Let Them Eat Organic Cake!

Despite the opposition of President Bush to federal subsidies for embryonic stem cell research, the United States isn’t the only jurisdiction that has had problems coming to terms with the implications of the genetic revolution. Ronald Bailey reports on EU intransigence on genetically modified (GM) crops, and how these EU regulations are having dire consequences for the livelihoods of the world’s poor people:

[T]he constituency of anti-biotech environmental groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth is not poor African and Asian farmers and their families, but affluent and easily frightened European consumers. In response to ferocious pressure ginned up by the misleading campaigns of ideological environmentalists, EU politicians and bureaucrats have built an all but impenetrable wall of anti-biotech regulations around themselves. Wielding these onerous crop biotechnology regulations, the EU, on specious safety grounds, has essentially banned the importation of most biotech crops and foods. But these regulations do not only have consequences for European farmer and consumers.

The EU wants to export its regulatory system to the world, and it is offering “capacity building” foreign aid to persuade developing countries to adopt its no-go or go-slow approach to crop biotechnology regulations. Even more tragically, some developing countries are so afraid of the EU’s anti-biotech wrath that they are willing to risk the lives of millions of their hungry by rejecting food aid that contains genetically enhanced crops.

Activists usually blame the inaction of rich countries for killing people in poor countries. However, instead of outrage here, we get Greenpeace geneticist Doreen Stabinsky primly quipping in the Post-Dispatch, “Hunger is not solved by producing more food. We’re the breadbasket of the world, and we have hungry people in the U.S.”

Hunger may not be solved by producing more food, but it sure couldn’t hurt.

There’s a saying, that if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; but if you teach him to fish, you feed him for a life time. What the anti-biotech groups’ approach boils down to is a refusal to teach their poorer neighbors to fish. This is unsurprising, as such groups are generally anti-liberal (in that they expect government to provide), and dispensing immediate aid doesn’t require teaching anyone how to be self-sufficient. This is of a piece with the anti-liberal hostility toward individual responsibility. (Do not confuse this with the liberal sympathy for the plight of the poor, as true liberals advocate both giving the man a fish and teaching him to fish.)

Rather odd, given the chidings that Americans are usually subjected to from Europeans dismissing our supposedly parochial attitudes toward technology. You’d think they’d know better. Then again, if their own farmers were at least marginally more efficient, they wouldn’t have to import food and thus run the risk of importing GM foods. Try telling that to someone in Brussels.

[Cross-posted at Between Worlds]

Lomborg Sets Priorities

Lomborg debates Pope of the Sierra Club in Foreign Policy. (From A&L.) His conclusion:

No matter how much money we raise, we should still spend it wisely. If investing in cookers is more cost effective than windmills, we should do the cookers first. It really isn’t more complicated. Advocacy groups understandably want to focus on headline–grabbing issues, such as mercury, mangroves, and global warming. But when we emphasize some problems, we get less focus on others. It has been hard to get you to say what the world should not do first. Such a strategy is, naturally, less charming. But if we really want to do good in the long run, it is more honest to put those terms on paper.

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Basted in Melted Blubber

The world faced an ecological crisis. Whaling had driven several species to the edge of complete extinction. Unless something was done, and done fast, it was possible that many whale species would be wiped from the world’s oceans in less than a decade.

So the International Whaling Commission was formed in order to place limits on the number of whales which could be harvested each year. The preliminary work was done in the 1930’s with the signing of the International Agreement for the Regulation of Whaling.

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Happy 91st to Borlaug

Instapundit notes that today is/yesterday was the 91st birthday of Norman Borlaug, Nobel Prize winner and Aggie. More than any other single person, he made life better in the second half of the twentieth century. Today, when our blog is heavy with disputes over death counts and the death watch in Florida continues, we can celebrate Borlaug and thank him for what he has done, for the billions he has saved. We can be grateful that one pragmatic man set about (and still sets about) making the world a better place.

Already in his seventies twenty years ago, Borlaug turned his attention to Africa. We are sometimes critical of Carter on this blog (and I think reasonably so), but his union with the father of the Green Revolution appears to bring out the best in the peanut farmer from Georgia – and the best in African soil.

And, thinking of Borlaug, I feel a broader gratitude. To the Chicagoboyz, grateful they let me play on their blog, respectful of the Great Books tradition that influenced so much of our plains life and came from Chicago. And I will go pretty far with them in terms of reducing government, but I am also grateful that in 1862 a Vermont congressman, Justin Smith Morrill, envisioned the Land Grant Schools that have not only educated farm kids (like me, my siblings, my husband, my parents) for the last hundred and forty years but also increased life expectancy- a fact that trumps much.

Our life is mundane, but it sparks the imagination: we sit in the middle of the largest campus in the world as experimental fields stretch for miles. And now Aggies are planting crops in Iraq.

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An Immortal Lie

A letter to the editor, Sydney Morning Herald:

You may want to suggest to Alan Ramsey that he do a little fact-checking before embarrassing himself in print, if indeed he is capable of embarrassment. Perhaps he was pressed for time, but his March 9 column was mostly a reprint of a speech Bill Moyers made, in which said that “delusional” American Christians supported the destruction of the environment and the expansion of Israeli settlements in order to hasten the Apocalypse. In support of this assertion, he quoted former Secretary of the Interior James Watt as saying “After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.” Mr. Ramsey may not be aware that Mr. Moyers formally apologized to Mr. Watt for using an entirely fictional quote. Since I am clearly a delusional right-wing fanatic, I invite you to consult a more credible source: Editor and Publisher’s website.

Please note the timeline: Mr. Moyers made his speech on December 1, 2004. The speech and the quote were published by a variety of newspapers, some more obscure than others, and reached the Washington Post on February 6, 2005. Mr. Watt demanded an apology and received one on February 9. Yet Mr. Ramsey reprinted the speech with its counterfeit quote on March 9. If you have no objection to paying Mr. Ramsey for recycling someone else’s three month-old speech – an admirable effort in conservation – I suppose I should not care whether the Sydney Morning Herald receives value for its money. As Mr. Ramsey himself says, “If not you deserve everything you get, even if the rest of us don’t.” Or if you favor the use of quotations, consider this one from Mark Twain: “One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.” And unlike Messrs. Ramsey and Moyers, I can furnish the source for that one.

Update: I should have included a reference to the original challengers to Moyer’s “higher truth.” The mad geniuses at Power Line, John Hinderaker in particular, drove this story. What a pity that professional journalists can’t be bothered to do for pay what Hindrocket does for love of the truth.