| This is bad news for the developing world and good news for Monsanto. Rajiv Shah, who used to work on agriculture at the Gates Foundation, is going to head up USAID - the U.S. Agency for International Development. That's the part of the government that is currently working on helping the 1 billion hungry people in the world by giving them better agricultural knowledge and technology.
The choice of Shah is a crystal clear sign of the direction the Obama Administration plans to go on fighting hunger. The majority of the world has signed onto a UN/World Bank study (the IAASTD report) calling for agroecological farming methods as the way to solve world hunger. The IAASTD report says that GMOs are not the way forward to help hunger among smallholders in Africa and South Asia and that our free trade agenda actually harms these farmers. The Gates Foundation (and presumably, Shah) takes the opposite view - against the conclusions of the 400 scientists from around the world who worked on the IAASTD report - that GMOs are the way to go. And, obviously, Obama is following Clinton and Bush as a die-hard free-trader.
This is not unexpected, but it's bad news. Bad, bad, bad news. |
