03 September 2007

Let's talk "sustainable" lifestyles...

As third-world farmers continue to cut their own throats.
-- GENEVA, Sept 3 (Reuters) -- Farm scientists warned on Monday that hardy breeds of livestock vital for world food supplies were dying out across developing countries, especially in Africa, and called for the creation of regional gene banks to save them.

"There is a livestock meltdown under way across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Valuable breeds are disappearing at an alarming rate," Carlos Sere of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) told the week-long gathering.

The report, from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), found that smallholders in poorer nations were abandoning their traditional animals in favour of higher-yield stock imported from Europe and the United States.
Mindless big city leftbots continue to portray America as the Great Satan in the continuing campaign for "sustainable lifestyles", but the simple country farmers of the third world are generating their own ecological time bomb.
Holstein-Friesian cows with high milk yields, fast egg-laying White Leghorn chickens and quick-growing Large White pigs -- all from the industrialised and more temperate countries of the North -- were pushing out native species in the South.

In northern Vietnam, local breeds made up 72 percent of the sow pig population in 1994 but eight years later the proportion had dropped to 26 percent. Of the 15 local pig breeds, 10 now faced possible extinction, according to the report.
Monoculture is never a good thing... putting all your eggs in one basket is a disaster waiting to happen.

But let's just blame everything on George Bush.

That's so much easier.