In Tehran Women removing their Hijabs and shouting "The Mullahs must get lost". #مهسا_امینی . Huge protests all over the country with people shouting everything from Death to the Islamic Republic to Death to the Dictator/Khamenei.
Bull crap, A Vandanaesque diatribe cloaked as a scholarly article. Bill Gates has spent $6 billion of his personal wealth to bring much needed infusion of science & innovation to help solve problems of food & agriculture in the developing world, a hero! tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
@BillGates instead is demonized here for his philanthropic work as philanthocapitalism, shoving Western ideas down the throat of poor third world peasants, not supporting agroecology. Oh, please!
According to this author, the work of Norman Borlaug, the @CGIAR institutions and @gatesfoundation is racist! Such twisted logic!
Parenthetically, nobody told Sri Lanka beforehand that their all-organic experiment would end in disaster. It was anti-GMO “rock star” Vandana Shiva who encouraged the country to take the dramatic steps it took. acsh.org/news/2022/07/1…
Sri Lanka ran an evil experiment on its citizens last year. Under the sway of nitwit organic-food activists, the government banned imports of synthetic pesticides & fertilizers to transition the country to all-organic ag, leaving the farmers without access to the vital tools
The result of Sri Lanka's experiment was predictable and tragic: roughly one-third of the island nation's agricultural land was left dormant in 2021; farmers lost hundreds of millions of dollars in needed income, and there wasn't enough food to go around. @ACSHorg
" Next time you think of reaching for the higher-priced produce on your supermarket’s “organic” shelf, spare a moment’s thought for the people of Sri Lanka. Broadly speaking, the rise of the organic-food fetish has been bad for poor people " @DougSaunders theglobeandmail.com/opinion/articl…
"You don’t need to go to South Asia to see that. Just look at the fact that every supermarket now features well-promoted shelves of foods that cost three or four times as much as the otherwise identical stuff in the lower bins"
"We’re sending a similar message to countries such as Sri Lanka. The majority of the world’s very poor people are farmers working small holdings with few resources, & the switch to less productive, & thus more land-intensive organic techniques, is the opposite of what they need"
“China’s illicit acquisitions of GM seeds provides a jumpstart to China’s own development of such seeds, deprives U.S. companies of revenue, and offers an opportunity to discover vulnerabilities in U.S. crops”
A fascinating story of a quest to revive a lost fabric with clever science! Nearly 200 years ago, Dhaka muslin was the most valuable fabric on the planet. Then it was lost altogether. How did this happen? And can we bring it back? @ZariaGorvett bbc.com/future/article…
It was not like the muslin of today. Made via an elaborate, 16-step process with a rare cotton that only grew along the banks of the holy Meghna river, cloth was considered one of the great treasures of the age. It had a truly global patronage, stretching back thousands of years
By the early 20th Century, Dhaka muslin had disappeared, only surviving in private collections & museums. The convoluted technique for making it was forgotten, only cotton plant, locally known as Phuti karpas – abruptly went extinct. How did this happen? And could it be reversed?
Organic movement is simply marketing disguised as a grassroots movement relying on the ignorance of its own consumers. It survives by distorting science, promoting a false narrative that organic food is safer or is more nutritional than conventional foods mylespower.co.uk/2022/07/23/van…
Sri Lankan President showed us what such a world would look like when he attempted to transition the country’s farmers to organic ag. The result was an economic & humanitarian crisis in which Sri Lanka lost its food security, half a million people pushed into poverty. @powerm1985
It was Navdanya International, an Indian-based NGO who advised him on how such a switch could be accomplished. Unfortunately for the people of Sri Lanka, NI is a pseudo-env organisation founded by conspiracy theorist and well-known and persistent myth-monger, Vandana Shiva