Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Vandana Shiva Calls For Death By Starvation For 3 Billion People

This all started on Facebook. Someone I friended "liked" an article by Vandana Shiva, titled "Time to End War Against the Earth".

Go ahead and read it. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Now that you're back, I'll get started.

I'm curious. How does Ms. Shiva reconcile her opposition to industrial agriculture with the work of Dr. Norman Borlaug, whose work with industrial agriculture and the development of stem rust-resistant and drought-resistant wheat was directly responsible for allowing India's agriculture to go from being able to support around 500 million people (in the 1960's) to over a billion people (today)? Today, thanks in large part to his work, hunger is overwhelmingly a political issue - not an ecological issue.

If not for his work, and the drought-resistant and pesticide-resistant crops that derive from his work (not to mention the pesticides and the fertilizers that she decries), every other human being in the Indian subcontinent would either be dead or would not have been born.

Ms. Shiva calls for "earth democracy" and "fundamental human rights". As Dr. Borlaug observed, "Almost certainly, however, the first essential component of social justice is adequate food for all mankind," and "Food is the moral right of all who are born into this world."

Perhaps Ms. Shiva would like to start suggesting which among us should die, as we abandon our current practices and return to a "sustainable" (but far less productive) mode of agriculture? After all, based on India, it should only be around 3 billion or so human beings.

Her hypocrisy is both overwhelming and nauseating.

Oh, for further reading: http://www.sirc.org/news/vandana_shiva_reith.html

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