Unintended Consequences - Agriculture in Africa

You gotta love the green party -- they love to muck around with "environmental issues" but very few of them have practical experience or science degrees. From The Westerner:

Green activists 'are keeping Africa poor'
Western do-gooders are impoverishing Africa by promoting traditional farming at the expense of modern scientific agriculture, according to Britain's former chief scientist.

Anti-science attitudes among aid agencies, poverty campaigners and green activists are denying the continent access to technology that could improve millions of lives, Professor Sir David King will say today.

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from Europe and America are turning African countries against sophisticated farming methods, including GM crops, in favour of indigenous and organic approaches that cannot deliver the continent's much needed �green revolution�, he believes.

Speaking before a keynote lecture tonight to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, of which he is president, Sir David said that the slow pace of African development was linked directly to Western influence. �I'm going to suggest, and I believe this very strongly, that a big part has been played in the impoverishment of that continent by the focus on nontechnological agricultural techniques, on techniques of farming that pertain to the history of that continent rather than techniques that pertain to modern technological capability. Why has that continent not joined Asia in the big green revolutions that have taken place over the past few decades?....

From this article at the London Times. One of the comments to this article sums up my thoughts exactly:

The "greenies" like to use science like a bludgeon when it's in their favor, and reject it as unnatural when it's not. They place their "Ideals" before humanity, and hope to take us all back to "hunter - gatherer" days.