Tail-end trophy for Greenpeace

Johannesburg - African and Asian farmers, and hawkers from across South Africa handed over a "Bullshit Trophy" (yes, that is the trophy's real name) to Greenpeace, the Third World Network and BioWatch for their contribution to the "preservation of poverty" in developing countries.

The trophy comprises of a piece of wood on which two heaps of dried cow-dung - "unfortunately not elephant dung" - are mounted.

Barun Mitra of the Sustainable Development Network (SDN), a coalition of non-governmental organisations which believes, among other things, that sustainable development is attainable only through free trade, officiated at the symbolic handing-over in Johannesburg on Wednesday.

Mitra denounced the three NGOs as parasites which "prey on the blood of the poor" and did not help to improve agricultural productivity in the Third World.

"They are not interested in famine or poverty. This lot is concerned only about their own interests.

"They sit here at the World Summit for Sustainable Development in their rich man's hotels and romanticise everything," he said.

Seven hawkers' organisations, including the Gauteng Hawkers' Association, and seven farmers' associations from South Africa, Kenya, the Philippines and India, protested under the banner of the SDN outside the Sandton conference centre on Wednesday morning.

The demands of the farmers' associations relate to, among other things, access to the best technology, to enter into trade inside and outside their borders and to sell their products at a price that has not been determined through agricultural subsidies, tariffs or quotas.

The hawkers demanded the right to enter into trade where and with whom they wanted, without the government's interference, and the right of self-regulation.

Leon Louw, secretary of the Informal Business Forum to which most of the hawkers' organisations belong, said on Wednesday that it was a disgrace that hawkers were prohibited from sitting along the roads in Johannesburg and Soweto selling their products during the Earth Summit.

About 20,000 hawkers in Johannesburg were losing "millions of rands" as a result of this ban, said Louw.

The major problem with the sustainability movement is that they've all these suggestions for healing the ills of the world, like poverty and such and none of them have been shown to work. Which indicates that their economic, political, and environmental models are wrong. But they will stick to them because it supports their misguided worldview. Though, I don't see why the fact that their policies are inneffective doesn't tell them there's something wrong with their models.

It's kind of like similar models which are used to predict what we should do in this country to solve problems regarding race, poverty, education and all our other social ills. The models are wrong and so aren't able to predict what should be done to solve the problems. For example with respect to education, we need more self-esteem programs in schools, smaller class sizes, multicultural studies, bilingual education, more money spent per student ad infinitum. Yet all this is done and we get very little if any academic gains at all from the students. The blacks and Latinos are still at the bottom and the whites and Asians are at the top. And, when successful methods are used they're either discarded or ignored because the implications are too much for those who cling to the same tried and failed models or their extra titles, positions and stipends.

Take bilingual education, for example the theory was that you needed to allow the student's use of their native language skills and by doing so you would better enable them at a future date to acquire skills in English. I heard lots of lectures on why this worked better than immersion and my response was what a bunch of junk science this is. Here, now that we've switched to immersion you have educators, whose only vested interests are the welfare of students, and who were once great proponents of bilingual education, coming out and confessing they were wrong; immersion was the only way to go. Of course, anyone who was bilingual and had an ounce of common sense could've told you that. At least, in this case the models reflecting how children acquired language, which were used to support bilingual education were mostly discarded. Lord, it only took twenty years worth of failures and a ballot initiative to do it, but that's progress compared to how many other psuedo-scientific models, which are incapable of predicting a thing, get discarded.

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