As desert locusts ravage African crops, EU-funded NGOs maneuver in
the Kenyan parliament to leave farmers defenseless. Caught flat-footed by the emergency, the FAO struggles to purchase
enough pesticides to avert catastrophe.
Experts fear it may be too late to avert famine.
The worst locust swarms in 70 years descended on East Africa
barely a month ago and have already devoured hundreds of thousands of acres of
staple crops throughout the region. Every day, the swarms grow larger and
travel further into the African
continent. As the crop losses mount, experts fear that this new plague,
which is hitting African food systems already challenged by epidemic
infestations of Fall Armyworm and numerous other plant diseases, may push the
region into famine.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) calls the locust
invasion an “unprecedented” threat to lives and food security. Oxfam says 25
million people have already been left hungry and malnourished by the swarms.
Incredibly, organic farming activists and EU-funded
NGOs are maneuvering in the midst of this crisis to ram
legislation though the Kenyan Parliament that would ban the agricultural
pesticides necessary to stop the swarms before they multiply beyond control. As
of last reports, 200,000 acres in Somalia and Ethiopia have been wiped-out and
another 170,000 acres in Kenya are under attack. Uganda and South Sudan may
well be next.
Pesticides are the only hope to stop famine
Aerial spraying of pesticides is the only
effective way to stop the locusts, and stopping them now in Kenya is critical
to preventing the disaster from spreading further. Experts say the swarms could
grow 500 times as large by next June and may soon reach 30 countries in Africa
and Asia.
But the NGO-sponsored law would make an effective response all but
impossible -- canceling registrations for over 200 pesticides that have been
approved as safe by Kenyan authorities and by regulators in the US, Canada,
Australia and other nations that rely on scientific, internationally accepted
risk assessments.
The leading NGO behind the initiative, the Route to Food, was
founded as an African political action group in 2016 with tax-payer funds
provided by the German Green Party’s Heinrich Boll Foundation. In just a few
years, RTF has become a major force in Kenyan politics campaigning against
pesticides, GMOs (which it claims are “nutritionally empty”) and advancing
Euro-style agricultural fads such as agro-ecology, which condemns modern crop
technologies -- along with free markets, trade and even mechanization -- in
favor of “peasant” and “indigenous” agriculture.
RTF is joined in the ban campaign by the Kenyan Organic
Agricultural Network, an NGO representing organic business interests (Noticeably,
the ban proposal doesn’t include organic farmers’ favorite, though highly
toxic, pesticide, copper sulfate). KOAN, too, is largely funded by European
governments, directly though development agencies such as the Danish Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, and the
Dutch NGOs SNV and HIVOS (Dutch: Humanistisch Instituut voor
Ontwikkelingssamenwerking, Humanist Institute for Cooperation with Developing
Countries). HIVOS is also a backer of the notorious Brahmin agroecology
advocate and “social justice” warrior Vandana Shiva who was recently condemned by Nobel
Laureate Rich Roberts and numerous other leading scientists for her
“anti-science and unethical stances.”
Even absent the locust plague, the NGO pesticide ban would
devastate food production in Kenya, whose corn farmers have lost up to 70
percent of their staple crop to the Fall Army Worm, which can only be
controlled by pesticides and GMO Bt crops. Almost every major crop is
threatened, and none would be viable without pesticides. UG99 Wheat Stem Rust has
spread throughout East, from Egypt down to South Africa, and jumped across the
water to Yemen and Iran. The Cassava Mosaic Virus can destroy up to 80 percent of the
crop, Africa’s third
largest source of carbohydrates and Western Kenya’s second most
important food crop.
Thousands of fungi, nematodes, insects, weeds and other pests make
farming in Africa, and everywhere else around the world, impractical and even
impossible without pesticides. European elites talk about banning pesticides
and replacing modern agricultural production with “agro-ecology”-style organic
farming, endlessly promoting the fantasy that organic farmers don’t use
pesticides. But all farmers who grow to scale -- including organic
farmers -- use pesticides.
The mainstream media, which appears ignorant of this basic fact,
was shocked when the French government recently reported that, despite its
promises to cut pesticide use in half, pesticide sales had actually increased
21 percent in 2018. There were several reasons for the hike -- including
farmers stocking up early on supplies to avoid new pesticide fees -- but a big
part of the increase came from a massive
surge in the use of organic pesticides like sulfur and copper sulfate.
Copper, in its various compounds, is considered “natural” and thus
approved for organic production, but it is highly toxic to people and wildlife,
accumulates in the soil, and is a known carcinogen. In 2015, the EU put copper
compounds on its list of “candidates
for substitution” -- meaning they are “of particular concern
to public health or the environment.” The EU would have banned the substances
long ago, except that organic growers, who dump them on their fields in truly
astounding quantities, couldn’t survive without it.
Europeans are hypocrites, America should not be the same
The hypocrisy in Europe is glaring, but Europe is wealthy enough
that it can buy food from abroad when its organic food faddism depresses
production at home. Indeed, Europe has been a net importer of food for many
years.
The imposition of elitist “agroecology” policies on Africa,
however, is proving deadly, and no organization is more complicit than the very
FAO that is now scrambling to find enough pesticide to combat the locust
plague. For nine years under its Brazilian Director General, José Graziano Da
Silva, the FAO diverted its considerable resources ($2.5 billion in 2018) into
promoting a highly ideological agroecology agenda in Africa that prohibited the
use of GMOs and synthetic pesticides (but of course permitted organic
pesticides) and promoted the organic fantasy.
There is nothing wrong with agroecology as it was originally conceived,
which is what it sounds like: the study of the overall ecology of agricultural
practices. But in the hands of activists, the science has been perverted to be
a prescriptive ideology that arbitrarily rules out modern farming technologies
and even mechanization (think tractors) and hides a radical agenda hostile to
markets, private property, and economic development under the cloak of “social
justice” -- though it’s a strange kind of social justice that wants to keep
“indigenous peoples” in a perpetual state of bare subsistence.
Graziano -- who came to FAO after serving in the left wing
government of Lula da Silva-- used the resources and prestige of his
organization to embrace the most radical political elements of the
agroecology movement. With FAO support, groups such as Via Campesia promoted
the glories of “peasant farming” and condemned international trade, while others
like the Third World Network railed against capitalism itself and defended the
Chavez-Maduro Venezuelan regime as it reduced that once wealthy nation to
starvation and despair. Inside the organization, Graziano-favorite Miguel Altieri used his perch on the FAO Steering
Committee to libel the Green Revolution, which saved a billion people from
starvation, as a “failed” project and to politic against private business and
free markets.
Otherwise occupied advancing radical politics and discouraging
poor African farmers from using the pesticides they desperately need, the FAO
somehow neglected to prepare for the current emergency. The natural, organic
world of their fantasies is now covering East Africa in a cloud of destruction
and death, and FAO’s 2.5 billion dollars somehow don’t seem to be enough to buy
the planes and pesticides needed to stop the infestation.
FAO’s new Director General, Qu Dongyu of China, elected last June,
has promised reforms. Let’s hope they come soon, and that they are not too
late.
