One hundred thousand apologies for misinforming you. I reported last week that the staple diet of banqueteers attending save-the-world conferences was oysters and foie gras. Absolutely inexcusable. The correct information has been provided by the admirable World Food Summit Forum which opened in Rome the other day, attended by 3,000 leaders and state officials. (This is not to be confused with a similar UN affair in Bali going on about now as a precursor to the really big one in South Africa in the autum)
The summit leaders in Rome feasted on foie gras on toast, lobster in vinaigrette, fillet of goose with olives, seasonal vegetables, and compote of fruit with zucchini. But not an oyster in sight. Dear me. My regrets are abject, my contrition total, my shame unquenchable. All I can do is hope that the UN conferences in Bali and South Africa will live up to my expectations that oysters will be served.
However, Rome did not disappoint my expectations in one other regard, though I kept it to myself, not daring to believe it would happen; but it did. Robert Mugabwe, butcher of the Matabele people 20 years ago, who is currently busy turning his once prosperous country into the Sea of Tranquillity, was applauded by African leaders after his speech celebrating his current land policies.
Bentley Pinnacle
One wonders: did these fine fellows bring doggy bags with them, to feast on the left-overs when they got back to their rooms? I certainly would have done; but they, of course, have no need. There is probably hardly a single African leader who has not got his name down for the new €1 million Bentley Pinnacle. What need have they of doggy bags, when they have entire countries at their disposal for looting? Of the 25 hungriest countries in the world, 17 are in Africa. Of the top 10, eight are African. The other two are Afghanistan, which has a rather good excuse, and Haiti. What that dazzlingly unfortunate country has in common with the second and third poorest countries, Burundi and the Congo, is that malnutrition is entirely man-made. With their climates, at least two crops a year should be possible. Yet two out of every three people in the two African countries suffer from malnutrition, and rather fewer in Haiti.
Genetic modification
But there are many countries where uncertain weather and plant diseases make food production far more hazardous. These are the places, homes to hundreds of millions of people, which would benefit from the work of scientists making hardy, disease-resistant crops which can flourish in the most improbable circumstances. The best way to do this is by genetic modification. Yet what are we doing in Europe but fetishising the anti-GM movement as moral saviours of the planet?
The first thing to be said about much of the Green movement is that it hates people. It prefers "nature" to human beings. It rambles on about "natural" solutions to the world's problems, when there is nothing "natural" about the sowing and harvesting of crops, or their protection against blight.
Natural doesn't mean good for you. Feast on the wholly natural deadly nightshade or the wholly natural Avenging Angel toadstool, and you'll die screaming. Nature is never more natural than at this time of year, when the countryside is an open-air abattoir, as millions of fledglings are being slaughtered in a vast and bloody contest for survival. Agriculture involves the creation of sanctuaries against such disorder, a triumph of the man-made unnatural over the natural.
We have it in our power to bring food to the world by GM means; yet those who oppose this are made to look glamorous. The recent BBC series Fields of Gold was based on superstitious mumbo-jumbo, with the same scientific basis as the medieval ducking stool. The target, naturally, was genetically-modified food, and the central premise was that a gene inserted in crops could leap species, from crops to animals and finally to bacteria. And this is as plausible as saying that bacteria could start sprouting Cox's pippins.
That the BBC should peddle such tosh is not surprising: it is full of the anti-scientific conspiracy-theory dolts who not long ago revered the Soviet Union. They must now turn their pathological credulousness in other bizarre, counter-factual directions, the pathetic dears.
But why is such cretinousness spreading rather like their imaginary genes, leaping species? Why do supermarkets such as Superquinn declare that their foodstuffs are GM-free, as if it were something to be proud of? Nor do we sell child pornography, and our hamburgers are guaranteed free of all baby-meat. Moreover, no women were shot in the production of any of our shampoos, and we are proud to announce that our bread is guaranteed to be completely free of human eyes. We do not allow human sacrifices in our butchery department.
Moral superiority
To reject science is to celebrate the Black Death and the Famine. To claim moral superiority because you reject a technology that could save millions of lives is a kind of fashion-fascism: you are appealing to a modish salon ignorance and a chic moral superiority which prefer baseless rumours nattered over the canapés to the hard truths of science.
Better to cherish these baseless myths as a means of proving your moral superiority than to promote the technologies which could put food into the swollen black bellies of millions of African children. If there is a truly inexcusable sin of our times, this is it.