Will a Bernie Sanders-Style President Reverse Peru’s Economic Progress?

July 25, 2021 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

When writing about economic policy in Latin America, Chile gets lots of attention because it’s a remarkable story of success.

Similarly, Venezuela gets lots of attention because it’s a remarkable story of failure (with Argentina also deserving condemnation for its downward slide).

But we can also learn from other Latin nations.

For instance, I wrote back in 2016 that Peru was one of the world’s “overlooked success stories” because of a big increase in economic liberty back in the good ol’ days of the Washington Consensus.

The huge increase in economic liberty that began in the mid-1980s has subsequently been followed by a period of stability.

 

Policy is not perfect in Peru, especially with regards to regulation and the legal system.

But it is #29 in the world according to the most-recent edition of Economic Freedom of the World, which puts the country in the “most free” quartile.

Not bad for a nation that was in the “least free” quartile as recently as 1990 (and among the five-lowest-scoring nations in 1985).

Perhaps more important, the economic liberalization in Peru is paying dividends.

Looking at the Maddison data on per-capita GDP (adjusted for inflation), you can see that living standards have basically doubled this century.

In this case, “not bad” would be an extreme understatement. Peru deserves to be viewed as a success story.

Now for some bad news.

While Peru has made great progress in recent decades, the nation may be on the verge of slipping into Venezuelan-style economic mismanagement following the recent election of Pedro Castillo, who campaigned on a far-left platform.

Surprisingly, the Washington Post has a superb editorial on this topic.

Now, the question is whether Mr. Castillo will seek to undermine…the country’s free market economy, or pursue or a more moderate course. At stake is whether the South American country of 32 million will follow the disastrous example of Venezuela, whose autocratic socialist regime has destroyed its prosperity, or continue what, until the covid-19 pandemic, was a record of steadily rising living standards. …Mr. Castillo, who was nominated by a Marxist-Leninist party founded by a Cuba-educated hardliner, says he is not a Communist. He campaigned on nationalizing the mining companies that are the foundation of the economy and summoning a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution, the political tactic pioneered by Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez. But the head of his economics transition team has said there will be no nationalizations, expropriations, or exchange and price controls, and Mr. Castillo has indicated he will leave the conservative president of the central bank in place.Given that the president’s party lacks the parliamentary majority it would need to authorize a new constitution or change foreign investment laws… Venezuela’s implosion, which has caused 5 million people to flee the country for its neighbors — including 1 million in Peru — has demonstrated the consequences of leftist misrule for the region.

Wow, that’s a great defense of free markets that shows a great understanding that statism is a recipe for disaster.

I only wish the Washington Post was similarly concerned about “leftist misrule” in the United States (a.k.a., the Biden-Bernie agenda).

But I’m digressing. For purposes of today’s analysis, let’s simply hope that soon-to-be President Castillo doesn’t wreck Peru’s progress.

After all, we know the recipe for growth and prosperity, so it makes sense to worry when politicians want to do the opposite.

P.S. Let’s similarly hope that Chile’s progress isn’t undone by a new, dirigiste constitution.

 

Big Government Enables Big Corruption

November 24, 2020 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

Most readers care about economic developments and economic comparisons involving the United States.

Some readers also care about what’s happening in other major nations, such as China, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, and the United Kingdom.  Relatively few readers, by contrast, care about economic developments in nations with comparatively small economic footprints, such as Peru. That’s understandable, but I want to cite Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s recent column in the Wall Street Journal because she focuses attention on the very important – and very unsavory – relationship between big government and corruption.

Her column is about political turmoil in Peru, but what she writes applies everywhere in the world.

…it’s hard to see how an electorate that so often votes for populism at the polls can extricate itself from the grasp of crooked politicians. The hard left’s solution, which is to rewrite the 1993 constitution and give the state a larger role in the economy, would make things worse. …Peruvians are frustrated. They have been told that by voting they can secure an honest government. But elected officials repeatedly turn out to be self-interested and corrupt. …Yet as fast as they throw the bums out and bring in new ones, more scandals arise. At the core of this dysfunction is a state with vast powers to redistribute wealth. …Even voters who say they want less corruption may find that change conflicts with their self-interest. The siren song of populism draws them to politicians who can hand out plenty of government jobs and other goodies in a world of weak institutional checks.

Amen.

