Lynas Spanks One Out for Genetic Engineering, Again

It's good to read a simple article by a Kenyan in a Kenyan newspaper about staple crops rather than cash crops for export being the key to tackling poverty. Many people probably suspect that it is true, but we are constantly blasted with articles about luxury fruits and vegetables for the European market and cash crops that make Kenyan farmers very little money but sell well in the West.

The article refers to a study brief by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) called Strategies and Priorities for African Agriculture. The study concludes that "producing more staple crops such as maize, pulses, and roots and more livestock products tends to reduce poverty further than producing more export crops such as coffee or cut flowers". IFPRI is connected with some of the big bullies among the multinationals and some heavy handed Western governments, but they can still produce sensible research, it seems.

Unfortunately, all the mainstream media are taking an interest in Mark Lynas' supposed conversion from environmentalist to promoter of genetic engineering (GE). Lynas spanked one out in public for GE over 18 months ago. Perhaps the press weren't quite ready then for such a shocking conversion, or they had other things on their mind. But back in July 2011 Lynas claimed that Africa must embrace GM technology to abolish hunger and malnutrition.

Lynas would be well aware that his claims are utter rubbish, so one can only conclude that he is making them for reasons that don't relate to science or anything too academic. All the more surprising that he considers opposition to GE to be 'anti-scientific'. Even his own arguments are not primarily about the science of GE, but the economics; and his arguments are based on falsehoods.

Back then, Lynas said "One of the most pervasive myths about biotech crops is that they are part of a nefarious plot by multinational seed companies such as Monsanto to dominate the world food chain." But that's pretty much how Monsanto and other GE multinationals would describe themselves, albeit using a slightly different rhetoric. Any science involved is of little relevance, which means that even someone with as little grasp of science as Lynas has can still take part in the debate, as long as they come to realize what exactly the terms of the debate are.

The most astonishing thing about GE crops is that they are so unneeded. Conventional crops have developed at a pace that GE can not keep up with; costs are also far lower; the claimed advantages of GE crops, where they didn't turn out to be exaggerations and lies, turned out to be short lived. Lynas and the GE industry are well aware of this, hence the need to keep pumping out the party line. Conventionally bred staple crops are what poor people depend on for survival, not expensive high technologies that don't perform well, despite all the hype.

For GM Lobbyists like Lynas, East African Famine is Gap in Market

Mark Lynas, who used to be an environmentalist, has become a rabid pro-GMO commentator. The title of his recent article in Kenya's Nation newspaper is:'To abolish hunger and malnutrition, Africa must embrace GM technology'.

Firstly, Lynas should know that if the world wanted to abolish hunger and malnutrition, they would have done so by now. Hunger and malnutrition are caused by lack of access to affordable and nutritious food. Even East Africa, where there is such a serious lack of access to food, has produced more than enough food in recent years.

But another thing Lynas should be aware of are the various factors that are causing food prices to spiral beyond what poor people can afford, especially in the last four or five years. Rich speculators are betting on the price of food staples rising in a world where many other sources of easy profits are more risky right now.

Growing biofuels, which require viable agricultural land and water, other things many poor people don't have access to, is also increasing the cost of food. A number of food crops are actually used to produce fuel so that rich Westerners don't have to reduce their fuel consumption.

And one of the most pernicious factors of all, land grabbing, should be very familiar to Lynas, if he has paid the slightest attention to his history lessons. Much of the best agricultural land in developing countries is not owned by poor people. That's precisely why most of them are poor.

Big multinationals, various non-African countries, speculators, wealthy individuals, pension funds and the like are all speculating in land in African countries. And even without those malign influences, much of the best land was handed over to top politicians and their families at, or soon after, independence.

That's quite a few items on the agenda that could be discussed before genetically modified organisms need even raise their ugly head. And all these items are long term trends, not something that just cropped up recently. The very threat of drought, food shortages and even famine have been noted over and over again by agencies whose job it is to warn of such possibilities.

This claimed 'need' for GMOs didn't just arise in the last few weeks, since the big news agencies, who seem so anxious to interview Lynas the expert, started taking notice and raiding their photo archives for choice photographs of dying people in dry and dusty locations. There's a stink of news manufacturing here, and a very nasty smell that is.

