Re: @h4rm0ny
"Right. So you support organics because they have a propaganda value? That says it all, really."
Actually, that says something completely other than what I wrote. I gave a number of supportable reasons in my post and none of them were to do with "propaganda value".
"No, it's not. The real fuck-you to the developing world is us stopping them getting higher productivity agriculture, cheaper energy and inward investment."
Where am I stopping them getting cheaper energy or inward investment? I'm extremely pro-nuclear for a start and you don't get better energy than that. India is one of the leading deployers of nuclear energy and I fully support that, though my support is chiefly limited to shooting down stupid arguments online or the rare environmental meeting. Inward investment? You know nothing about what businesses I work in or where my money goes. For your information I've contributed to a number of developing countries. You know nothing about me or what I do for a living. You have only, somehow, extrapolated from my comments about patents on GMOs for example, that I am somehow against investing in developing countries. A very stupid extrapolation. As to pesticides and higher-yields, they want that primarily for export market, and the export market is what distorts much of the local production in the first place. For example, you get areas of India with vitamin D deficiency being common because traditional farming containing a balance of nutrients, has given way to intensive rice farming. A problem that Monsanto exploits to sell its vitamin D-enriched "golden rice", ironically enough.
"People like you love to keep the poor where they are - they look lovely on postcards. You might not think you're a racist, but your politics certainly is."
Making an argument that developing countries should be wary of ending up with their crops being nearly all patented by massive Western corporations who will later on cease to subsidize the buying of those crops once native seed stocks are heavily depleted and they are reliant on heavy use of pesticides and herbicides because the balance of their local ecosystem has been heavily shifted, is not reason to start suggesting I'm racist. Both the science and the economics of the above are sound.
In short, your response seems to have little to do with the post I wrote. It seems to be a knee-jerk abuse based on some simplistic demon environmentalist stereotype that exists in your mind. No, people "like me" do not "love to keep the poor where they are." Poor people don't make good trading partners or customers for my tech-based services. Plus there's, you know, something called compassion. A thing that you seem to assume no-one but yourself posesses.