GREENIE IMPERIALISM

In the Third World the hostility against ecoimperialism from the West is growing. This ecoimperialism in practised both by western governments and western NGOs. In international trade negotiations, for instance, western governments urge the developing countries to adopt high environmental standards, based on the argument that the playing field of worldwide competition must be level. Developing countries reject these standards as a luxury they cannot afford. In their current stage of economic development, growth comes first.

But besides governments, NGOs play an important role. Deepak Lal, an economist of Indian descent, who teaches development studies in the US, compares the behaviour of western NGOs, such as Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, with the proselytic zeal of western missionaries in the past. He sees environmental radicalism as a modern secular Christian crusade, which has replaced the saving of souls for the saving of spaceship Earth. In his view, their primary goal is to prevent the economic development. Therefore, he argues that green radicalism needs to be fiercely resisted, because only economic development offers the world's poor any chance of escaping their age old poverty.

Green radicalism may be very harmful. It can even be a mortal threat. A dramatic example was the murder of the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, in May of this year, by an animal rights activist. But, however tragic this has been, it was 'just' a single event. More serious is the systemic and less visible menace of green radicalism, which puts the livelihood and even lives of millions of people at risk. In term of numbers of victims, the megaterror of al-Qaeda looks pale compared with the impact of green fundamentalism.

Examples abound. Lal points, for instance, at the shipbreaking at Alang in Gujarat. India is a signatory to the Basel Convention, which by defining various metals as 'hazardous,' controls trade in waste, scrap and recyclable materials. Greenpeace is using the treaty to organise a total embargo on trade with developing countries, excluding them from global scrap metal markets. This is already having deleterious effects. It may threaten the livelihood of one million people, who are directly or indirectly involved in this industry.

Another example relates to the ban on DDT. According to Lal, this substance is still the most cost-effective controller of diseases spread by bugs like flies and mosquitoes that has ever been produced. The US National Academy of Sciences estimated it had saved 500 million lives from malaria by 1970. In India, DDT spraying had reduced the number of malaria cases from 75 million in 1951 to around 50,000 in 1961, and the number of malaria deaths from nearly a million in the 1940s to a few thousand in the 1960s. But in the 1970s, foreign aid agencies and various UN organisations began to take a jaundiced view of DDT, and the use of DDT declined. Not surprisingly, the mosquitoes hit back and endemic malaria returned to India. By 1997 the UNDP's Human Development Report 2000 estimates there were about 2.6 million malaria cases.

GM (genetically modified) foods offer still another example. The recent scare about GM food equally needs to be resisted, argues Lal. The Green Revolution having disproved the doomsters predictions that the world would not be able to feed a burgeoning population, they are now attempting to stop the next stage in the agricultural revolution offered by bio-technology. GM crops provide major economic benefits as they have reduced pesticide applications, higher yields and lower consumer prices. Yet, particularly in Europe, the Greens - again led by Greenpeace - have created mass hysteria about these crops, labeling them as Frankenstein foods. But if GM crops are the creation of a Frankenstein, so is virtually everything we eat. Any method that uses life forms to make or modify a product is biotechnology: brewing beer or making leavened bread is a 'traditional' biotechnology application. There is no danger to health or the environment from GM food. Since 1994, more than 300 million North Americans have been eating several dozen GM foods, but not one problem with health or the environment has been noted. Yet the hysteria continues.

In all these cases Third World governments have yielded to, or weakly defended them, against green pressures. Yet at the at the recent World Summit in Johannesburg, they showed growing resistance. It was, for instance, expected that Johannesburg would canonize the Kyoto Treaty on the reduction of man-made greenhouse gasses, especially CO2. But with the support of the Third World the opponents of Kyoto succeeded to prevent this, just as they did at the recent climate talks in New Delhi. This has been a most fortunate outcome, because Kyoto's scientific base is fatally flawed. It will cost hundreds of billions of dollars annually. It represents a frontal attack to our system of free enterprise, because it legitimizes all kinds of government intervention in the economy. And it is utterly ineffective in terms of cooling (only 0.02 degrees Celsius in 2050). Against this background it is no exaggeration to qualify Kyoto as a serious case of collective insanity. Or, to put it in other words, an exercise in modern day rain dancing ... and equally effective. The Third World emphasised that it wanted access to cheap energy. In their view, renewable energy sources, which are two to three times as expensive, are something which only the rich countries can afford.

