Worthy goals both, to which I heartily subscribe. But do you really think they even come close to being enough? Science I believe is the only answer under present circumstances. Much will be lost either way, and nobody's sadder about this than I am.
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Coalition of the ignorant (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter fugl
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Worthy goals both, to which I heartily subscribe. But do you really think they even come close to being enough? Science I believe is the only answer under present circumstances. Much will be lost either way, and nobody's sadder about this than I am.
It is much more than just 'collateral damage', they do set out to destroy biodiversity, on the point that the presence any other life except for the crop, means the crop is unable to utilise 100.0000% of the available solar energy input. If there is just one wild non-crop plant, or just one insect, in the field, that means the crop is only using 99.9999% of the available energy, and that's not good enough for them. Therefore the competing biodiversity has to be eradicated. Same mentality that most UK gamekeepers have towards raptors: if they just take one pheasant or one grouse, that is one less for the paying guns, and therefore the raptor must be eliminated, at all cost.
Like regulations requiring accurate labelling (which the GM companies are lobbying very vigorously to oppose), or requirements that it be illegal to use pesticides / herbicides on GM crops (which would e.g. render 'roundup-ready' plants worthless)
I'm not talking about "fighting dirty among ourselves", but being willing to use misinformation ("GM crops are deadly poisonous" to fight the wealth of misinformation and megabuck bribery that the GM companies use to promote their cause. Otherwise, it's not a level playing field. Sad fact is, 95% of the population don't give a toss about biodiversity, so we need other reasons to convince them against the GM steamroller.
But that's what agriculture--small-scale subsistence and large scale commercial alike--always wants to do: have the fields to itself in order to minimize competition with other organisms and maximize return on labor and capital. GM farmers just do it more efficiently than anybody else. What's needed now is a means to increase productivity per acre so as to avoid having to bring more land into cultivation (or into use for cattle ranching, that abomination). GM. it seems to me, has great potential to help with this.
And, as I stated earlier in the thread, I am entirely in favor of labeling GM products as such. If nothing else accurate labeling should help reduce the current paranoia on the subject.
I too have no objection to "misinformation" in a good cause but as I've said I don't think this is a good cause. [And good cause or bad I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work long-term in this case but would eventually boomerang back on the antis. Which, of course, would be fine by me
].
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jurek
Well-known member
Every single country in the world can feed itself and overproduce food with existing crops and agricultural technologies.
World hunger comes not from lack of crop varieties, but from poverty of consumers, from lack of capital, lack of access to basic pesticides, seed banks, agricultural consultancy, from political instability, wars etc.
Proposing that GM plants will stop world hunger is the same as proposing that since road travel in rural Africa is very slow, Africans need faster cars like Formula 1.
If you aim to stop world hunger give poor people jobs, stop guerilla insurgencies and dig irrigation ditches, don't sit in the lab developing fancy plants.
How do uncontrolled population growth and the consequent need, using existing agricultural practices, to tear up more forest and savanna to feed the new mouths figure into your thinking then? Those are the elephants in the room you know. You can't expect to be taken seriously if you just ignore them.
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Chosun Juan
Given to Fly
Arrrrrgggggh! "dig irrigation ditches" Gawd! Please, Noooooooooooooo !!!!
I agree, that proxy wars, militia's, persecution, exploitation, and resource theft are significant contributors to misery in the 3rd world, but don't ignore the elephant in the room ........ desertification.
Basically what we see are lands being farmed and grazed unsustainably - trading on the fertility of the past, of functioning woodland, wetland systems, and/or fertile volcanic, or alluvial deposits. Most agricultural practices have one major flaw - unsustainable soil and fertility loss. Think of it as like living in your house and continually breaking significant bits of it off to burn and keep you warm - not a rosy future is it?
A significant portion of observed temperature rise, and drying out of the land, is in fact caused by vegetation loss, micro-climate functioning destruction, and associated water table, and hydraulic functioning degradation. Key in this destructive process is the erosion and cutting-in of waterways, thus drying the top layers of the soil, and destroying the life and fertility therein.
Australia is the driest inhabited continent on earth. It evolved to largely contain the water "in" the soil, under the shade of vegetation, and with rivers and creeks running "on top of the land". That's right, on top of -- not like drains in cut-in channels. It is magnificent water and fertility recycling at it's finest. It is also the opposite of agricultural practice with irrigation channels cut into the land.
What's needed is more biomimickry of this natural soil and fertility building cycle. More multi-species sustainable rotational grazing - and keep the house intact!
Ownership of seeds by multinationals, GM modification to allow increased pesticide use (supplied by those same multinationals) seems like proliferation of fission nuclear power to solve so-called climate change .......DUMB! The wrong solution to the wrong problem - no more effective in the long term than shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.
