Don’t forget to check my latest over at Glibertarians – this week it’s the first installment in a new fiction series.
Now: Much of Europe (and, frankly, the U.S.) in their green, “sustainable agriculture” activism, has traded one kind of condescending colonizing for another in Africa. We’ve discussed this before; now here’s another good piece on that topic. Excerpt:
Are you a white person who believes you have a moral imperative to introduce your superior belief system to brown and black people in other countries who have not yet been converted?
No, you’re not a 19th century European missionary, you work at a modern European environmental NGO.
That reads provocative, even inflammatory, but it may be happening. And agroecology academics want to stop it before it is too late.
Europe has made it plain that they want European laws to be earth’s laws. If a developing nation uses a safe pesticide that Europe has still chosen to ban, Europe will put them in their economic ghetto, along with imports from Israel.
In Africa, promoting alternatives to agricultural science that inhibit self-sufficiency has meant continued dependence on Europe. Without science, Africans cannot grow food cheaper than they can buy it. From Europe. Where a cow gets twice as much money each year just in government subsidies as a worker in Sub-Saharan Africa can earn.
Most of Africa is not the natural breadbasket Europe is, they need science to offset the effects of drought, hold off pests, and to simply allow themselves to utilize the Great Equalizer that the modern world of science and technology provides.
A field plowed by a man with an ox does not make more nutritious food than a tractor will
If the developing world was not held back by European scaremongers, all of their food could be affordable and locally grown. Emissions due to shipping would plummet. America currently has more open land than the entire continent of Africa and if the rest of the world adopted America’s acceptance of science, Whole Foods shoppers aside, farmland equivalent to the entire country of India now in use could revert to nature.
Seriously, for all the cries of “racist” emanating from the Left these days, it’s rather baffling how they don’t seem to notice – or just studiously ignore – this casual, condescending racism in their own ranks.
If the European and American Left really wanted to help African agriculture, well, first stop sending them food and start sending them tractors. John Deere has done more to end food shortages in the world than all the NGOs and UN committees throughout history ever could. Then, drop the idiotic bans on GMOs and safe fertilizers and pesticides. Africa is more than capable of feeding itself if the racist agitators in Europe and the States would just get the hell out of the way.
Africa has a lot of problems. Many, if not most of them can be laid at the feet of corrupt dictators that run many of the countries there. But this is one case where the developed world could help just by minding their own damn business, which when you get right down to it is a good idea for nations – and people – in general.