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THE GREENIE ATTACK ON INDIA

Some excerpts from the article by Prof. Lal referred to above

Among the two other treaties currently under negotiation, which India should have nothing to do with, are the POPs (Persistent Organic Pollutants) Treaty and the Biodiversity convention. These are attempts to ban DDT and GM food. As both are of vital interest to India's future, it maybe worth saying something more on these.

The Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) Framework Convention is being negotiated under pressure from environmental groups, who want a binding treaty to ban `persistent organic pollutants': defined as pesticides, industrial chemicals and their by-products. DDT is sought to be banned under the treaty. If India foolishly signs this convention it will seriously damage the nation's health. For DDT is the most cost-effective controller of diseases spread by bugs like flies and mosquitoes that has ever been produced. The US National Academy of Sciences estimated it had saved 500 million lives from malaria by 1970. In India, effective spraying had virtually eliminated the disease by the 1960s, so much so that the mosquito nets which were ubiquitous in my childhood had disappeared from urban houses by the time I was at University in the late 1950s. DDT spraying had reduced the number of malaria cases from 75 million in 1951 to around 50,000 in 1961, and the number of malaria deaths from nearly a million in the 1940s to a few thousand in the 1960s.

But then in the 1970s largely as a result of an environmental scare promoted by Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring, foreign aid agencies and various UN organisations began to take a jaundiced view of DDT, and the use of DDT declined. Not surprisingly, the mosquitoes hit back and endemic malaria returned to India. By 1997 the UNDP's Human Development Report 2000 estimates there were about 2.6 million malaria cases.

The same story of a decline and rise in disease with the increase and decrease in DDT spraying can be told about kala-azar, which is spread by the sand fly. DDT largely rid India of kala-azar in the 1950s and 1960s. But, with the subsequent decline in DDT use it has come back. The State Minister of Health in Bihar recently informed the Assembly that, 408 people had died, and 12,000 were afflicted with the disease in 30 districts of Northern Bihar.

So why did DDT fall out of disfavour despite its demonstrated merits? It was Rachel Carson in 1962 who started the DDT scare with her claim that its use had devastating effects on bird life, particularly those higher up the food chain. It was also claimed it caused hepatitis in humans. Numerous scientific studies showed these fears to be baseless. It was shown to be safe to humans, causing death only if eaten like pancakes! In 1971 the distinguished biologist Philip Handler as President of the US National Academy of Science said, "DDT is the greatest chemical that has ever been discovered." Commission after commission, expert after Nobel Prize-winning expert has given DDT a clean bill of health (see E.M. Whelan, 1985: Toxic Terror).....

Once again, the environmentalists are willing to ban DDT because they are willing to sacrifice human lives for those of birds. This underlying misanthropy of the environmentalists is explicitly brought out by the following statement by Ehrlich about India: "I came to understand the population explosion emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi. . . . The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping, people visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people."

The recent scare about GM (genetically modified) food equally needs to be resisted. The Green Revolution having disproved the doomsters predictions that the world would not be able to feed a burgeoning population, they are now attempting to stop the next stage in the agricultural revolution offered by bio-technology. As the father of the Green Revolution Norman Borlaug, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, has recently noted: though "the Green Revolution is [not] over, as increases in crop management productivity can be made all along the line: in tillage, water use, fertilisation, weed and pest control and harvesting, however, for the genetic improvement of food crops to continue at a pace sufficient to meet the needs of the 8.3 billion people projected to be on this planet at the end of the quarter century both conventional technology and biotechnology are needed" (Borlaug, 2000).

In 1995 there were 4 million acres of biotech crops planted, which had risen to 100 million in 1999. In the US 50 per cent of the soybean crop and more than one-third of the corn crop were transgenic in 1999. These GM crops provide major economic benefits as they have reduced pesticide applications, higher yields and lower consumer prices. (Krattiger (2000). They have been readily adopted where they have been introduced. Yet, particularly in Europe, the Greens - again led by Greenpeace - have created mass hysteria about these crops, labelling them as Frankenstein foods.