Soil, Mega-fauna, and Biodiversity loss has borne the brunt of the madness so far. We need to turn this ship around.
Here's some visionary intuition, research, and practice on how:-
http://www.nsfarming.com/
http://www.watershedartisans.com/#
Chosun :gh:
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MJB
Well-known member
Right on, Chosun! Most of the countries of the Sahel, with little foreign exchange, succeeded in extending agriculture to feed their populations, but over the last 3 decades, immigration, population growth (mostly steady but inexorable) and non-integrated damming of the Niger began to add to the pressure, but since much of the increased food production was rice, an unceasing proportion of that area became increasingly too saline for any crops. Many of these countries are now trying to purchase wheat on the open market just at the time the wheat price trend has soared upwards. (Main source: Zwarts, L, RG Bijlsma, J vd Kamp and E Wymenga. 2009. Living on the edge: wetlands and birds in a changing Sahel. KNNV. Zeist, The Netherlands.)
The most likely result for the peoples of these countries is the dilemma: Do my family stay here and risk starvation or do we try to move somewhere that starvation is less likely (eg Europe)? - That could be 15 million people...
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Andy Adcock
Worst person on Birdforum
fugl;3322149 And said:
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Andy Adcock
Worst person on Birdforum
The most likely result for the peoples of these countries is the dilemma: Do my family stay here and risk starvation or do we try to move somewhere that starvation is less likely ([I said:
Why is Europe always the answer?
There are plenty of countries in Africa that they could move to. The perpetual dependance on handouts is not doing Africa any favours in the long term.
Zimbabwe, after throwing out all the white landowners, is short of people who know how to manage land and grow food and there are huge tracts of land standing empty while people go hungry.
At the risk of starting a verbal stamped in my direction, the limitation on family size in some places has to be a starting point, where on earth is the sense is having 4-5 kids that you cannot feed! I'm not talking about mass, forced sterilizations but simply managing the planets population in a sustainable way, we are a species who cull other species if we consider them to be overly abundant.
Andy
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Chosun Juan
Given to Fly
Stop breeding. Seriously. Just stop breeding. If you cannot feed the children you "plan" to bring into the world, then is it really anyone's fault but yours?
25 years ago I used to feel gut wrenchingly sad for all the starving children in the world ..... now, not so much.
The caveat being that a lot of the issues are power based - proxy wars and resource theft, religious nutters, exploitation by multinationals, and even foreign powers, uninvited regime change by outside funded militias, private profiteering of publicly owned resources and assets, strains on traditional methods of food production and support by population growth and displaced peoples, backwards agricultural practices that have already failed the world over for centuries, etc, etc, etc .........
Sometimes there's scant little humanity in humanity :-C
Chosun :gh:
Chosun Juan
Given to Fly
Nutcracker - agree wholeheartedly :t:
Unfortunately wind does not recognise fence lines.
There have been instances here where a GM crop (Canola seeds modified for a particular herbicide resistance eg. Glycophosphate" - non-coincidentally also sold by the same company!):eek!: have been planted on adjoining properties using different herbicides or next to roadsides where grain spill is an issue for crop escapees. The upshot is cross contamination requiring both lots of herbicides to be used on both crops! Thus near doubling the herbicide load, not to mention costs. More than one life long neighboring friendship has ended up coming to blows in court. Apart from evolved resistance (already a problem) therein lies a problem, though by far not the major one.
The other biggie is pretty strong emerging evidence linking corporate chemical farming to bee colony collapse. All arguments will be moot anyway if that disaster keeps unfolding ......
The real objection though, is in the Corporatisation of food. The same company selling the same once-only use seeds, as well as the herbicides they have been engineered to resist. Ding Ding :brains:
Is it any wonder that there is European resistance to the US corporatisation and monopolisation of food itself??? :cat:
I agree there is room in the GM process for naturally resistant strains of food, but that just buys a modicum of time - you know nature, she never sits still for long, the goalposts just get temporarily shuffled along for a bit. I watched a fascinating show the other day whereby the Great Reed Warbler and the particular Cuckoo that exploits them are locked in a continual evolutionary battle of continuously refined detection on one hand, and egg matching and call mimicking subterfuge on the other ...... After generation upon generations both species are getting better and better, and the nuances more and more subtle. :cat:
This type of thing can help developing and developed nations alike. The killing of weeds is a similarly backwards move to unsustainable irrigation and soil degrading agricultural practices. The only way forward is to BUILD SOIL, and repair natural hydrological and connected native old growth vegetation community functioning. Interestingly, managed multi-species grazing can be employed to effectively mimick the functioning of ancient megafauna, provided that they can be kept out of destroying wetlands and riparian areas, and that no new country is cleared. There is enough stuffed country to repair for generations anyway. Africa with what's left of its large land animals and plethora of bitey biteys may be another case altogether!
