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Africa Subsaharan
Keeping Africa on the brink of starvation
2020-02-24
Watts Up With That? via Instapundit
Billions of desert locusts have descended again on East Africa. Crawling first, then sprouting wings and flying in hungry hoards of 40-150 million or more, they are devastating crops and threatening tens of millions of people with lost livelihoods and starvation. This latest locust plague, says the United Nations, is the worst in 70 years for Kenya, the worst in 25 years for Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia.

...Incredibly, this looming catastrophe is due to policies and programs that have been officially adopted and deliberately implemented by the very UN agencies that are now crying loudest about the horrific situation.

For years now, the FAO, UN Development Programme and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) have been working in cahoots with some of the most radical environmentalist pressure groups on Earth to devise and impose "agroecology" ‐ a perverse combination of socialism, pseudo-ecology and primitive, anti-technology agriculture. The program is financed and advanced by the UN, by European governments via their development agencies and funding of environmentalist NGOs ‐ and even by US taxpayers, who provide 22% of UN funding and underwrite grants to and tax-exempt status for environmentalist groups.

Agroecology is above all political. It rejects virtually everything that has enabled modern agriculture to feed billions more people from less acreage. It rabidly opposes monoculture farming, hybrid seeds, synthetic/non-organic insecticides and fertilizers, biotechnology ... and even mechanized equipment like tractors! It claims Dr. Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution, which saved a billion people from starvation, did little more than put global food production "under the control of a few transnational corporations."

Acceptance of agroecology tenets and restrictions has become a condition for poor farmers getting seeds, and their countries and local communities getting development loans and food aid. Mid-level bureaucrats get cushy jobs overseeing and propagandizing agroecology campaigns, while ruling elites get more opportunities to siphon off additional millions in international aid money. They still erect roadblocks to Golden Rice, which could save 2 million parents and children a year from blindness and death.

AgroEcology advocates extol "food sovereignty" and the "right to subsistence farming." They promote "indigenous agricultural knowledge and practices," to the exclusion of knowledge, practices, technologies and equipment that have been developed in recent decades ‐ and could help end Africa’s perpetual poverty, malnutrition, disease, joblessness and early death. They sow fear about pesticides and GM food.
So, I've a question: Who are the real racists? These who think that African-Americans are drunk on white guilt? Or whose who starve millions of Africans?
Posted by:g(r)omgoru

#5  Protein. Crunch. Salty snacks.
What's not to like?
Posted by: Lex   2020-02-24 12:24  

#4  Children open to seeing insect-based meals on school dinner menu, study suggests


Posted by: Skidmark   2020-02-24 11:54  

#3  Let me know when it starts getting dark, 'kay?
Posted by: AlanC   2020-02-24 08:06  

#2  /\ Every modern ill known to the dark continent can be traced to the colonial period.

[sarc off]
Posted by: Besoeker   2020-02-24 07:36  

#1  Locust are the least cause of their food shortages problems. Kleptocrats and other tribal thieves have been destroying its food independence since those racist white colonials departed.
Posted by: Procopius2k   2020-02-24 07:30  

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