I, for one, am not pleased to see Kenya turning its savanah into more farmland. The article refers to the dry lands as merely a grazing area for wild animals and livestock. I find this statement shockingly nescient, particularly concerning the environmental implications. The land that these farmers and agricultural scientists see as formerly barren and unfit, now ripe for cultivation with new geneticallty altered seeds is where world's last great herds of wild animals cling desperately to life by slender threads, crowded out of better lands not by any natural catastophe, but by a man-made one. It's exactly this kind of thinking that got us into so much trouble in the first place, environmentally speaking.
There are two main reasons so many Africans are starving and neither of those reasons is wheat fungus or drought. The two main reasons Africans are starving are war and over-population. There were already too many Africans for the continent to support decades ago, and growing genetically modified crops to feed them so they can continue to multiply out of control is not the long term answer to Africa's human needs, and it pushes more wild life closer to extinction. Wildebeast? Gazelle? Lions? Tigers? Cheetahs? Giraffe? Elephants? Ah, who needs em, right? While they're at it, why don't these agricultural scientists just suggest to everyone in Kenya to suppliment their diet with more bushmeat, too. I mean, who needs great apes anyway?
If there isn't enough food to go around, maybe they should take the hint and begin to control their population growth.
If gorillas could talk they'd say, "Choke on your nuclear-irradiated seeds! I hope it doesn't rain for a century! Let the bastards starve..." |