Rice is one of those rather ridiculous crops that western government subsidize and people who don't know anything about agriculture believe needs to be covered in water to grow. It is actually covered in water in Asia to keep it safe from...nature.(1) In many places, water takes energy and if we care about climate change, we want less energy pumping water or importing rice from China on emissions-belching ships. Science to the rescue. So scientists created a rice with three genes tweaked to make it naturally resistant to Pyricularia oryzae, rice blast fungus.
Except activists hate science in a way the Taliban hates Buddhism, and the UAE and Iran and Syria - okay, every dictator in the mid-east - hates Jews. They just did to Stonehenge what these morons did to Buddhas in Afghanistan. (2)
Credit: Middle East Institute
They hate science more than they love nature, so a rice that uses less pesticides, less water, and less energy had to go. And it did.
Despite the project having the endorsement of the national and regional governments, the Senate Agriculture Minister helped with the planting, eco-terrorists know better than every scientist in the world and decided it had to be destroyed.
It's a shame, this was a big win for European scientists, especially Italian, who have been trapped in a culture of hate against agriculture for decades.
Eco-terrorists refuse to call off their Progressive War on Science yet these fundamentalists may have hurt their agenda. Italian permission to engage in science is only temporary, it is to expire in 2024, but by attacking a tiny plot they may engage the famous Italian stubbornness and open the door for even more modern science to be done. Perhaps even permanently.
NOTES:
(1) In states like California, it is subsidized and still grown covered in water, despite the state being a desert and under the control of a political party that mandates roaring torrents of water in rivers rather than storing it. Because they believe Ancient Ways Are The Best while Science Is A Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.
(2) Then environmentalists attacked...a golf tournament...while other environmentalists rationalized the destruction with their equivalent of 'look at what you were wearing, you were asking for it' and went back to their 'bees are dying, only more money will stop it' rhetoric. And yet when the Obama administration "accidentally" handed the names and addresses of 80,000 farmers to eco-terrorists, it was waved away as a harmless oversight.
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