Commentary (by Charles Onyango-Obbo) - An angry son and the hungry of the world get a raw deal

Ref: http://www.nationmedia.com/dailynation/nmgcontententry.asp?category_id=25&newsid=122694

Story by CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO
Publication Date: 5/8/2008

WITH THE BLOW-UP that followed the December elections in Kenya, and the bizarre election fiasco that we are witnessing in Zimbabwe, you would think we have seen it all.

Apparently not. Local council elections were held in the UK on May 1, but the contest for Orrell county in the Wigan Council made headlines for the most unusual reasons.

Richard Clayton Sr., a Conservative who has represented Orrell for the past four years, was challenged by his son, Richard Clayton Jr. The young man was angry that his 65-year-old father left his mother for a younger woman.

According to reports, the domestic feud began when Clayton Sr left his wife, Marjorie, to move in with his new partner, a 46-year-old divorcee. It looked like the senior Clayton was toast, but voters everywhere can be fickle.

When the counting was done, the old man had routed his son comprehensively. Senior got 1,608 votes, and Junior only a measly 321.

The one voter who left no one in doubt about whom she was going to vote for was Marjorie. She cast for Junior.

Meanwhile in Zimbabwe, Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF might have lost its majority in Parliament, and the ageing strongman who has wrecked a once great nation was beaten in the first round of the presidential race by opposition leader, Morgan Tsivangirai.

Because Tsivangirai didn’t win by more than 50 per cent, there will now be a run-off. Mugabe might have lost it, but there is one area in which he and his henchmen are still world champions – in the art of vituperation.

After some African leaders criticised Mugabe’s attempt to steal the election, the government mouthpiece, The Herald, called them “myopic stooges”.

Zimbabwe’s economic crisis (inflation is now 170,000 per cent) has left many of its citizens going hungry. Now, says the World Bank, 100 million people in the world are facing severe hunger too as global prices of food shoot through the roof.

But like the soaring oil prices that have enabled the giant oil companies to rake in unprecedented profits, there are multinationals that are making a killing from the high food prices.

According to a report in The Independent on Sunday, Monsato (famous for its controversial genetically modified foods) last month reported that its net income for the three months up to the end of February this year had more than doubled over the same period in 2007, from $543m (Sh33bn) to $1.2bn (Sh76bn).

Its profits increased from $1.44bn (Sh89bn) to $2.2bn (Sh136bn). Cargill’s net earnings soared by 85 per cent from $553m (Sh34bn), to $1.12bn (Sh69bn) over the same three months.

AND ARCHER DANIELS MIDLAND, one of the world’s largest agricultural processors of soy, corn and wheat, increased its net earnings by 42 per cent in the first three months of this year from $363m (Sh22bn) to $517m (Sh32bn).

The operating profit of its grains merchant merchandising and handling operations jumped 16-fold.

The unjust thing about some of this is that, according to a new authoritative study carried out over the past three years at the University of Kansas in the US, contrary to the hype that genetic modification increases crop yields, the opposite is actually true.

Genetic production, the study found, cuts the productivity of crops. GM soya, for example, produces 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent.

The new study confirms earlier research at the University of Nebraska, which found that another Monsato GM soya produced 6 per cent less than its closest conventional relative, and 11 per cent less than the best non-GM soya available.

Mid last month the biggest study of its kind ever conducted – the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development – concluded that GM was not the answer to world hunger.

Now, that leaves us in a tight spot.

We can’t be blamed for escaping the dangers facing us by burying ourselves into the odd and funny contradictions of life.

Take China, a country which is officially atheist. It is set to become one of the biggest Bible producing countries in the world, The Guardian reports.

A massive new printing plant which opens this month will employ 600 non-Christians locals producing 23 Bibles a minute. The plant is expected to supply a quarter of the world’s Bibles by 2009.

To less holy matters, recently, a Russian man returned home from holiday only to find his two-storey house had been stolen brick by brick.

That, of itself, was surprising, but perhaps not more than the discovery that the house had been stolen by his neighbour.

Not too far from the Vatican in Italy, a man was convicted for an old Biblical sin. He was found guilty of “staring too intently” at the woman sitting opposite him on the train.

My favourite comes from Australia. Last week. One of Australia’s most senior conservative politicians broke down at a news conference as he tearfully admitted sniffing the chair of a female colleague shortly after she vacated it.

Troy Buswell, the leader of the opposition Liberal Party in Western Australia, is under intense pressure to resign over the incident, which happened in 2005.