IDIOT OF THE WEEK:
ZAMBIAN PRESIDENT LEVY MWANAWASA
Now here’s a world leader who’s really scores high on the idiot quotient. Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa, who has refused donations of genetically modified corn from the U.S. to solve his country’s hunger crisis, has asked his starving countrymen to remain patient while “scientists investigate the issue.”
Last month, Mr. Mwanawas’s government rejected corn donations from the United States, the largest donor of food to alleviate the southern African famine, because some of the American corn was genetically modified. Talk about political correctness gone mad. The Zambian government — taking its cues from the well-fed environmentalist lobby in Europe and America — said it was worried about the danger genetically-altered corn could pose to the health of recipients of such food donations. Better that they starve to death, it would seem, than have their health potentially threatened by environmentally-unsafe agricultural products (which, by the way, United Nations agencies have certified as safe).
Well, that’s one way to deal with environmental hazards, as defined by the environmentalist fanatical fringe. Let people die, rather than be exposed to politically-incorrect food stuffs which might, um, damage their health.
And what a neat solution it is from the point of view of the affluent, well-fed environmentalist activists in the West who have foistered this half-baked science on the Third World. These designer activists can happily depart their favorite gourmet eateries with full bellies every evening, head home to their comfy brownstone abodes for the night, and happily fall sleep knowing that they have once again thwarted the greedy American agribus monster — saving the hungry of the Third World from the horrible evils of genetically-altered food. After all, better dead than wrongly fed, they’d probably argue.
Unfortunately, none of it will be of much comfort to the millions of starving people in Zambia as they waste away from hunger.
(from http://www.iconoclast.ca)
