Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

I remember a famous academic study in the nineties that questioned whether PC's really produced any appreciable return on investment.

Course that would be so laughable today that no scientific journal would publish it. This article is similar in quality. Got to give it to the anti GMO folks they never give up, even after its clear that they've lost.

I worked in agriculture for over twenty years as an agronomist. I wasn't in an ivory tower, I was on the ground walking farmers fields. My customers used less insecticides with the introduction of GMO seed. They used much safer herbicides. Farmers work in an extremely low margin business. They continued to buy GMO seed because it made them more money. Farmers are the original environmentalists and the use of GMO seed was cleaning their community.

In America we spend around 11% of our income on food. In Europe it's more than double that number. In Europe a small but loud group of activists prevented the adoption of GMO seed. They destroyed research crops so that tests could never be completed on the efficacy of GMO seed.

https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2015/06/11/bbc-panora...

Europeans also convinced a starving Zambia to reject the generous US gift of life saving grain. Let people starve cause hypothetically something could be bad for them is the height of hypocrisy.

http://www.economist.com/node/1337197

If they [the environmentalists] lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 60 years, they’d be crying out for fertilizers, herbicides, irrigation canals and tractors and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.

- Norman Borlaug, inventor of the green revolution and winner of the 1970 Nobel Peace prize

People don't starve because a lack of food to eat, they starve because they can't afford food to eat. You honestly think it's more effective to spend money paying farmers for crops here and transporting them halfway around the world to deal with the logistical nightmare of getting them to villages is more effective than spending the same amount to pay for the food in Zambia?

Regardless of how you feel about GMO's, food aid is a farmer subsidy pure and simple and one that makes a long-term problem worse by lowering prices for the local farmers where the food is being dumped.

I mean, seriously, think about it, you are looking at a country where 72% of the population is employed in agriculture. You think the answer to their problem is putting them all out of work by dumping food on them?

I don't think keeping locally grown food prices and employment up are the key issues when the harvests are failing. The argument of giving them money instead of food and let them handle it themselves is not bad per se, the food would still not come from Zambia or the other countries though. While food aid can act as a domestic subsidy for the country giving it, that doesn't mean that it inherently bad, just that the donor country gets something out of it as well.

The following are some details from the famine of 2002:

Hundreds have already died in Malawi and the threat of famine looms large in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, Swaziland, and Lesotho.

Crops have failed due to droughts and floods. Attempts to deal with the problem have been hampered by political chaos and the inadequate infrastructure in the most affected places.

The World Food Programme (WFP) said that southern Africa needs 1.2m tonnes of food to help it through the year. The EU and the US are helping, but the main problem is effective delivery.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jul/25/famine.qanda

> Europeans also convinced a starving Zambia to reject the generous US gift of life saving grain. Let people starve cause hypothetically something could be bad for them is the height of hypocrisy.

Zambia wasn't starving; as far as I can tell there was a regional famine, while some areas were actually experiencing an above average output. According to government sources the main issue was getting aid to affected areas inside the country, not the inability of the government to procure food from other countries.

I've tried to search for any evidence that anyone starved to death, but couldn't find any. It's telling that when searching for info about the Zambia famine, you mostly get articles talking about GMOs and can't find any (at least I couldn't) talking about anyone who starved.

This is one of those topics where whenever it comes up you can usually expect a ton of disinformation thrown about from all sides.

Is it really a famine if it's not causing any starvation?

It's a food shortage when someone else is not getting enough food. It's a famine when you are not getting enough food.

Look harder. Stunting means malnutrition; starvation is not the only outcome of lack of food. "4) The prevalence of stunting in children - low growth for age - is 40 percent."

http://m.wfp.org/stories/10-facts-about-hunger-zambia

Malnutrition in childhood also causes lower IQ for life.

Malnutrition is a pretty different claim from starvation ("Let people starve", in the initial comment). I also don't see much evidence that rejected GMO food aid in 2002 (which the above comment talked about) has a big influence on the 2015 numbers.

And worth noting, from your link:

"More than 350,000 people in the country are food insecure"

350,000 from a population of about 14.5 million is ~2.5%. According to the USDA, "An estimated 12.7 percent of American households were food insecure at least some time during the year in 2015"[1]. You can look at various articles on nutrition in the USA as well ("...only half of all children ages 2 to 17 meet federal diet quality standards"[2]).

That's not to say that there aren't issues in Zambia, but I'd need to see more evidence to show that rejecting a specific aid package offered in 2002 (what was being discussed) is the reason for the malnutrition numbers you stated.

[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details/?pubid=7976... [2] http://blogs.usda.gov/2015/03/11/sound-nutrition-what-every-...

>Europeans also convinced a starving Zambia to reject the generous US gift of life saving grain.

As a European I am ashamed by what anti-GMO groups are saying every day.

Why is there a disproportionate amount of propaganda surrounding GMOs?

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