I thoroughly recommend that anyone with even a passing interest read the two books by Natural Sequencing Farming and landscape guru Peter Andrews OAM (the OAM is something of a lesson in determination considering he was regarded as a nutter and pariah for many many decades!) .... "Back from the Brink", and "Beyond the Brink" :t:
https://www.google.com.au/webhp?sou...&ie=UTF-8#q=back+from+the+brink+peter+andrews
https://www.google.com.au/webhp?sou...v=2&ie=UTF-8#q=beyond+the+brink+peter+andrews
I have been to his life's work "Tarwyn Park" - what an eye-opener and revolution to say the least! :eek!: http://www.nsfarming.com/
Great case study here, and also Peter Andrews OAM on weeds:
http://mullooncreeknaturalfarms.com.au/environment/management-practices/natural-sequence-farming
http://www.ecofilms.com.au/peter-andrews-on-weeds/
YOU MUST WATCH THIS!!: PETER ANDREWS ON WEEDS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjlia4DjgKg
Chosun :gh:
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MJB
Well-known member
Well, Andy, to attempt an answer to your question (and I'm in no way saying it's the only answer, far from it), consider this: imagine if you will that you are the head of a family in a Sahel country that is threatened with the 'starvation or move' choice.
Do you think that neighbouring or more distant countries in Africa are likely to be more stable than your own disintegrating country? If so, which ones are these, and what opportunities do they present? You mentioned Zimbabwe having a labour shortage, but it also has rampant inflation, and no means of worthwhile currency exchange.
Now, consider Europe: even the economic situations of Greece and Italy appear better than that of your own disintegrating country, and despite unrest, quite often on a large scale, famine isn't anywhere near threatening there, and in comparison with many African countries, Greece and Italy's instabilities are of a first-world nature, not a third-world's. If Greece and Italy can be seen as better than many African countries by people with the 'die or move' option, think what the others look like.
Thousands of US and European movies and news bulletins have for decades been viewed world-wide, the overall if unintentional effect being of presenting on social media a kind of 'streets paved with gold' metaphor. In many parts of Africa nowadays, business (and even virtual currencies) trades at the village and small town level via mobile phones powered by solar chargers - it's a huge audience. Essentially the West has presented itself as a cornucopia of consumer goods: it's also trumpeted itself as the repository of freedoms, no matter how fragmented, and the main source of rational thought, no matter how fitfully it may have achieved that. What's not to like?
Fine, so this just happened, little consideration being given to how it all may appear to the have-nots, in the long run. Now, following medium-scale population movement (when compared to Earth's near 8 billion), the view is being presented 'we have all this, but now you're excluded' as one thread in the argument (I know, it's a gross generalisation, but you get the idea).
Already, we've seen over the last two decades a steady increase in people-trafficking. Hundreds of thousands have crossed the Sahara and then sought to cross the Mediterranean. As of 2013, Spain has 682 000 Muslim migrants from or via Morocco, Portugal at least 40 000 (http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/spring2013/moving-iberias-new-muslims): Spain may have about the same number of non-Moslem, non-European migrants; of the migrants in Morocco, many as workers, the number of undocumented migrants is unknown, but 30 000 applied for registration after Morocco introduced a scheme for assisting temporarily those in greatest need; racism against black Africans and factors such as fear of Ebola (http://america.aljazeera.com/articl...recedent-in-hosting-sub-saharan-migrants.html) (no known cases in Morocco) has made many undocumented people avoid this scheme, but it's likely that around 300 000 undocumented people (low estimate) are in Morocco, and proportionate numbers in Algeria and Tunisia. Some context here: http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/morocco-setting-stage-becoming-migration-transition-country.
It thus appears that many African countries already have significant numbers of undocumented migrants, but their infrastructure struggles to cope, or may be corrupt.
Of course the above is only a small part of what's happening in Europe, Africa and Asia - the number coming from China and Central Asia is rising. I don't pretend to have a panacea solution, for there are so many factors to cover, but my point remains, the present level of mostly Syrian migrants, is likely to be but a harbinger of much larger numbers, given the extent of soil degradation in so many countries whose biomes have little resilience if seasonal regularity of rainfall is worsened.
Birds, of course may have more flexibility than humans in their ability to move, but habitat extent and variety is disappearing worldwide at a high rate, which correlates with human population increases...
MJB
The question of feeding the worlds hungry is a huge one and it has a different answer in ever country and region , but one thing it is not is a food sortage problem .
We have been fed this lie of lack of food so many times that we think it is true . Not to say it is never true , but enough so that we do not need them using GMO crops that they certainly can not afford.
Also they will never use them as they do not trust us because in the 70s we sold them the green revolution where we exported our old based fertilizer system to them and it destroyed their soil. Now they know better than to trust us.
