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.

  • Lenins2ndCat@lemmy.ml
    31·
    2 years ago

    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.

    And there are plenty of poor people that (out of little other options) also do massive environmental damage.

    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.

      • Lenins2ndCat@lemmy.ml
        43·
        2 years ago

        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.

          • Lenins2ndCat@lemmy.ml
            32·
            2 years ago

            Everyone out of their teens knows what a strawman is mate it’s very basic. Where is your justification? Where is your evidence? Stop avoiding the point and dancing around it. Talk like a normal human being that actually answers what people say.

            All you are doing is repeatedly dodging. Are you going to avoid the request for evidence a third time? You’re only demonstrating that you have none.

          • Lenins2ndCat@lemmy.ml
            32·
            2 years ago

            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.

            Mate you are the one that brought this up. Aiming to defer blame from the western imperial core with your “everyone is doing it” response. It’s very clear what side you are batting for here.

            No, not everyone is doing it, the western imperial core is doing it. The Chinese are not, and the claim that they are is nonsense.

              • Lenins2ndCat@lemmy.ml
                32·
                2 years ago

                Ok I see the problem here.

                Do you understand how international finance and investment works?

                  • Lenins2ndCat@lemmy.ml
                    32·
                    2 years ago

                    No mate, clearly fucking not.

                    Why do you think it’s all foreign companies and not domestic? Because there isn’t a domestic industry, it either needs to be built, lacks pre-requisites, or other matters are a greater priority in the moment.

                    So what to do for a developing country? They have resources but they do not have the means to do anything with them, so they invite foreign companies to make deals for those resources. Investment in return for debt.

                    The devil of that debt however is in the details of the deal. The IMF and World Bank make many of these deals for the west in the global south and they have always been absolutely dogshit, but the global south having no other options always accepted them. China on the other hand makes extremely fair deals, even with countries that have no negotiating position, and as you can see from earlier links they also write off these debts all the time. Yanis for example had first hand experience dealing with China but they were incredibly reasonable, much more reasonable than he expected.

                    So why did I bring up debts? Because investment in natural resource extraction by foreign companies in the global south is always about some form of debt. It’s literally how finance works.