Starvation-threatened Africans are being encouraged to eat insects by a UK aid initiative.
African caterpillars, migratory locusts and black soldier flies are on the menu under the initiative taking place in Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo - but locals are rejecting the offer due to the taste and cultural norms.
Dr Alberto Fiore, the project lead who has whipped up a dish of locally farmed mopane worms, cereals, and fruits, has also created a insect-based porridge containing grains including sorghum and millets, which he reassured the Guardian is palatable.
It is quite common is some parts of Africa (Uganda for example) and perfectly acceptable there, so I don’t really see the implied moral outcry you seem to try to frame this article.
The issue is not eating insects, is that the UK has the balls to tell then to do so “for the environment” when the developed world is the one destroying it.
The environment is also being destroyed in Africa by Africans. As usual the world is a bit more complex than Twitter moral outrage in 120 letters can convey.
And besides, it is not “the UK”, but some researchers from the UK…
Bullshit. If Africa was being destroyed by Africans then Africans would reap the rewards of the phenomenal resources their continent has. They don’t reap those rewards though do they? Because all of the companies are owned by the imperial core countries. The environment is destroyed by the resource extractors and the wealth is exported.
It is destroyed by the UK, France, US, Spain and so on, among others of the western imperial core that reap the benefits of that destruction.
Parenti saying this years ago, nothing has changed
There is a wealthy & corrupt local elite that is benefiting very well from the exploitation that is done by western, Asian and also some local companies on the African continent.
And there are plenty of poor people that (out of little other options) also do massive environmental damage.
Evidence? I posted Bloomberg’s excellent debunking of this myth here.
You people make these claims constantly but never back it up comparatively with how much the IMF and Worldbank has absolutely fucked them.
We can put this in incredibly simple terms anyway, framed in the context of the free market liberals love so much. The reason the entire global south is taking money from China instead of the west is because China is offering them a much better deal than the west.
No there fucking aren’t. The scales here are ridiculously different. There are absolutely no poor people with the resources to do the kind of damage the top 100 companies in this world are doing, which are responsible for 71% of global carbon. Comparing a poor individual from fucking Africa with these behemoth monsters of global destruction is absolutely fucking insane.
Stop arguing a strawman, I never claimed anything about so called debt-trap diplomacy. But China is very much cooperating with corrupt local elites in destroying the environment.
And CO2 isn’t the only environmental damage. Cutting down trees for charcoal production for example might not significantly contribute to global carbon levels, but it has a massive negative effect on the local water cycle and biodiversity.
Strawman? Strawman? Asking you for evidence is not strawmanning. You are the one that has invented something, I am asking you to back it up. I have given you responses with direct links to liberal capitalist media telling you that you’re fucking wrong, it’s not even slightly socialist media! It’s fucking Bloomberg. It’s the mouthpiece of the financial elite. The very people I want to see launched into the sun.
Where is your evidence that these loans are “traps”? And if you can come up with literally any evidence to support that, where is your evidence to demonstrate that the western loans are magically better? Because that’s what this is really about “China bad, we’re better” is the essential reason that you’re even bothering to make this argument at all. Except you’re not better. You’ve been horrific for these countries for their entire existence, setting them back, couping them, destroying them economically.
Don’t forget who freed half the continent from colonialism in the first place. Communists like Nelson Mandela. Only to be subjugated post-ussr by the USA’s neo-colonialism via the IMF and the world bank.
Do you even understand what Strawman argument means? Please stop assuming that I am arguing about something which I am not even talking about.
You mean, like China…
No. I absolutely do not mean like China. They just wrote off shit tonnes of debt to 17 african countries, which they also did last year. And the “debt trap” bullshit about them is a myth.
This is the complete polar opposite of how the west behaves to the global south, which is precisely why the global south hates the west while having a very positive view towards China. There is a reason the global south has completely different opinions about them compared to the west and it has a material cause.
The developing world doesn’t even come close to the level of environmental destruction that the developed world is doing. Like, the disparity is staggering, if you ever actually looked at the data. Almost as staggering as the disparity in wealth, resources, social mobility, and quality of life. Until the developed world has done everything they possibly can to alleviate their own environmental burden, which we aren’t even close to, maybe don’t go making the developing world more miserable.
As for eating insects, the developed eats far more environmentally destructive meat like beef than the developing world. If we ate insects, or better yet, just plants, it would do WAY more for the environment than Africans.
I’m not at all opposed to Africans pitching in toward sustainability. I’m extremely opposed to the West telling them to do so while they live in environmentally unsustainable luxury and takes none of their own advice. If you’re not also eating insects for the environment, it’s pretty fucked up to tell people poorer and more miserable than you that they have to, and I’m 99% sure whichever asshole wrote that paper had steak and lobster the night it was published.
We talked AT LENGTH about this in actual environmental science class because the profs acknowledge that way too many people in the developed world blame the developing world.
Look, I don’t disagree in general, but you are just as much of an armchair pundit as you make this strawman of a researcher from the UK sound like.
Much more likely this was simply a research project done that showed the (indisputable) environmental benefits of utilizing insect protein for human consumption and suggested it to people from DRC, because, you know… their direct neighbors in Uganda are already consuming insect protein in large quantities.
Greetings from Africa btw…