Crop Rotation

Just when you think you have heard it all – the overwhelming stupidity of people can still astonish you.

Background: we have a team that is actively involved in support to civil affairs. Among our team members is an Entomologist. He is actively working vector control programs and trying to figure out how to reduce the burden of malaria on the Afghan population. I like his ideas and potential programs since they will benefit the US service members as well. Fewer mosquitoes means fewer chances to get malaria.

There is a toad in the road. WHO. In their pie in the sky program on vector control, they try to avoid insecticides. In fact, they would just as soon never use them at all. Admittedly, when there are other options, I will go for them. But if the option is small fish which will displace native fish (food source), I am not enthusiastic. If the proposals involve other methods -well – crop rotation is not a sensible suggestion.

For those areas which are rice growing – you would be asking farmers to cease growing their staple food crop. Rice paddies, of course, are great places for mosquito larvae. I am not sure what they would eat. Rice is what they know how to grow and it is suited for the area and the land.

In other areas, the same solution has also been suggested and met with the same skepticism. I am not sure we want to encourage poppy growing. Otherwise, there are four main crops grown for export. I think that poppy fumes have gotten to WHO – exactly how do you rotate the main crops? And when would you expect a reduction in mosquito population?

Oh – the four crops? Grapes, apricots, pomegranates, almonds. Not exactly overnight cro

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8 Responses to Crop Rotation

  1. Helen says:

    Amazing that these people have little or no idea – sad really.

  2. Diane says:

    Definite nomination for the Darwin awards here!!!!

  3. Jan says:

    Don’t get me started about the WHO, all its ponderous eloquence and Gro Bruntland and the millions of poor kids still dying out there in the bush. Very frustrating. Prima donnas everywhere doing mostly cookie pushing with white wine.

  4. Diane says:

    What cracks me up is that these people (WHO, etc.) come into a country that they know nothing about (nothing as far as how the average poor Afghan has lived for centuries) and then try to tell them what to do! They’ve taken away the poppy production (ok, I can see that) so what do they have left? Now to destroy their ability to produce rice for which to feed themselves by introducing a foreign fish? What a load of crapola! Who is smoking what over there…or shall we say in Washington DC ? What do they think these people are going to do to provide for their families or does the WHO plan to open a chain of US fast food restaurants in the country? Yes, we see in what good shape our people are in now living on the stuff. Agencies like that really make me mad!

  5. Berg says:

    I believe I would be accurate in asking WHO do they think they are kidding

  6. Carmen says:

    Oh, way cool. Rotational cropping for orchards. Please tell me they didn’t actually say that? Of course you can’t replace annual crops with orchard crops all at once. And are they serious about introducing non-native fish? WHO is way too European. IMO

    Conservationists without thinking can put more value on “nature” than on humans. Not systems thinkers because they don’t understand their own theology.

  7. Beverly says:

    Same problem in Belize. Malaria was virtually eradicated in the 1950s but then came back with a vengeance (tropical rain forest) when DDT was banned. And you can no more drain a mangrove swamp than you can drain a paddy field. Only difference was that it was probably PAHO rather than WHO . .

  8. April says:

    you have got to be kidding ? would they possibly hire and pay me the big bucks to be the comedian?

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