I made the same point, for instance, in this 2009 video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity. And I was focusing on the United States.  Simply stated, when politicians have more power over the allocation of a nation’s resources, the greater their incentive to abuse that power.  To be sure, it’s not a linear relationship.

A country’s political culture also matters. Some nation’s have developed very low levels of tolerance for corruption, so there’s not a strong relationship between corruption and the size of government.  As you can see from Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, the Nordic nations are among the countries that are especially good in this regard.

But nation’s from the developing world, including the perennial bottom-dweller Venezuela, tend to get poor scores. The moral of the story is that it’s especially important to limit government (and therefore limit opportunities for corruption) in countries that don’t have high scores. I’m including this data because Peru, unfortunately, is in the bottom half of nations.

Not a terrible score when compared to Venezuela, but weak compared to Chile.  That being said, I want to close with a dose of optimism about Peru.

Today’s final visual is a chart showing how economic freedom in the country dramatically increased starting in the mid-1980s when the “Washington Consensus” was ascendant. And, just as Prof. William Easterly found in his research, this eventually kick-started much better economic performance.

P.S. It is worrisome that Peruvian economic policy stopped improving beginning about 2005. And based on Ms. O’Grady’s column, it seems unlikely that policy will get better in the near future.

P.P.S. Chile remains (at least for now) the big economic success story of Latin America, though Panama deserves a bit of attention as well.

Massacre of Children in Peru Might Have Been a Sacrifice to Stop Bad Weather

Nicholas St. Fleur, New York Times, March 6, 2019

Last year archaeologists in Peru announced the discovery of a centuries-old ritual massacre, at a site they believed was the largest known case of child sacrifice ever found.  Buried beneath the sands of a 15th-century site called Huanchaquito-Las Llamas were nearly 140 child skeletons, as well as the remains of 200 llamas.

While the reasoning behind the gruesome mass murder of the boys and girls — who were only between the ages of 5 and 14 — cannot be definitively determined, the researchers now say the act was done out of desperation in response to a disastrous climatic event: El Niño.

“What we seem to have at Huanchaquito-Las Llamas is a sacrifice to stop torrential rains, flooding and mudflows,” said John Verano, an anthropologist at Tulane University and an author of the paper, which was published Wednesday in PLOS One.

The finding provides insight into the rituals of the ancient Chimú civilization that inhabited Peru’s northern coast. It also attempts to piece together the story behind why people murdered these children, presumably by cutting open their chests and ripping out their hearts..........To Read More...

My Take - There are so many unwritten insights in this account.

First, much of what is said about Columbus and his sailors and their despicable actions is true. If you wish to find fault with them for being bad Christians, that's a valid argument.

However, if you wish to find fault with them as being bad people there's a problem. Except for a few instances, they weren't as bad as those they replaced. They were playing by the same set of rules as their adversaries, they just played better, and ultimately the horrible religious practices involving mass human sacrifices ended.

Secondly, we justify the abortion because it will impact the mother's ability to advance economically. The ancient world butchered and sacrificed children to their gods to assure good crops. Economics!

The Aztecs slaughter millions to make sure the sun rose every day to assure the continuation of the world.

Now we have atheistic socialists who are demanding we abandon everything that allows for civilization, along with healthier longer lives, in the name of saving the planet from Global Warming.

Does anyone see the parallels there? Pagan religions and the green/left religion are amazingly similar in their misanthropic willingness to sacrifice humanity on their Satanic alter.

You don't believe in Satan? No matter, the correlation is still valid.

Commentary: The Dark Side of Deep Ecology

By James A. Marusek

Editor's Note:  I originally published this article on October 29, 2009.  But this is just as profound now as it was then, and worth bringing back, often!

Mr. Maursek's old site, IMPACT, is no longer available. However, his work can now be found at The Other Side of the Global Warming Debate and The Legacy of the Environmental Movement which may be found at these new addresses. I would like to thank Mr. Marusek for allowing me to republish this excerpt which is from a much larger commentary, Solar “Grand Minima” Preparedness Plan, i.e. Little Ice Age Preparedness Plan. RK

Deep Ecologists push radical depopulation, perhaps to as few as 500 million people worldwide, as the best medicine to cure the human infection and again permit nature to flourish. Some believers have become advocates of thinning the world’s population through genocide, abortion, euthanasia, pestilence, famine and war. But some Deep Ecologist are actively pursuing this objective now with whatever means are available as we stand by and watch from the sidelines.

