Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2002. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg) - June 14, 2002
Gavin Chait, Cape Town
The Mail & Guardian has rightly condemned the notion that HIV does not cause Aids (or that it does not even exist), but you muddle your science in other areas.
Scientists seem incapable of formulating and delivering a message that people can understand. So a little man like Jose Bove can lead a march through Paris proclaiming that genetically modified crops have no use and will help nobody.
And the M&G accepts his message -- even as rural KwaZulu-Natal farmers bring in their best-ever harvest of cotton thanks to a genetic mutation that fends of the boll weevil and reduces the poisons necessary to protect the crop.
World leaders fail to turn up at another world forum -- this one on feeding the world's hungry. Obviously, they just don't care as much as the M&G does. But perhaps you may have failed to notice that some of them are trying to keep Pakistan and India from nuclear war. The humanitarian disaster that would result is surely worth preventing.
And now we come to the next World Forum on Sustainable Development. You are already trotting out the mantra that the world is worse today than it was yesterday. But, in 1970 35% of all people in developing countries were starving; in 1996 the figure was 18% and is expected to fall to 12% by 2010 (United Nations World Food Survey, 1996).
In 1900 we lived for an average of 30 years, today we live for 67. According to the UN, we have reduced poverty more in the past 50 years than in the preceding 500 -- and it has been reduced in almost every country.
This does not mean no poor people exist, but we are on the right track. To claim that the gap in wealth between rich and poor is increasing and that, therefore, the poor are poorer is rubbish. If I get richer and you stay the same, the gap has increased. If I get very much richer and you get only a little richer -- the gap has also increased. In neither case are you poorer.
There are poor people in the world and many of them are hungry. Is this the fault of globalisation? Did the citizens of Malawi, Zimbabwe or Myanmar wind up starving and terrified because of international capitalism or because of hopelessly incompetent and corrupt local governments?
As George Orwell used to say, "Only a socialist can show such contempt for ordinary people."
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