Lynas seems to see the problem of aid agencies simply coming up with more unsustainable strategies to deal with hunger. But that's no reason for imposing GMOs, which represent the most unsustainable strategy yet. They cost phenomenal amounts of money when you take in the long term commitments they represent and what the farmer loses by embracing them.

Farmers will have to pay inflated prices for agricultural inputs, accept the huge risks that have destroyed so many farmers in India and other countries, face lower yields after the first few years, once resistance develops to the pesticides and the fertilizer has contaminated the land and reduced yields further. And they won't be selling their produce in Europe, either.

It's strange how specific Lynas is in mentioning what he sees as "myths about biotech crops" being "part of a nefarious plot by multinational seed companies such as Monsanto to dominate the world food chain." As a former anti-GM activist and current Monsanto backscratcher, he should be aware that Monsanto's entire GMO effort is to dominate the world food chain.

All multinationals aim to dominate their field or fields of interest. Monsanto is no different in that respect. They don't even make any secret or that, except to Lynas, it seems. Does he think that Monsanto has suddenly transformed itself into a great big philanthropy engine, a jolly green giant?

If Lynas wishes to let on to be so disingenuous, others are not convinced. The Tanzania Alliance for Biodiversity (TABIO), an alliance of organizations concerned with the conservation of agricultural biodiversity for livelihood security and food sovereignty, has sent a vigorous response to Lynas's prognostications to the English Times (though I don't think it has been published yet).

This feigned innocence in reporting the GMO line as if it were an honest weighing up of the arguments doesn't wash. Lynas is not unaware of the faultlines in his 'reasoning'. That doesn't explain why he should wish to put his name to such rubbish, or be so widely reported to be doing so. But it will take a bit more than classic greenwashing to sell GMOs to anyone who has taken the trouble to study the issues.

Tomorrow's Disasters Are Preventable Today

I think most people, if they saw their child playing near a fire or in some other dangerous situation, would do something about it before an accident occurred. They wouldn't just watch and then shell out the money for hospital fees once an accident had occurred. But donor money is usually spent on clearing up after a disaster has hit.

Many children (and quite a number of adults) in developing countries are severely burned because most cooking is done on open fires, close to the ground. Donor money is sometimes forthcoming for the expensive surgery and skin grafts required by people who have suffered burns. But it's not often you come across substantial projects to provide people with alternatives to cooking on open fires, using mainly wood or charcoal.

Burning wood and charcoal accounts for a very large proportion of the carbon emissions from developing countries. Forests are fast disappearing and wood is getting more expensive and less viable as a fuel source. The use of wood and charcoal is part of a massive environemntal disaster. There are cheaper alternatives, such as solar cooking, biogas and the use of fuel briquettes made from combustible materials.

There is a lot to be gained from not burning wood and charcoal. There are the environmental benefits and safety benefits to consider. Also, people in close proximity to wood and charcoal cookers suffer from respiratory problems, one of the top killers in developing countries. Alternative fuels are cheaper, even free. And their use can reduce the time and effort taken to collect wood and produce charcoal.

But rather than see aid money go into proejcts that have these multiple advantages, we continue to direct it to big disasters. The children that suffer terrible burns, that we wish to see treated, shouldn't have to suffer these burns in the first place. The plastic and reconstructive surgeons should be concentrating on people who are not suffering from preventable injuries.

Similarly, money for surgeons and health resources is spent on reconstructing the faces of children affected by noma, which affects children suffering from malnutrition. Food security and proper nutrition would prevent many other illnesses and health conditions, in addition to noma, and would also reduce deaths, especially among infants and young people. Those who don't die from illnesses arising from insufficient food and nutrition still suffer stunted growth and retarded mental development. These are all avoidable.

The current debate about land grabbing in developing countries, where greedy multinationals are buying up huge tracts of land to grow food for rich countries, is an idle exercise if it does not go any way towards reducing this phenomenon substantially. By the time this land has been ravaged by industrial scale farming and contaminated by genetically modified organisms, it will be too late. What is the point knowing now what the consequences will be if we are not going to do anything about it?