Science shows that adding chlorine to drinking water was the biggest advance in the history of public health, virtually eradicating water-borne diseases such as cholera. Every year, nearly 1.5 billion people --mostly children under five -- suffer from preventable water-borne diseases such as cholera, typhoid fever, amoebic dysentery, bacterial gastroenteritis, giardiasis, schistosomiasis, and various viral diseases such as hepatitis A. Yet now there is a mounting campaign, led by environmental activists in wealthy industrialized nations, to eliminate every last man-made chlorine molecule from the face of the earth.

As Greenpeace's Joe Thornton explains, There are no uses of chlorine which we regard as safe. Yet chlorination -- considered one of the greatest advances ever in public health and hygiene -- is almost universally accepted as the method of choice for purifying water supplies. In the United States alone, 98 percent of public water systems are purified by chlorine or chlorine-based products. In 1991, an epidemic of cholera started in Peru and spread to the rest of Latin American. This epidemic reached the U.S. in 1992 via an outbreak among 75 commercial airline passengers from Peru. This epidemic is reported to have caused as many as 1 million cases of cholera and as many as 10,000 deaths.

Although the epidemic was reportedly started by a ship which dumped its bilge within reach of Peruvian waters, the epidemic's spread has been credited in part to the Peruvian government's decision to stop chlorinating drinking water supplies under the urging of environmental activist.

Please read - Cholera Epidemic in U.S. Courtesy of EPA "Science" and Dirty Water; Will the United States repeat Peru's chlorine folly?

Ten thousand people were killed and 10 to 15 million left homeless when a cyclone slammed into India's eastern coastal state of Orissa in October 1999. The U.S. Agency for International Development provided corn and soy meal as humanitarian aid to thousands of hungry storm victims. A staunch member of this eco-religion, Vandana Shiva, of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology demanded this food aid distribution immediately be halted because it contained genetically modified (GM) food and accused the United States of using the people of India as guinea pigs. This is despite the fact that Americans have been growing and eating biotech crops for years with no ill effects (about one third of all the corn grown in the United States has been genetically modified).

In 2002, eco-religious groups from Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Comers International convinced the government of Zambia to block the distribution of American-donated genetically enhanced corn to its starving people. As 3 million people in his country face starvation, the president of Zambia let some 15 million metric tons of donated corn sit untouched in storage because some of it was genetically modified.

Please read; Biotech Food Politics: Zambia Revisited and Africans Starve Rather than Accept Bounty of GM Corn and Zambia Allows Its People To Eat

In 2008 a cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe has sickened more than 100,000 and killed at least 4,500. A simple innovation, using GM rice plants, to produce a rice-based oral rehydration solution was developed. This innovation has been shown to cut the duration of disease in children in Peru. But its introduction and use in Zimbabwe was opposed by various eco-religious groups.

Environmental activist urged Chad to fight global warming and the government responded by banning the manufacture, importation and use of charcoal – the sole source of fuel for 99% of Chadians. Women giving birth could not even find a bit of charcoal to heat water for washing.

Another dark aspect of this religious movement is it spawns religious fanatics, such as the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), that believe terrorism such as the destruction of property and threatening human lives, are justified in the name of their eco-religious beliefs.

Peru gets rid of glossy shrine to Marxist guerrillas

January 1, 2019 By Monica Showalter

Peruvian authorities on Saturday demolished a mausoleum holding eight Shining Path rebels killed during prison massacres more than three decades ago and relocated their remains to a cemetery in a northern part of Lima. More than 50 police officers and dozens of workers from the cemetery in the Comas district of Peru’s capital participated in the operation, said prosecutor Javier Zapata. The remains of the Maoist rebels will be buried in separate niches.

When I visited Lima in 2012, I was amazed to visit a place called the "Memory Museum" which was dedicated to exposing the crimes of communism. Apparently it was paid for by the Germans and the European Union, and there was some nod to equalize crimes in the eurotrash style, so that supposedly no one would think communism was any worse than thuggy government soldiers, but it didn't work that way, in effect. The simple reason why is that the museum listed all the atrocities, and did huge news spreads on each, as viewers moved from room to room.

