Yes, but our stone age
ancestors who made the jump
to agriculture

never took the genes
from, say, some insect and put
them into some plant.

Genetic techniques
are creating things we can
only imagine

the consequences
of. And imagination
has been known to fail.

But if it fails in
this context, the results could
be catastrophic.

[tuna_battle]

You forgot the "barf alert"! Where's that gif of the kid vomiting? I can't find it!

[Paulus Invictus]

Let them eat non-GM cake!

[Rockitz]

Bump!

[JasonC]

Virtually all of the stuff being opposed as "GM" food is based on techniques equivalent to selective breeding. In a few cases, genes from similar plants are transfered to slightly different plants. There is precious little more than that going on. We have been "playing god" with life forms for ages - yeast, yogurt, cheese to corn and wheat to cows, sheep, horses, dogs, to chickens, pigeons, etc.

As for the idea that anything might happen so we cannot possible do anything, it is superstitious luddism of the first water. It amounts to submitting ourselves to whoever says "boo" the loudest. I can allege absolutely any consequence to absolutely any activity. I can inflate the size of the downside to any degree, up to an including eternal damnation. If low or no probability worries are supposed to constrain you due to the size of the alleged downside, see Pascal and get to church.

Rationality begins when you instead look at the known probability of anything going wrong. And there isn't any. We've tinkered for ages without the slightest negative consequence. We can tinker some more if we don't particularly like the results of the last round, and do so regularly. The result has been a dramatic, continuous trend of agricultural productivity increases, with the same scale of inputs, for longer than records can be found.

When all scientific knowledge, ages of past precendent, the welfare and survival of mankind on the present scale are all on one side of the ledger, and on the other side is a bare allegation of completely unspecified superstitious worries, we are supposed to consider it rational to weigh the latter more heavily than the former? That is just plain crazy. You might as well say, "since everything is subtly connected to everything else, if I don't throw salt over my left shoulder right now the sun might go supernova. Better not risk it".

When the consequences are completely innocuous personal inconveniences, it is merely raving nonsense to indulge such superstitious fears. But when it involves starving millions of other people to death, not to mention wrecking the ability to feed the present population of the world for the long term future, it is not at all innocuous. It is genocide by witch scare, and as such is a moral outrage.

[semaj]

I would like to know on what evidence do they base the claim that genetically modified grain poses harm to anyone who ingests said grain? Any nutritionists/horticulturalists out there?

[theFIRMbss]

>Rationality begins when you instead look at the known probability of anything going wrong.

I hope you are right.
There's no history, however,
for what happens when

people start switching
genes from species to species.
Because we're the first

people to do it.
That's why I said we have to
only imagine

the consequences.
There are no precedents for
transgenic transfers.

Or, for that matter,
for nanotechnology.
These technologies

are not updated,
simple extrapolations
of past nuts and bolts.

They are profoundly
different with their own unique
characteristics.

Maybe the future
will have the same ups and downs
we saw in the past.

But just as may be
it is reasonable to
worry that the new

ups and downs will be
different from the past as
the technologies

themselves differ from
past technologies. In fact,
the differences

led Bill Joy to write,
"Why the Future Doesn't Need
Us" -- Not because he's

a luddite. Rather
because the particular
characteristics

that let computers
radically change cyberlife
are coming "on line"

in the non-cyber,
real, material world in
the guise of things like

transgenic work and
nanotechnology. Don't
panic. But don't blink.

[JasonC]

Of course Bill Joy is a luddite of the first water. And there is nothing rational about it. But the case of GM is decidedly worse than his scaremongering. It is patently irrational on its face, not simply a different assessment of a possible future.

These people are objecting to eating - not planting, eating - corn meal. Which is mostly starch, which human digestion reduces to sugar, and small amounts of plant protein, which human digestion reduces to component amino acids. This is madness. They are pretending it is "poisoned", as in "possessed by some unseen demon" that will "curse" them with "sickness".

Why? Because the corn plant the kernels grew from is resistent to this or that pest. As though anything about the corn's genetic program is being used in their digestive tract. As though sugars and amino acids are "dangerous poison" if they don't come from a "natural" (read, sinless and therefore magically pure) corn plant.

The reason we can eat every variety of ground grain, including all the strains we have ever developed by selective breeding, is because the differences between those strains don't matter a tuppenny darn in our digestion. Because the difference between the plants and -us- don't matter in our digestion. That is -why- we can eat them and get nutrition out of it.

We build our bodies by -our- genetic programs, not those of the things we eat. That is why we can eat all sorts of things, from a fungus (mushrooms) to a cow (steak). But these luddites play on popular ignorance in the matter, and mystical nonsense growing from such ignorance. The proteins and sugars from which cellular structures are made do not change one iota from life form to life form; that is why we can eat them. They likewise do not change one iota from "natural" strain to GM strain.

Which, no surprise, is why an American populace that has been eating GM food for decades is among the healthiest in the world. Our main problem is that we overeat because we have such abundant access to cheap food in whatever quantities we desire, including the poorer among us. Not exactly what the scaremongers were selling in the early 1970s, is it?

When starving people are denied corn meal out of superstitious fear, and die in consequence, those peddling those superstitions become murderers. Being wrong about the "population bomb" and other such nonsense was plain stupid, decades ago. Trying to make up for it by attacking GM food today - which is exactly what is going on - is practicing genocide rather than admitting past error. It is disgusting, and does not deserve defense.