Much of the land being grabbed is destined for biofuel production. The ridiculousness of starving people producing crops to fuel the cars of well fed people, far away, seems to be lost on us. We, the people benefitting from the increasing impoverishment of the poor, may be willing to see our governments giving large sums of aid money to starving people in the future, but we don't seem to want to do anything to prevent the circumstances that will eventually leave people starving.

Land grabbing, especially for biofuel production, results in food, water and other vital resources being exported from poor countries to rich countries. If we prevent the land grabbing now, we won't have to send aid money later to the disaster we are so busy creating.

Lomborg Preaching to the Converted, Again

As we (Ribbon of Hope) go about, visiting our various clients in and around Nakuru, we see the many and fast changing problems that people here face. Some people get through these problems well enough, others don't. It's always hard to figure out if some make it through because they are better off than others or if they are better off because they are good at getting through problems or if there is a mixture of factors.

The rains have come in some areas. This means that it is time to plant crops. If the right preparations have been made, the crops should grow and if the rains continue, there will be a good harvest. But now the rains are here, are people preparing to harvest rainwater in order to ensure they get through the next drought? Sadly, not many people harvest rainwater. This doesn't appear to be a government priority either. The government even talked about distributing cheap or free seeds and fertilizer but now, there appears to be a shortage of both seeds and fertilizer because, well, er, the government has bought up so much of them. They must have just forgotten to distribute them.

In other areas, the rains have brought too much, too quickly, and have washed away fields, crops, roads, bridges, houses and anything else in their path. Were provisions made for flooding? It appears not. Roads that have been swept away in Coast Province were not flood proof. Floods occur with amazing regularity but flood proofing is an optional extra.

There have been power cuts again recently, despite promises that these would become a thing of the past. The government, it has been claimed, have now got the extra oil they need to make up for the shortfalls in power. Perhaps they will sort it out before the next fuel shortage. But fuel shortages, like floods, droughts, famines and other disasters keep occurring and will continue to occur. They need to be planned for. Last year, politicians were talking knowingly about planning for such disasters but there is little evidence that they have achieved anything yet.

The antics of the 'environmentalist' Bjorn Lomborg are well known to those who are interested in environmental issues but Nairobi appears to have the dubious pleasure of hosting a conference organised by Lomborg's 'think tank', the Copenhagen Consensus Centre.

Strangely enough, Lomborg appears to make a valid point about the need to concentrate on some very cheap, efficient and vital development programmes, such as micro-nutrient deficiencies and intestinal parasite infestations, which affect billions of people. However, there is a need to ensure that these billions of people have access to a balanced diet. The cheapest and most sustainable solution to these problems is not to enhance foods with various supplements and to produce things like vitamin A enriched chewing gum and other headline grabbing stories. There are already plenty of foods rich in vitamin A and other micro-nutrients. It's just that many people are too poor to afford them.

Lomborg also uses the opportunity given by this smokescreen to plug his tired old argument that climate change is not caused by human activities and that we need to adapt to it rather than trying to fight it. If the money and effort spent on denying that climate change is caused by human activities were to be spent on worthwhile causes, such as the ones Lomborg mentions, a lot of good work could have been achieved by now.

Kenya can't afford to risk accepting Lomborg's puny argument. Whether climate change is caused by human activities or not, the government has to put money into sustainable sources of energy for two reasons: first, these sources of energy will still be available for the foreseeable future, unlike fossil fuels; second, the country is not able to afford these expensive and unsustainable sources of energy and they are not able to afford the costs that go with high usage of unsustainable energy sources.

On the other hand, Kenya can afford to invest in wind power (as long as they produce their own generators, rather than buying the ridiculously expensive British ones that the UK government seems hell bent on selling them); they can afford hydrothermal power, solar power, biogas and probably all sorts of other ways of reducing the country's energy bill and the bill for the pollution and environmental damage that has taken place and that continues to take place.

But what is the government doing? Boasting about the possibility of finding oil in the Eastern Province. Billions have been sunk in drilling for oil in Kenya but the point is not that they have diddly squat to show for it. The point is that they don't need to spend all this money on fossil fuels when there are so many alternatives available here.

