Categories: uncategorized
Date: 03 June 2008 12:44:14
I am not a great fan of the European Union and today my love for this institution went down further; I never though it could get any lower.
The EU food chief, Patrick Wall, wants the ban on feeding animal products to other animals. As such he wants pigs to be poultry trimmings and chickens to be fed pig meat. Supposedly this is what helped to cause the BSE crisis in the 1990's.
He asks: "Is it morally and ethically correct to be destroying this food when people are starving? No one I know is worried about the science. There is only concern about consumer reaction.".
For over 10 years we have been told that feeding animal by products to animals is scientifically wrong. Now we have the EU's head food boffin saying that there is nothing wrong with it. What are we supposed to believe?
Isn't it morally and ethically wrong to grow crops for fuel, rather than food? At least by feeding grain to animals you are ensuring that the food chain is safe. Making biofuel from foodstuff is not.
The EU is also to blame because it keeps changing its priorities for the agricultural sector. It pays them subsidies to grow food and then subsidies not to grow food. Its constiuent governments have diverted aid from agriculture to buying energy producing businesses and, in the case of the UK government, flogging those industries off at a profit that is then shared out with the investment fund and not reinvested where it's needed.
Maybe if governments actually thought about the effects of their ill thought out policies then we wouldn't be in this mess.
History Today :
1098 : The First Crusade captures Antioch after an 8 month siege. Billy Graham did not lead this one though....
1940 : The last ship leaves Dunkirk and completes Operation Dynamo. 338,226 allied troops have been saved. Even so some French people look on it as a betrayal by Britain.
1989 : Chinese troops open fire on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, killing thousands. Now China is hosting the 2008 Olympic Games and everything is forgiven.
Revision - I am informed that no such action took place in 1989. There was no massacre and, even if there was, it was the duty of the brave Chinese troops to crush the supporters of the western imperialist oppressors. But they didn't because it never happend.