Specter explains why these irrational things happen: “an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable lie.”

We demonize genetically modified foods, says Specter, because of food elitism—making decisions that work against feeding the hungry in developing nations under the guise of protecting their best interests.

“In other parts of the world, a billion people go to bed hungry every night,” Specter told National Public Radio. “Those people need science to help them.”

“Either you believe evidence that can be tested, verified, and repeated will lead to a better understanding of reality or you don’t,” says Specter. “We are either going to embrace new technologies, along with their limitations and threats, or slink into the slime of magical thinking.”

Societies have used magical thinking for thousands of years, and it has provided emotional comfort to billions. Unfortunately, it has had little beneficial impact on the length of our lives, our earning power, or our quality of life. Magical thinking can’t produce comforts like air conditioning, conveniences such as computers and microwaves; or breakthrough technologies like antibiotics, and joint replacements..

Add to the irrational list:

• People marching to demand the right to drink raw milk, which presents major health risks due to the bacteria it contains, instead of feeling grateful for pasteurization.

• The European politician who proposes to ban rat poison because it is “too dangerous.” Bubonic plague, spread by rat fleas, killed a third of the people in Europe—twice. Rats also spread such “filth risks” as salmonella and E. coli.

There’s no question that the mainstream media have aided, abetted and encouraged the irrationality. In fairness, the media also trumpet the news of new scientific breakthroughs—but their news instincts home in more aggressively on bad news. Moreover, we in the First World don’t really have much really serious stuff to complain about anymore except for the politicians we ourselves elect. That leaves the journalists short of the bad news they crave.

Ergo, they have turned to the activists for scare stories and there have been a zillion of those. Working together, the journalists and activists have helped create the backlash against science. The journalists are paying for this now, of course, as the public has gotten “scare fatigue.” The Internet and talk radio have given a broader perspective, and called the mainstream media’s judgment into serious question. People are simply not buying the newspapers or watching the network TV news as did an earlier generation.

It’s too soon to tell whether all this will lead to good or ill, although I’m personally and professionally appalled at the Obama idea of subsidizing news organizations. Neither Britain’s BBC nor our National Public Radio has been any more resistant to activist scare stories than NBC, “20/20” or Shepherd Smith.

Specter gives us no solution, but having TV, talk radio, and the Internet certainly puts us ahead of any previous information consumers in history.

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC,  is an environmental economist.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

 

On the other hand, we do know how to prevent 500,000 kids from going blind every year—and even dying—due to severe Vitamin A deficiency (VAD). But we’re not preventing the blindness or the deaths. Instead, we’re accepting the tragedy of millions of blind kids, plus the deaths of hundreds of thousands of pregnant women who die from needless birth complications, also due to VAD. The Vitamin A problem is far bigger than the Haitian earthquake, and it keeps on going, year after year.  

 

We started trying to cure Vitamin A deficiency 20 years ago, after a Swiss government researcher bioengineered “golden rice.” The new rice contained a gene from the daffodil that codes for beta-carotene.  The human body can then make Vitamin A out of the beta carotene. Kids in rich countries get most of their Vitamin A from meat, milk and eggs, but poor-country kids live mainly on such plant foods as rice, cassava and sweet potatoes.  None provide much bio-available Vitamin A.

 

But Greenpeace and its eco-allies claimed—without evidence—that such genetic engineering is a “danger to the planet.” 

 

Even after Syngenta developed a corn-based “golden rice II” with vastly more beta carotene—and offered it free to the Third World—Greenpeace still said no.

 

Only now, after 20 years of blockade and delay, are we finally seeing the dramatic benefits of growing Vitamin A crops in the local fields. In the Mukono District of Uganda, they’re growing bio-fortified sweet potatoes. Here, about 25 percent of the children used to be wan and sickly, prone to severe diarrhea, pneumonia, eye inflammations and blindness. Most of the kids are now healthy and vigorous. Pregnant women are thriving, along with their babies.

 

The difference? Orange-colored sweet potatoes, supplied by Uganda’s national agricultural research organization. They’re rich in beta-carotene, and they produce high yields because they resist local crop diseases. The germ plasm for the new sweet potatoes originated at HarvestPlus—Norman Borlaug’s international farm research organization that saved a billion people from starving in the Green Revolution of the 1960s.  

 

“A danger to the planet,” of course is what Greenpeace has called virtually every recent advance in global food production. At the same time, they claim the earth cannot sustainably feed the people already here. The European Union, to its shame, has backed up Greenpeace with threats to boycott the farm exports of any country which allows biotech plantings. In India, rice farmers protested plantings of the new rice, for fear the EU’s ban on biotech foods would block their exports of high-value basmati rice.

 

HarvestPlus finally decided to breed around the Greenpeace blockade. It took more than a decade of laborious test plots and back-crossing, but now cross-bred beta-carotene is being planted in farmers’ fields—and the Mukono mothers say their kids have become remarkably healthier. All it cost was 20 more years, 10 million more blindings, and millions of maternal deaths.  

 

HarvestPlus notes that much of the Third World’s population is caught in a health-poverty trap. Blind and ill family members and orphans need extra care from the able-bodied family members or from societies resources. They never get ahead. Instead, struggling people and their large families keep slashing-and-burning more subsistence crops and hunting endangered animals with cheap AK-47s.

 

Not even Greenpeace should want a poverty-stricken world full of blind children.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net