Clownfish, they are still finding DDT in Antarctic penguins despite a fairly widespread ban on the environmental use of it over three decades ago.

I must say that the growing counter-culture that thinks the widespread environmental use of highly residual neurotoxins was a terrific idea and should never have been stopped is disturbing. The fact is, that they were only ever a temporary measure because resistance in insect species tends to make their widespread use somewhat self-defeating eventually. That's what happened to DDT. Rachel Carson didn't condemn anyone to death.

There is ZERO evidence that GE increases yields - in fact, there is more evidence to the contrary. The notion that GE will feed the world has been dismissed by that radical environment group - The World Bank in their 4 year study of global agriculture. To Clownfish: If Borlaug is going to get credit for saving lives through the green revolution then surely he is also responsible for the over 1 billion people who currently go hungry because they don't benefit from that revolution. As Vandana Shiva says - you can't have it just one way.

next, your logic defeats me.

I assume therefore that I am personally responsible for the suffering of everyone in Samoa, because I didn't donate *enough* money to house and feed them all?

Clownfish, the logic is clear: scientists of the green revolution claimed to save millions of lives through increased production. As Shiva points they also construct their own immunity from the impacts of those increases. Starvation and malnutrition are intimately related to the political systems that created the corporate agricultural model in which the green revolution sat. Your analogy isn't.

Next,

That food yields nearly doubled are not in dispute, neither is the fact that from WW2 to now the % of people threatened with starvation has dropped from about 40% to 20%, and where there is still food insecurity it is almost always due to political kleptocracy and corruption.

How you can tag the scientists with the responsibility for corrupt 3rd world politicians astounds me.

Vandana Shiva’s point is that scientists cannot absolve themselves from the failures of the technologies they produce nor the systems that produce them. This isn’t absurd – this is obvious. Scientists operate in the political sphere. When CSIRO Plant Industries beds with Monsanto in the development of GE crops, they make political choices that have impacts throughout the food chain. They work on behalf of multinationals with patents on food , rather than on developing local farming systems. They research GE, not organics (in fact, they fired their one organic scientist); they become open advocates for the biotech industry. The green revolution was a rapid expansion of industrial and corporate farming. That increased food production but also caused and increased a variety of other problems (everything from chemical deaths, soil depletion, water depIetion and contamination, dependence on machinery and fossil fuels, acquisition of corrupt governments by megacorporations, commodifying of food, growing of food for export rather that local food consumption, destruction of communities, ownership over the commons)…These are real problems in agricultural areas - and are not solely, not even primarily, the result of corrupt 3rd world governments. The corruption is endemic - and it begins here - and scientists, along with all who support the current system of food production must take responsibility for its realities. At the moment those realities are mainly ugly - and avoidable.