anti-GMO cruelty
Adapted from after-dinner remarks by Purdue University President Mitchell E. Daniels Jr.at the Agriculture Department’s Agricultural Outlook Forum in Arlington, Va., Feb. 25:
There are huge threats, impediments, to our climbing the mountain of feeding a world of nine billion fellow humans, but they are not the ones we’ve known in the past.
The threat this time is internal. It will be a self-inflicted wound. What is troubling me, and I hope troubles you, is that there is a shockingly broad, and so far shockingly successful, movement that threatens this important ascent of humankind out of the condition that has plagued us since we first walked upright: of having enough food to meet the most basic, the most elementary need of any living species. That threatens our ascent by choking off the very technologies that could make that next great triumph possible.
I suggest to you that you have a positive duty to do things that probably do not come naturally, to contest and refute junk science and false claims against the technologies that offer so much promise to the world. And not solely on the polite objective grounds that come most naturally to folks in the pursuits represented here, to people who work in the regulation of agriculture and its products, to those who study academically these subjects and work on the new technologies and the policies around them, or to the businesses that produce these products as the technologies become available. . . .
Marie Antoinette may have at least had the excuse of naïveté and ignorance. That excuse cannot be made for the people who are attacking GMOs and other technologies like that today. You know, when starvation was imposed knowingly, in cases and instances we can all think of from the past, we knew what to call it. And I can’t for the life of me see a moral distinction between those instances and these.
Read Mr. Daniels' comments in full from the Wall Street Journal here.
There's no hope for these people. Read about the ISU students who are up in arms about a GMO banana that is chock full of Vitamin A, which was made so that third world countries could consume it cheaply and because vitamin A prevents blindness and other diseases no longer seen in the Western world. They'd rather see children go blind that eat a banana that would give them their sight. You can't fight this level of stupidity with fact and sound reasoning. http://www.wsj.com/articles/anti-gmo-students-bruise-a-superbanana-1457998345
ReplyDeleteI went to a presentation at a brewery in St. Louis once where all these other millennials were saying how awful it is that Coke sells its product in Africa because people's teeth rot. And I stood up and said, "So, you would like these people -- who you have just admitted are starving -- to have no calories at all, rather than at least a few from a cheap drink?" It's shameful.
Delete