The communist atrocities were so much more numerous, so much more expansive in their killing numbers, and so very, very, vile in details, that it was obviously an effort to discredit and de-romanticize communism. (The communists even came into villages and hung people's pets, which shows just what kind of psychopaths these vaunted fighters for social justice really were.) The whole thing was recognizable to anyone, too - the Che tshirts, the university radicals, the press romanticism, the establishment's tolerance ... and the forced marches and death pit massacres. There also were things you never see otherwise, too - such as the news that it was the indigenous people who were brutalized the most by the communists, and those people visited the museum with tears. That doesn't fit the lefty narrative anywhere, and it was clear that the museum's truth-telling was Peruvians refusal to kowtow to those narratives.............Read more

Remember how Brazil, Ecuador and Peru condemned Arizona over illegal immigration in 2010?

By Monica Showalter August 19, 2018

Remember how Arizona Governor Jan Brewer got piled on by 17 Latin American nations in 2010, condemning her state for attempting to enforce federal immigration law based on the reality that Arizona was being overrun by illegals and the Obama administration was doing nothing? It was bad enough that the Obama administration sued her state to end the law, something it only did with partial success.  But then Latin states such as Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador joined the fun, piously weighing in to sign on to a highly questionable Friend of the Court brief led by Mexico, condemning Arizona for trying to enforce U.S. immigration law.

Scroll forward to 2018. Now the shoe is on the other tootsie.

Because right now, those are the very nations pulling up the drawbridge to illegals as their own countries get inundated by vast human waves of Venezuelans flooding over their borders without papers..............While I pity the plight of these sick Venezuelan refugees from socialism and fully support the U.S. mercy mission, there is also the main issue of why these countries don't want to be overrun.

Like the illegals who rolled into Arizona that Colombia and the others had such tough words for, quite a few of these people are criminals who have wrought havoc on the countries they invaded. It's gotten so bad that in one Brazilian town, the locals literally ran them all out of town.  Which was exactly what happened in Arizona.......... Read more  
 

Greenpeace again offends indigenous people

By Craig Rucker
web posted December 15, 2014

 

Greenpeace likes to pretend it's on the side of local people, especially indigenous peoples. But time and again they demonstrate a shocking degree of cultural boorishness. Now Greenpeace activists have Peruvians up in arms, after trespassing all over treasured Incan cultural sites at Machu Picchu and Nazca, while doing ridiculous publicity stunts to highlight their claim that tiny amounts of plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide are causing "dangerous" planet-wide climate change...... The damage affects some 1,600 square meters (0.4 acres) next to a hummingbird etched into the desert soil. A spokeswoman for the prosecutor said that, under Peruvian law, damaging the historic site could be punishable by a prison sentence of three to six years. ......Many politicians and business people are afraid to stand up to Big Green bully groups. CFACT is unafraid. We have challenged Greenpeace and Big Green at every opportunity, such as here,here,hereand here. We are committed to working for people, as well as nature......To Read More.....

My Take - On a personal level, I don't much care about these ancient pagan cultural sites, especially since the religions of Central and South America were centered on human sacrifice - and on a massive scale. But even so, everyone should be offended. Why? I think there is an important lesson to be gleaned from all of this about the greenies.

These sites belong to someone else. It’s the property of the Peruvian people. It doesn’t belong to Greenpeace, and these self-righteous environmental activists have no right to damage their property. 

This is just one more act of disrespect from the Green activists. They hate humanity and the outcome from the things they support – or are against - in so many arenas are ample proof of it. They are the spear point of the left, where the emotional and philosophical foundation for the green movement was created - in 19th century Germany and codified into law in 20th century Nazi Germany.

The roots of that philosophy go back to the ancient Germanic Druids. The one thing they all have in common - the pagans of South and Central America, the Middle East, the Celtic Druids, the Nazi's and the Green movement is their willingness to sacrifice human beings on the altar of their nature worshiping based beliefs. We really do need to come to a complete understanding that western environmentalism is the secular religion of the urban atheist, with its roots in pagan Celtic nature worship. Once we grasp that everything they do falls into place.

 

The World's Climate Change Mafia Meet in Peru

By Alan Caruba

This appeared here and my thanks to Alan for allowing me to publish his work.  RK

To understand all the talk of “climate change” you must understand that everything and everyone involved—except for those of us who debunk the lies—are engaged in a criminal enterprise to transfer billions from industrialized nations to those who have failed to provide a thriving economy, often because they are run by dictators or corrupt governments who skim the money for themselves.

