The coronavirus pandemic has now spread to every country in Africa, hitting a continent already reeling from the worst plague of Desert Locusts in 75 years, on-going drought, and ubiquitous infestations of Fall Army Worm, stem rust and other plant diseases that make farming challenging in more “normal” times.
A second wave of locusts, 20 times larger than the first, is now fanning out from the insects’ breeding grounds in East Africa, stripping the land bare of vegetation and threatening millions of Africans with starvation. Swarms have already been spotted as far south as Tanzania and as far…
While the coronavirus pandemic dominates global news, another deadly on-going public health emergency has gotten lost in the headlines. Tens of millions of Africans risk starvation as a continuing Desert Locust infestation explodes across the Horn of Africa. For more than six months, the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) has sounded the alarm. But the response of FAO’s leadership, otherwise preoccupied with imposing zero-technology, low-yield “agroecology” on African farmers, has been conflicted and flat-footed at best.
FAO is one of the leading international organizations…
Today there are 257 million people in Africa experiencing hunger, and successive poor harvests in recent years mean the situation is getting worse. According to Famine Early Warning Network, an organization providing early warning and analysis on acute food insecurity in Africa, large parts of Eastern and Southern Africa are now in “crisis” and heading toward famine.
Drought and political unrest are the most widely cited causes of this humanitarian catastrophe. But behind these causes is an alliance of deep-pocketed NGOs and highly politicized UN agencies, with the UN Food and Agriculture…
For decades, European policymakers have strong-armed African nations to prevent approvals of desperately needed biotech crops (GMOs), even as devastating plagues of new and old plant pests ravage the continent and mire African farmers in a perpetual state of food insecurity.
As others and I have previously reported, the EU has been assisted in this by an extensive network of EU and US NGOs, and in recent years, an increasingly radicalized FAO[1], that have poured hundreds of millions of euros into spreading the most egregious lies and disinformation in the African media, claiming GMOs and the…
After years of delay, Kenya is set to lift its ban on GMOs. Facing down pressure from EU officials and a massive anti-GMO propaganda campaign by EU-funded NGOs, the East African country will soon set the regulatory requirements for the commercialization of genetically modified crops.[1] In doing so, Kenya will join the small band of other African nations (South Africa, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Egypt and Sudan) that have defied EU dictats in order to allow their farmers to use the same modern agricultural technologies that farmers in North and South America, Asia, Australia, and even parts of…