And the politicians will continue talking about flood proofing now the rains have come and they will surely talk about rainwater harvesting when the rains have gone away. If oil is discovered, they will rake in the money and when the oil has gone they will talk about how long term thinking is required. But I guess you can't blame Lomborg for talking the Kenyan government into stupid energy policies and development agenda. Because people who listen to such arguments seem to want to believe them.

And the bit that Lomborg gets right, that we could achieve a lot by working on micro-nutrient deficiencies and intestinal parasites, has long been recognised. But these are issues that the Kenyan government has little to say about.

Al Gore's Bullshit Won't Make the Crops Grow

Today is Blog Action Day, where lots of blogs around the world all write about some aspect of climate change. I'm all for promoting environmental and climate change issues but I noticed that, pretty late in the day, Al Gore got involved in the initiative. I'm sorry that an otherwise worthwhile sounding effort feels the need to be associated with a loudmouthed freeloader who jumped on the environmental bandwaggon when his political career went off the rails. I suppose there'll always be Gores and the like, who attach themselves to something that allows them to promote their own interests.

Anyhow, developing countries like Kenya are going to bear the brunt of climate change and are probably already feeling the effects. There have been prolonged droughts in many areas for some time now. The El Nino rains are due to start soon, which may resolve some of the short term problems. But they may also increase the problems. If the rains are too heavy and result in flooding, crops that are planted could be washed away. There has already been flooding in several areas, with loss of life and livelihoods and a lot of people being displaced.

The Kenyan government has done little to alleviate the problems and probably a lot to exacerbate them. The much talked about Mau Forest, where large scale logging over a long period has probably resulted in a massive reduction in water tables, is still being destroyed. True, the government has very publicly evicted small settlers in the forest but they will not quickly reverse a problem that took such a long time to develop.

Over several decades, people have been persuaded to grow things for export, such as flowers, tea, coffee, fruit and vegetables. This sort of farming has done a lot of environmental damage. But also, these are cash crops and they are not used to benefit ordinary Kenyans. They will not solve the food shortages because they are produced by rich landowners, often foreigners, who expect big profits.

What Kenya needs now, and what they have always needed, is food security. They need to produce enough staple crops for the domestic market and ignore the advice they seem to get from foreign interests to keep concentrating on exports. Feeding Kenyans should be the priority.

The Kenyan government is belatedly talking about things like providing fertilizer at low cost. This may help some large scale farmers but it is unlikely to help small farmers, the majority, who only produce enough to provide for themselves and perhaps for a modest surplus. Some of them are planting right now in the expectation that rains will come. If the rains come, great. But if there is not enough rain, the crops will be destroyed by the use of these artificial fertilizers, just as much as they would be if the rain failed altogether.

This kind of intervention is typical of the sort of short term thinking that has made small farmers increasingly vulnerable as the years go by. Small farmers need also to consider organic waste, household and farm waste, whatever is available. Artificial fertilizers may be of use in the short term, especially to large farmers, but even they eventually end up destroying their land.

But small farmers can least afford this process of land degradation. To keep their costs and their losses low, they need to use cheap or free materials. Because, even if they don't have to pay much now for artificial fertilizers, they will still have to bear the costs in the long run. The production and use of artificial fertilizers is part of the problem, it will never be a sustainable solution. It may not even be a short term solution.

What Has Solar Cooking Got to do with HIV Prevention?

Another day courting the sunshine. I decided to try to cook githeri, a mixture of maize and beans. But it takes a very long time and after four hours of demonstrating and discussing solar cooking, I took the mixture home to finish cooking it on a jiko (charcoal cooker). However, the rice and vegetables were evidence enough to convince the group of about 15 people. So we'll get together again next week and discuss the issue further. The following week, we'll have a workshop to make our own solar cookers. The week after, who knows...

This blog started off concentrating on HIV and it may seem that I have wandered off the point. But let me recap a bit. Throughout, I have argued that HIV transmission is related to many of the everyday aspects of people's lives, such as their environments, their employment status and work conditions, their levels of income and education, their health, nutrition, sanitation, infrastructure and many other things.

