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GMO

Life-Saving Golden Rice Finally Gets to Poor Farmers Despite Environmentalist Opposition

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By Ronald Bailey – Re-Blogged From Reason

Bangladesh announces that it will allow its farmers to plant this genetically improved crop

Golden Rice which has been genetically engineered to have higher levels of the vitamin A precursor beta-carotene is finally about be to approved for planting by poor farmers in Bangladesh. This a big step toward improving the health of some of the poorest people on the planet. Vitamin A deficiency causes blindness in between 250,000 and 500,000 children each year, half of whom die within 12 months, according to the World Health Organization. A study by German researchers in 2014 estimated that activist opposition to the deployment of Golden Rice has resulted in the loss of 1.4 million life-years in just India alone.

Environmentalist ideologues have fought fiercely for two decades to prevent this crop from being offered to poor farmers in developing countries. Among other things, they hired thugs to rip up test fields of the grain at the International Rice Research Institute in the Phillippines.

GoldenRiceIRRI

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Anti-GMO Attitudes Study Nature 2019

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By Joel O’Bryan, PhD – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Screen Shot 2019-01-26 at 10.15.01 PMFrom NPR on-line, there is this news item:

“People Strongly Against GMOs Had Shakier Understanding Of Food Science, Study Finds”

January 26, 2019 7:00 AM ET

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/01/26/687852367/people-strongly-against-gmos-had-shakier-understanding-of-food-science-study-fin

“People who most intensely oppose genetically modified food think they know a lot about food science, but actually know the least, according to a peer-reviewed paper published in January in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.”

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Twelve Invisible Eco-Catastrophes and Threats of Doom That are Actually Fake

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By Patrick Moore, PhD – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Some time ago it struck me that the majority of alleged environmental catastrophes and threats are invisible or very remote, thus making it virtually impossible for the average person to validate them through observation. Observations, along with replications of those observations, are the very foundation of the scientific method. Seeing is believing, and seeing the same result again and again under similar circumstances reinforces the belief. Is it possible that activist groups and the media choose to cite supposed catastrophes and threats that are invisible, very remote or both because the majority of people cannot verify them in person and therefore must rely on the activists, the media, and other third parties to tell them the truth? At the conclusion of this essay, the reader may judge. Here’s a list of some of the alleged invisible catastrophes and threats of doom, beginning with one of the former.

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Luddite Eco-Imperialists Claim to be Virtuous

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By Paul Dreissen – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Poor families in impoverished countries face formidable foes: an absence of electricity, roads and other infrastructure; corrupt, kleptocratic governments;  nonexistent property rights to secure loans; well-financed eco-imperialists whose policies perpetuate poverty, malnutrition and disease.

Now they face even harder struggles, as a coalition of well-financed malcontents, agitators and pressure groups has formed a social-political movement called “AgroEcology.” Coalition members despise fossil fuels, chemical pesticides and fertilizers, biotechnology, corporations, capitalism, and even farm machinery and all facets of modern agriculture. It’s anti-GMO organic food activism on steroids, promoting all the latest in PC fads and terminology: “food sovereignty,” the “right to subsistence farming by indigenous people” and “the right of peoples to culturally appropriate food,” to cite a few.

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