Being green is the in thing today. Green advocates self-righteously admonish the rest of us to change our ways and save the planet. Our lifestyles, our autos, our clothes and our food are all derided for the harm they do the environment.

We are told - if we don’t mend our ways - plague, death and environmental devastation will follow. What is seldom revealed is that the green movement, in its pursuit of environmental purity, has caused massive suffering and death on a scale to dwarf the devastation we are seeing in Haiti today.

Greenpeace, one of the oldest, largest and richest green groups is responsible for the deaths of millions of people. According to the Center for Global Food Issues, Greenpeace’s opposition to biotechnology has resulted in massive human suffering in many developed countries; “Greenpeace and its eco-allies claimed - without evidence - that such genetic engineering is a ‘danger to the planet.’”

It has successfully blocked the use of biotech crops that would help cure disease and malnutrition in many nations in Africa and other Third World nations.

According to Dennis Avery, with the Center for Global Food Issues which is a division of the Hudson Institute, “500,000 kids go blind every year - and even die - due to severe Vitamin A deficiency (VAD). But we’re not preventing the blindness or the deaths. Instead, we’re accepting the tragedy of millions of blind kids, plus the deaths of hundreds of thousands of pregnant women who die from needless birth complications, also due to VAD.”

The real tragedy is that we have had a cure for VAD for 20 years. A Swiss government researcher bioengineered “golden rice.” The new rice contained a gene from the daffodil that codes for beta-carotene. The human body can then make Vitamin A out of the beta carotene. Kids in rich countries get most of their Vitamin A from meat, milk and eggs; but poor-country kids live mainly on such plant foods as rice, cassava and sweet potatoes. None of these provide much bio-available Vitamin A.

Even after Syngenta developed a corn-based “golden rice II” with vastly more beta carotene and offered it free to the Third World, Greenpeace still said “no.” The European Union, to its shame, has backed up Greenpeace with threats to boycott the farm exports of any country which allows biotech plantings.

HarvestPlus is a biological research program dedicated to producing more nutritious crops to combat hunger around the world. With funding from Bill Gates, it set out to break the Greenpeace blockade.

In the Mukono District of Uganda, they’re growing bio-fortified sweet potatoes. Here, about 25 percent of the children used to be wan and sickly, prone to severe diarrhea, pneumonia, eye inflammations and blindness. Most of the kids are now healthy and vigorous. Pregnant women and their babies are thriving.

HarvestPlus notes that much of the Third World’s population is caught in a health-poverty trap. Blind and ill family members and orphans need extra care from the able-bodied family members or from society’s resources.

They never get ahead. Instead, struggling people and their large families keep slashing-and-burning more subsistence crops and hunting endangered animals with cheap AK-47s.

You would think the green movement would want to remedy this situation, but it is too focused on the West and changing our way of life.

The next time some green goodie-two-shoes asks you to support their organization and “save the planet,” ask them what they are doing to save the starving people and the eco-systems in Third World nations.

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of Farm World. Readers with questions or comments for Gary Truitt may write to him in care of this publication.