Solar cooking, solar water pasteurization and renewable energy sources in general have the attraction of addressing many of these issues. Using renewable energy means that people use less wood, which is great news for the environment. They produce less smoke and greenhouse gases, which reduces sicknesses related to smoke inhalation. Acute respiratory infections (ARI) represent one of the biggest threats to people's health and life expectancy. ARIs combined with diarrheal conditions account for around 40% of deaths in infants and under fives.

Paying for fuel is a major day to day cost that can be cut by using something like solar energy, which is very plentiful in African countries. Much time and energy is spent on collecting and preparing fuel for cooking, time that could be better spent doing other things. And there are few better ways for people to increase their self reliance than to explore renewable and sustainable resources.

Food cooked on solar cookers cooks slowly and is therefore more nutritious. It also uses less water, something that is in short supply and that can take a lot of time and effort to collect. In fact, the job of collecting fuel and water often falls to women and children, especially girls. Many's the time children don't do their homework because they spend the remaining daylight hours after school doing household chores.

At the moment, we are concentrating on telling people about solar cookers, why they could make their lives easier and better, how it could help them save money, etc. But in the longer term we are looking for income generating activities (IGA). For example, it's possible to make items to sell, such as cakes, roasted peanuts, ugali (boiled maize meal) and other popular foods, commonly sold on the street. Saving on fuel costs could give people the edge over their competitors. Perhaps people could also make and sell solar devices such as cookers and cooking baskets.

Well, that's why we're experimenting with solar cookers and those are some of the reasons we feel they are relevant to HIV and HIV prevention.

Does Everyone at the World Bank Share the Same Brain Cell?

The World Bank certainly knows how to give mixed messages. The overfed, overpaid over there now admit the dangers of climate change, especially for developing countries, and they are urging industrialised countries to reduce carbon emissions. This took many years of arguing against the climate change denialists, who dominated industry and finance, so this was no mean feat.

But the World Bank is also financing massive coal fired electricity plants in developing countries that will pump out greenhouse gases for decades. In a country like Kenya, where they don't produce coal in large quantities, this will also mean an unwanted increase in dependence on imported energy.

Dearest World Bank people, we never expected genius to emanate from among you, but nor did we expect such total idiocy. Right now, foreign governments are gagging to get their hands on Kenyan land so they can grow crops for biofuels, even though one quarter or more Kenyans face food shortages and the country is experiencing prolonged drought. This will also increase the countries carbon emissions. And there are plenty of other things happening here that are inimical to emission reduction.

Perhaps the people at the World Bank have heard of solar energy? To this piece of knowledge, perhaps they could add the fact that Kenya and other African countries get a lot of sun? Or maybe I'm overloading your thought faculties a bit? Well, there's also something here called geothermal energy, which also emits little or no carbon. There's also wind energy, which I'm sure even World Bank people would have some understanding of.

So why, with these abundant sources of renewable, not polluting energy, does the World Bank choose a non-renewable, polluting source of energy that will cripple poor countries with debt and swell their balance of payments deficit?

Would it be an exaggeration to suggest that the people at the World Bank have completely lost it and shouldn't be trusted with a piggy bank, let alone the billions they propose wasting on increasing the potential catastrophes brought about by climate change?

Leaders Nail their Colours to the Mau Forest

The Kenyan Government is to release the identities of some of the people involved in land grabbing in the Mau Forest. People may be shocked to hear that some of those involved were business leaders, political leaders and the Catholic church.

Of course, they may not be shocked. They may simply shrug their shoulders, because business, political and religious leaders have always been involved in the filthiest of excesses. There's never been much the electorate could do about that, except to shrug their shoulders.

Also implicated in the deals were former president Daniel Moi (it would be surprising if he were not involved in such a lucrative deal) and various other politicians, wealthy people and big businesses.

The amounts of land being discussed are only a fraction of the area of land that has been grabbed and if this is to be a typical story, the grabbers will be mainly wealthier people and organizations rather than poor people who have few other options for survival.

And just to make matters worse, Raila Odinga has tried to give the whole affair a tribal angle. Perhaps he's starting the next election campaign early.