But if GM crops are the creation of a Frankenstein, so is virtually everything we eat. Any method that uses life forms to make or modify a product is biotechnology: brewing beer or making leavened bread is a `traditional' biotechnology application. As Borlaug states: "The fact is that genetic modification started long before humankind started altering crops by artificial selection. "Mother Nature" did it, often in a big way. For example, the wheat groups we rely on for much of our food supply are the result of unusual (but natural) crosses between different species of grasses. Today's bread wheat is the result of the hybridisation of three different plant genomes, each containing a set of seven chromosomes, and thus could easily be classified as transgenic....

Nor is there any danger to health or the environment from GM food as has been repeatedly noted: by a 2100 signatory declaration in support of biotechnology by scientists worldwide, by the US National Academy of Science, by the US House of Representatives Committee on Science and by a Nuffield Foundation study in the UK. Since 1994, more than 300 million North Americans have been eating several dozen GM foods grown on more than 100 million acres, but not one problem with health or the environment has been noted. (Whelan, 2000). Yet the hysteria continues. To see the misanthropy at its heart, there is no better example than that of the miracle `golden rice'.

Scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Zurich) and the International Rice Research Institute (Philippines) have successfully transferred genes producing beta-carotene, a precursor of Vitamin A, into rice to increase the quantities of vitamin A, iron and other micronutrients. As the GM rice produces beta carotene it has a bronze-orange appearance, hence its name `golden rice'. It promises to have a profound effect on the lives of millions suffering from Vitamin A and iron deficiencies which lead to blindness and anemia respectively. It has been estimated that more than 180 million children, mostly in developing countries suffer from Vitamin A deficiency, of whom two million die from it each year. About a billion people suffer anemia from iron deficiency. The new golden rice is being distributed free of charge to public rice breeding institutions around the world. Millions will be able to reduce their risks of these disabling costs at little or no cost.

Yet as the inventor of `golden rice' Professor Ingo Portykus has noted, though it satisfies all the demands of the Greens they still oppose it. As he notes, the new rice has not been developed by or for industry; benefits the poor and disadvantaged; provides a sustainable, cost free solution, not requiring other resources; is given free of charge and restrictions to subsistence farmers; can be resown each year from the saved harvest; does not reduce agricultural biodiversity; does not affect natural biodiversity; has no negative effect on the environment; has no conceivable risk to consumer health and could not have been developed with traditional methods.

But, notes Prof. Potrykus: "The GMO opposition is doing everything to prevent `golden rice' reaching the subsistence farmer. We have learned that the GMO opposition has a hidden, political agenda. It is not so much the concern about the environ-ment, or the health of the consumer, or the help for the disadvantaged. It is a radical fight against technology and for political success" (Potrykus, 2000).

There we have it. The Green movement is a modern secular religious movement engaged in a worldwide crusade to impose its `habits of the heart' on the world. Its primary target is to prevent the economic development which alone offers the world's poor any chance of escaping their age old poverty. This modern-day secular Christian crusade has exchanged the saving of souls for saving Spaceship Earth. It needs to be fiercely resisted.

First, by standing up to the local converts - the modern day descendants of what the Chinese called `rice Christians' and `secondary barbarians' - the Arundhati Roys, Vandana Shivas and Medha Patkars of this world. Their argument that their views are in consonance with Hindu cosmology are reminiscent of those used by the proselytising Christians promoting a syncretised Christianity in the nineteenth century, and are equally derisory.

Second, by refusing to accept the transnational treaties and conventions which the Greens are promoting to legislate their ends. As many of the environmental ministries have become outposts of their local converts, the economic ministries must play a central role in resisting this Green imperialism, by insisting on having the last say on any transnational treaty India signs. As China has shown, through its continuing production and use of DDT and continuing development of GM technology, there is no need to give into this latest manifestation of western cultural imperialism, and in this fight, as the shining example of Julian Simon shows, there are still many in the West itself, who have not been infected with this secular Christian religion, and will join in showing up the Greens and their agenda as paper tigers, much as the Christian missionaries found in the last phase of western imperialism.

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Kyoto treaty opposed in Japan: "One of the reasons the U.S. Senate unanimously rejected the Kyoto Protocol was the treaty's disproportionate punishment of the U.S. economy relative to other nations. The economies of nations with a lighter burden than the United States are nevertheless beginning to feel the economic pains associated with Kyoto. The Asahi Shimbun reported on October 4 that Japanese companies are beginning to flex their muscles in opposition to environmental taxes connected with the Kyoto Protocol. Industry has reacted negatively to suggestions from the agriculture and environment ministries that some form of carbon tax is needed."

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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