The lies being inflicted on Americans include Obama’s “war on coal” that is shutting down coal-fired plants that affordably and efficiently produce the electricity the nation needs, along with the six-year delay of the Keystone XL pipeline. Add in the thousands of Environmental Protection Agency regulations affecting our manufacturing, business and agricultural sectors and the price we are paying is huge.

At its heart, environmentalism hates capitalism.

One of the worst parts of this scam to take from the rich and give to the poor—otherwise known as “redistribution”—is the way the world’s media have played along since 1992 when the first Earth Summit was held in Rio. The perpetrators are headquartered in the United Nations, home to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that sets the agenda.

While the 20^th session of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Conference of Parties meets in Lima, Peru this week, perhaps the most egregious and outrageous example of journalism was the December 2^nd Associated Press article, “Hotter, Weirder: How Climate Change and Changed the Earth.” It is not attributed to a specific reporter; perhaps because it is filled with lies from start to finish.

It starts with the biggest lie of all: “WASHINGTON (AP) -- In the more than two decades since world leaders first got together to try to solve global warming, life on Earth has changed, not just the climate. It's gotten hotter, more polluted with heat-trapping gases, more crowded and just downright wilder.”

The Earth is in the 19^th year of a natural cooling cycle, the result of a comparable cycle on the Sun which is producing less radiation to warm the planet. What astounds anyone who knows this is the article’s assertion that “It's almost a sure thing that 2014 will go down as the hottest year in 135 years of record keeping, meteorologists at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center say. If so, this will be the sixth time since 1992 that the world set or tied a new annual record for the warmest year.”

Would government agencies that are beholden to the existing administration for their budgets lie to the public? Yes, they would. While all fifty states experienced freezing weather within the past month, we are still being told that 2014 set new records for warmth. To borrow a phrase from Jonathan Gruber, the architect of ObamaCare, the government can tell “stupid” voters and others anything it wants in order to achieve its goals.

For the record, in 2013 and much of 2014, there have been record low numbers of tornadoes and hurricanes. There was a record gain in Arctic and Antarctic ice. There was no change in the rate of sea level rise; something measured in millimeters. The weather is the weather and that includes dramatic events such as blizzards or droughts, but it is hardly uniform. Depending on where you live on planet Earth, you will experience it differently on any given day.

As representatives of 190 climate mafia meet in Peru, you will be given data about carbon dioxide (CO2). The AP article cites increases of “60 percent.” If that were true, it would be good news. All vegetation on Earth depends on CO2, just as humans and other living creatures depend on oxygen. More CO2 means healthier forests and greater crop yields, an agricultural bonus in a world that needs to feed seven billion people. But it’s not true. Nor is the claim that the mere 0.04% of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere traps so much heat we’re all going to die. It doesn’t and most of us will die of old age.

As Amy Ridenour of the National Center for Public Policy Research reported in June, “The U.S. already leads the world in CO2 reductions and is a great role model. U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions fell 12.6 percent between 2005 and 2012, thanks to technology and conservation. Worldwide, CO2 emissions increased by 17.7 percent during the same period.” That’s a far cry from the AP claim of 60 percent.

The Peru conference is another effort to impose a global tax on “carbon” and to increase the UN’s “Climate Fund” to which some nations have pledged $9.3 billion. To put this in perspective, the United States just set a new record of $18 TRILLION in debt and cannot afford to be pledging money to that fund or any other fund. Most of that debt has been incurred during the one and a half terms of Barack Obama who just happens to be telling everyone that “climate change” is the greatest threat to all life on Earth.

“Climate change” is what the 4.5 billion-year-old Earth has been doing during all that time and will continue to do. Humans experience it as the “weather” which is measured in days and weeks while climate is measured in units not less than thirty years and more often in centuries. Today’s weather prediction is good for, at best, five days and is subject to change at any time.

As for all those claims about “global warming” it’s worth keeping in mind that not one of the computer models cited to prove it has been accurate. There isn’t a model or a computer big enough to take in all the many elements that compose the weather anywhere and everywhere on Earth. The weather is always in a state of flux and change, just as the temperatures during any hour of the day are in a stage of change.

