ROY INNIS CHALLENGES EUROPE ON DDT USE

According to Tim Lambert, you'd have to be clueless to think the EU has threatened trade sanctions against African countries wanting to use DDT (to get around Lambert's petty link-bouncing, copy and paste http://timlambert.org/2005/12/ddt-ban-myth-bingo/ ).

Well, Roy Innis, national chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), has had enough of the thinly veiled threats:

... the European Union (EU) is again warning of possible agricultural export sanctions against Uganda, Kenya, and other countries that use DDT to save lives. Previous threats were pointed and direct; the latest are more oblique.

"Nothing will happen, at least on the official side, if they decide to use DDT in strict compliance with the Stockholm Convention" on chemicals, the EU's trade representative to Uganda said recently. But the EU has "no control" over environmental and consumer organizations that might pressure supermarkets to stop selling agricultural products from those nations, he claimed.

In other words, if callous activists want to exaggerate the risks from trace amounts of insecticides and ignore the very real, life-or-death dangers those insecticides could prevent, the EU's hands are tied. It can't even do anything as simple as issuing an official statement attesting that DDT is safe and effective and represents no threat to EU consumers. If more Africans get sick and die, that's a shame, but we Europeans have our own concerns--that's the EU's position.

The struggle for human rights--especially the fundamental right to life itself--is obviously not over.

Innis reckons it's time for Europe to stop screwing around and get totally with the program:

It's time for Europe to end its deadly policies. Individual countries and the EU Parliament must issue an unequivocal declaration:

• supporting DDT as a vital component of any malaria control program;

• affirming the right of every country's health minister to decide which weapons to use in combating disease;

• agreeing to support insecticide spraying programs;

• saying trade bans and lethal supermarket campaigns will not be tolerated; and

• pledging to penalize any country or organization that tries to block lifesaving insecticide programs.

For too long, the European Union, environmental groups, and health care agencies let horribly misguided policies perpetuate malaria's global reign of terror. They have it within their power to save millions of lives and improve health and economic conditions for billions.
If they can find the necessary moral clarity and political willpower, countless mothers and daughters, fathers and sons will be spared the ravages of this killer disease. And by the next Africa Malaria Day, there will actually be something to celebrate--not just in Africa but also in Asian and Latin American countries that are still plagued by this ancient, deadly disease.

Strangely, Innis then refers those wanting further information to the evil death-mongerers at Africa Fighting Malaria. Surely Lambert is going to have to correct Innis's errors.