Another Country Falls For Lies About Genetically Modified Crops

Kenya has just become the fourth African country to give in to the pressure to produce and use genetically modified (GM) crops. If the GM evangelists are right, in a few short years Kenya will be entirely self-sufficient and food secure and will no longer need the vast quantities of food and aid money for food that they currently receive.

This decision follows the signing of the long discussed biosafety legislation. A National Biosafety Authority will be formed to oversee the implementation of the legislation. So everything should be fine because if there is safety legislation, nothing can go wrong, everyone will behave as they should and Kenyans will all live happily ever after, right?

GM evangelists have been using food shortages and famine to leverage their arguments for the need for GM. It's a bit like producers of a well known brand of baby milk formula distributing their produce free of charge in hospitals. The recipients return home to find that they have to pay for the product and infants subsequently die of water born diseases. Some die later because they haven't acquired resistance that they would have acquired from being breast fed.

It could be objected that the baby milk formula producers don't do that any longer. However, their tricks continue, albeit more subtly. And they can afford to spend a lot on publicity to convince people that they are really nice companies. Besides, people get tired of particular issues, so they have probably tired of that one by now.

Well, GM evangelists also pay out a lot for publicity, lobbying and downright lies. There is no evidence that GM crops produce greater yields, reduce the need for pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, grow well in poor conditions or are in some way better for the environment. They have no advantages that cannot also be found in non-GM agricultural techniques.

There are also serious disadvantages associated with accepting GM. GM increases dependency. The last thing Kenya needs now is to increase its dependency on donors to whom they are already in debt for the foreseeable future. When farmers buy GM seeds, they also need to buy GM fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. These are very expensive and need to be bought every year. So do the seeds. It is not possible to put by seeds for the following year, they must be purchased every year.

GM also poses a serious risk to the environment. At present, much of Kenya's arable land is committed to some form of monoculture, such as tea, sugar, sisal, cashews, rice, etc. This has been the situation for many decades, so biodiversity is already very low in many areas. But GM has a trick to reduce biodiversity even further.

If Kenya buys a particular 'variety' of GM maize, for example, that will become the only variety in many areas, if not throughout the whole country. Coupled with that, GM pesticides and herbicides kill everything except the GM crop. That's what they are designed to do. Everything in a GM field except the GM crop dies. This is not even counting the flora and fauna that are affected by run-off from the field.

Even the oldest of the GM evangalists must have learned about ecological balance when they were at school. They must have learned about how the smallestand seemingly insignificant organisms are part of the same system as human beings, how wiping out everything in an area leads to total and probably irreversible destruction.

GM evangelists even have the cheek to claim that there are substantial economic, environmental and welfare benefits offered by GM and this is why use of the technology has increased. They claim that "biotech crops can contribute to some of the major challenges facing global society, including: food security, high price of food, sustainability, alleviation of poverty and hunger, and help mitigate some of the challenges associated with climate change." What they don't say is that GM will increase these problems.

Using the current food shortages in Kenya and other developing countries to push the argument for GM is cynical beyond belief. GM multinationals are deliberately rolling out a technology that they know will make poor countries poorer and will also destroy the environment. They are doing it, not just because it makes them very rich, but because it also puts them in control of food producers. And the dependency associated with GM is far more serious than that associated with baby milk formulas. It will affect everyone, for their whole lives.

In addition, most Kenyan farmers are small farmers. They produce for their own needs and sell their surplus locally. GM is designed for mass production. Mass producers in Kenya do not, on the whole, benefit the majority of people. They employ few labourers, mainly on a casual basis and pay them very little.

What makes the Kenyan government think that this would be good for the country? Is it sheer desperation because of the food shortage and the global food price explosion? Or have they been nobbled by the GM evangalists? Well, the consequenses will be the same, whatever the reasons for the decision.

The government, it seems, has seen enough evidence to be convinced that GM crops are safe for human consumption. Well, that evidence took many years and a lot of money to manufacture. However, there is absolutely no evidence that GM will solve any of the countries problems and plenty of evidence that it will cause immense social, economic, environmental and other problems.