Here’s a bit of advice. Do not believe anything that comes out of the UN conference because, scientifically speaking, it will be a lie. And don’t believe anything the Associated Press reports on “climate change” because that too must automatically be regarded as a lie as well.

Whatever Barack Obama has to say about “climate change” (formerly known as “global warming”) is a lie. It would be nice to have a President and a government we could trust.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

The Dark Side of Deep Ecology

By James A. Marusek

Mr. Maursek's old site, IMPACT, is no longer available. However, his work can now be found at The Other Side of the Global Warming Debate and The Legacy of the Environmental Movement which may be found at these new addresses. I would like to thank Mr. Marusek for allowing me to republish this excerpt which is from a much larger commentary, Solar “Grand Minima” Preparedness Plan, i.e. Little Ice Age Preparedness Plan. RK
Deep Ecologists push radical depopulation, perhaps to as few as 500 million people worldwide, as the best medicine to cure the human infection and again permit nature to flourish. Some believers have become advocates of thinning the world’s population through genocide, abortion, euthanasia, pestilence, famine and war. But some Deep Ecologist are actively pursuing this objective now with whatever means are available as we stand by and watch from the sidelines.

Science shows that adding chlorine to drinking water was the biggest advance in the history of public health, virtually eradicating water-borne diseases such as cholera. Every year, nearly 1.5 billion people --mostly children under five -- suffer from preventable water-borne diseases such as cholera, typhoid fever, amoebic dysentery, bacterial gastroenteritis, giardiasis, schistosomiasis, and various viral diseases such as hepatitis A. Yet now there is a mounting campaign, led by environmental activists in wealthy industrialized nations, to eliminate every last man-made chlorine molecule from the face of the earth.

As Greenpeace's Joe Thornton explains, There are no uses of chlorine which we regard as safe. Yet chlorination -- considered one of the greatest advances ever in public health and hygiene -- is almost universally accepted as the method of choice for purifying water supplies. In the United States alone, 98 percent of public water systems are purified by chlorine or chlorine-based products. In 1991, an epidemic of cholera started in Peru and spread to the rest of Latin American. This epidemic reached the U.S. in 1992 via an outbreak among 75 commercial airline passengers from Peru. This epidemic is reported to have caused as many as 1 million cases of cholera and as many as 10,000 deaths.

Although the epidemic was reportedly started by a ship which dumped its bilge within reach of Peruvian waters, the epidemic's spread has been credited in part to the Peruvian government's decision to stop chlorinating drinking water supplies under the urging of environmental activist.

Please read - Cholera Epidemic in U.S. Courtesy of EPA "Science" and Dirty Water; Will the United States repeat Peru's chlorine folly?

Ten thousand people were killed and 10 to 15 million left homeless when a cyclone slammed into India's eastern coastal state of Orissa in October 1999. The U.S. Agency for International Development provided corn and soy meal as humanitarian aid to thousands of hungry storm victims. A staunch member of this eco-religion, Vandana Shiva, of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology demanded this food aid distribution immediately be halted because it contained genetically modified (GM) food and accused the United States of using the people of India as guinea pigs. This is despite the fact that Americans have been growing and eating biotech crops for years with no ill effects (about one third of all the corn grown in the United States has been genetically modified).

In 2002, eco-religious groups from Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Comers International convinced the government of Zambia to block the distribution of American-donated genetically enhanced corn to its starving people. As 3 million people in his country face starvation, the president of Zambia let some 15 million metric tons of donated corn sit untouched in storage because some of it was genetically modified.

Please read; Biotech Food Politics: Zambia Revisited and Africans Starve Rather than Accept Bounty of GM Corn and Zambia Allows Its People To Eat

In 2008 a cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe has sickened more than 100,000 and killed at least 4,500. A simple innovation, using GM rice plants, to produce a rice-based oral rehydration solution was developed. This innovation has been shown to cut the duration of disease in children in Peru. But its introduction and use in Zimbabwe was opposed by various eco-religious groups.

Environmental activist urged Chad to fight global warming and the government responded by banning the manufacture, importation and use of charcoal – the sole source of fuel for 99% of Chadians. Women giving birth could not even find a bit of charcoal to heat water for washing.

Another dark aspect of this religious movement is it spawns religious fanatics, such as the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), that believe terrorism such as the destruction of property and threatening human lives, are justified in the name of their eco-religious beliefs.