Contra Celsum has nominated Sue Kedgley for an S-Award for her “clear and present danger” call over the threat of New Zealand being crippled by global food shortages.
Citation:
Sue Kedgley, Green Party Safe Food spokesperson has blown the trumpet of alarm over rising international food prices. She has called for urgent measures to move New Zealand to self-sufficiency in as many basic staple crops as possible. (NZ Herald, 9th April, 2008)
However, her analysis of the causes of rising food prices is deplorable. Yes—wait for it—she blames “changing climate conditions.” She conveniently neglects to mention that the food crisis is largely man made and caused by environmentalism, by greenism—the very things she stands for. Bluntly, Kedgley and her fellow travellers are the cause of the food shortage.
There are at least two major causes of global food shortages for which geenism is directly responsible.
1.The drive to bio-fuel production. Motivated by a utopian dream of saving the planet millions of hectares of arable land and millions of tonnes of edible crops have now been removed from food production and diverted into fuel production. As Gwynne Dyer recently observed:
“But the worst damage [to food production] is being done by the rage for 'biofuels' that supposedly reduce carbon dioxide emisions and fight climate change. (But they don't really—at least not in their present form.) Some 30 percent of this year's US grain harvest will go straight into an ethanol distillery, and the European Union is aiming to provide 10 percent of the fuel used for transport from biofuels by 2010.
“A huge amount of the world's farmland is being diverted to feed cars, not people. Rainforest is being cleared to grow more biofuels. A study in the US journal Science calculated that destroying ecosystems to grow corn or sugarcane for ethanol, or oil palms or soybeans for bio-diesel, releases between 17 and 420 times more carbon dioxide than is saved by burning the biofuel grown instead of fossil fuel.
“It's all done in the name of climate change, but the numbers don't add up.
“'If . . . more and more land [is] diverted for industrial biofuels to keep cars running, we have two years before a food catastrophe breaks out worldwide.' said Vandana Shiva, director of the India-based Resaerch Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resources Policy. 'It'll be 20 years before climate catastrophe breaks out, but the false solutions to climate change are creating catastrophes that will be much more rapid than climate change itself.'” (NZ Herald, 10th April, 2008)
But, wait, it gets worse. Vandana Shiva is wrong. Climate change is a phyrric threat. It is not a threatening catastrophe but a gigantic false alarm, as the actual measured evidence is beginning to show. We are left with the deplorable situation that false solutions to what is increasingly showing up to be a non-existent problem are causing a very real global catastrophe. “The wicked flee when no-one pursueth.”
Sue Kedgley is right to call our attention to the looming food crisis. It is, however, utterly duplicitous for her not to confess that she and all her fellow greenists are the cause of the problem. Her continued advocacy and support for the current biofuels mania is deplorable, wrong, scientifically asinine, and a great threat to the world.
At Contra Celsum we are unsure whether Kedgley is acting out of foolish ignorance or her behaviour represents a wilful obscuring of the truth. She is an educated person, so we lean to the latter explanation.
2.The luddite greenist opposition to genetically modified food crops is a further cause of food shortages.
World population rose rapidly in the last half of the twentieth century. However, food production rose at a faster rate, leading to rising living standards around the globe and a decrease in hunger and malnutrition. The cause of the increased production of food was the discovery of genetically modified, disease resistant, higher crop yielding strains of basic cereals. These amazing developments, called—somewhat ironically now—the Green Revolution, resulted in much improved food production.
The greenists' mindless, inveterate opposition to genetically modified crops is a significant factor in food production not being able to keep up with population growth in the past decade. It is a material cause of rising food prices.
Sue Kedgley is like a mother who systematically starves her child, then blames anyone and everyone but herself for the child's demise. There is none so blind as those who will not see. Such cant, such hypocrisy must not go unrecognised. It deserves an S-Award.
Sue Kedgley—S-Award Class II for behaviour that is Stupid, Short Sighted and Stupefied.
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