Now this is environmental racism.
Kenya is in the middle of its worst drought in 40 years. In the parched north of the country, rivers are running dry and millions of livestock have perished due to lack of food. Around 4.4 million Kenyans don’t have enough to eat, and the situation will worsen if the coming rainy season fails like the previous five. “I’ve never seen it so bad. There’s nothing in the farms, the drought is too harsh,” says Daniel Magondo, a cotton and maize farmer in central Kenya.
The record-breaking drought is forcing Kenya to confront a controversial topic: whether the country should grow genetically modified (GM) crops. These are plants that have had genes from another organism inserted into their DNA to give them a new trait, such as disease or drought resistance. Although GM crops are completely safe to eat and are widely grown in the US, Canada, Brazil, and India, governments in many parts of the world, including Europe and East Africa, have pushed back against them.
That was the case in Kenya in 2012, when the cabinet banned them from being imported. The ban stayed in place until 2019, when the government allowed the importation of GM cotton engineered to be resistant against a pest called the cotton bollworm. And then in October 2022, the cabinet declared that it would allow farmers to grow pest-resistant GM maize—effectively ending the decade-long ban on GM crops in the country. Since 2015, fall armyworm moths have ravaged maize crops, by one estimate destroying a third of Kenya’s annual production.
In a statement released in October, the Kenyan cabinet said that GM maize would help improve the country’s food supply, relieving some of the pressure of the ongoing drought. The government ordered 11 tonnes of pest-resistant GM maize seeds that are widely grown in South Africa and have also been trialed in Kenya. But then, in February 2023, Kenya’s GMO regulator was barred from releasing the seeds after four separate legal complaints were lodged: three with Kenyan courts and one in the East African Court of Justice.
Kenya needs to grow GMO plants in order to feed the country’s populace, but environmentalists sue, lobby against, slander, or even vandalize efforts to develop biotechnological foods even though they use less resources (like water, land and even pesticides) to cultivate. Environmentalists oppose GMO’s even though many scientific organizations world-wide have concluded that bio-tech foods are safe and can be made to be more nutritious than organic versions.
Environmentalist efforts in Kenya is what they want for humans in other parts of the globe (except them, of course). Diminish the respectability of science in the field of genetic modification of foods, then the reduced manufacture and then use of GMO’s occurs. This, in turn, results in more hunger and reduced nutrition available for humans and that is exactly what environmentalist organizations, like Greenpeace, strive for.
Thanks to environmentalists, millions of Kenyans will not have adequate food resulting in starvations and even death. It’s a lot easier to oppose food production when you have a lot of money and think you can tell other people how to live or think you are, somehow, superior to someone else. The lives of a few million African people don’t matter to environmentalists because they’re racists to the core and pay little to no price for the lives they destroy.
Green Jihad 