Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was over reading Pejman Yousefzadeh’s new blog and took great interest in this post.

Your Maximum Leader can’t recall if it was in a past blog post, or just in a conversation with Smallholder, that he railed against Europeans (specifically) and others (generally) who are holding up use of genetically enhanced or even bio-engineered foods in Africa and Asia.

Your Maximum Leader has yet to hear a fully formed argument against using genetically modified crops. The most common argument against is that genetically modified crops will contaminate native crops. This is the favourite argument of Greenpeace. What would be the outcome of cross-pollination between modified and unmodified crops? That the modified crops might become less disease resistant and the unmodified might become more disease resistant? No one ever seems to ask that question.

And no one ever seems to address the plain fact that cereal staples have been bred for millennia (albeit using more primative methods than genetic engineering) to promote certain characteristics. Characteristics like greater yeilds and desease resistance. Where is the outcry over that?

Your Maximum Leader remembered reading about starving Africans in 2001 who could have been saved had they been allowed to eat golden rice that had been donated for relief. But due to concerns about the genetically modified rice, it was not distributed. (An interesting article about Greenpeace’s objections to golden rice is here.)

Your Maximum Leader is not going to be an avatar for genetically enhanced foods and claim that they will solve the problems of the starving in Africa. Indeed, if you read the carefully the statements of those who produce genetically modified foods they don’t claim that their foods alone will solve Africa’s problems. But they will help. And they will help a damn sight more than another pontificating rock concert. If European governments wouldn’t scre African governments we might get some crops that might help to Africans. It would also help to let African farmers use pesticides. If that could happen we might not have to have more gargantuan rock concerts to benefit starving Africans. Of course, it might also help if Africans didn’t fall into a rut of monoculture.

It is tragic that help is being kept from those who need it by those who have the sense to know better.

Carry on.