The soil in the middle of the USA has faired better becuase it was once all prairie with loam that went down 20 plus feet ( most loam only goes 3 or so feet). But as it decreased we put more and more fertilizer on it to get things to grow well. To the point where new research is showing that over that over a 15 year spread organic farming is producing as much as oil based ( conventional )
And GMO is certainly not the answer , as I mentioned earlier they are failing ,we spend 10 to 15 years developing a GmO and Mother Nature slips around it in 5 years or so . That is a battle we can not win.
And soon we will not have to , as Mother Nature has beat us on the antibiotic front , we now have almost no antibiotics left that still work well , and the best one we had just showed resistance in an area of china a month or so ago . What that means for all those that can not remember what it was like ( and that is most of us) is that even a thorn scratch from a rose could kill you .
The first person ever saved with antibiotics was sick from a rose thorn scratch .
Looks like Mother Nature will do the culling of the species that is over populating .
We have been fed this lie of lack of food so many times that we think it is true . Not to say it is never true , but enough so that we do not need them using GMO crops that they certainly can not afford.
Also they will never use them as they do not trust us because in the 70s we sold them the green revolution where we exported our old based fertilizer system to them and it destroyed their soil. Now they know better than to trust us.
The soil in the middle of the USA has faired better becuase it was once all prairie with loam that went down 20 plus feet ( most loam only goes 3 or so feet). But as it decreased we put more and more fertilizer on it to get things to grow well. To the point where new research is showing that over that over a 15 year spread organic farming is producing as much as oil based ( conventional )
And GMO is certainly not the answer , as I mentioned earlier they are failing ,we spend 10 to 15 years developing a GmO and Mother Nature slips around it in 5 years or so . That is a battle we can not win.
And soon we will not have to , as Mother Nature has beat us on the antibiotic front , we now have almost no antibiotics left that still work well , and the best one we had just showed resistance in an area of china a month or so ago . What that means for all those that can not remember what it was like ( and that is most of us) is that even a thorn scratch from a rose could kill you .
The first person ever saved with antibiotics was sick from a rose thorn scratch .
Looks like Mother Nature will do the culling of the species that is over populating .
Nutcracker
Stop Brexit!
Biodiversity doesn't work like this; to keep biodiversity, it has to coexist within low intensity agriculture. If you compartmentalise the two separately, you end up with tiny pockets of nature reserves scattered in a vast sterile agricultural landscape. That rapidly loses species as they can't move between the tiny islets of reserved habitat.
And it's even worse for migratory species like many birds: they need migration stopover sites to feed up, and have evolved to select the richest habitats to feed in to do so. Unfortunately for them, dense, rich green crops look as though they ought to be good feeding sites, so they drop down in them, and starve; they would do better to aim for the less-fertile-looking, but actually food-richer, reserves. But they can't know that. Migrating insects too, will see fertile dark green as = good feeding, but only to be killed by the GM toxins in the crops.
Cattle ranching - done extensively with low stocking rates - is actually not too bad for biodiversity provided it doesn't displace rainforest; it mimics natural wild Bison herds and (even earlier) Mammoth Steppe habitats to some extent. Intensive cattle rearing with high stocking rates, and particularly with high veterinary medication input, is a very different matter though, very bad for birds.
No, no, no, of course, of course, of course. Small very intensively cultivated areas interspersed with large tracts of "wilderness". I'm, of course, taking the long view. Pie in the sky maybe but so is everything else suggested so far in the face of rampant third-world population growth. But we're both repeating ourselves. . ..
With regard to cattle ranching, I'm sure it can take place without major environmental damage in certain areas under certain restricted conditions but not on the massive scale it is now or anywhere near it. I live in a ranching state where cattle grazing on millions of acres of public lands has caused a great deal of damage to the desert ecology.
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Andy Adcock
Worst person on Birdforum
Del Monte have deforested large areas to plant e.g Pineapple so it's not just cattle.
Andy
Andy
GMO--another wrinkle. Where will it end?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/22/s...l?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/22/s...l?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share
Chosun Juan
Given to Fly
The beginning of the end ?!
I always thought we had peaked as a civilisation with the advent of those automated bug sprayers that you set up in your living room, or outdoor bar-b-q area, gently and continually poisoning you as you go about your day, and that it was all downhill from there to the inevitable Mad Max apocalyptic conclusion ....... now I'm almost certain of it ! :gn:
...... "Another concern is that a gene drive system may have unintended consequences, by making its target species more pathogenic or by spreading to other species."
"A gene drive designed to render a population extinct is known as a crash drive. A crash drive being developed for mosquitoes consists of a gene engineered into the Y chromosome that shreds the X chromosome in the cells that make the mosquito’s sperm, thus ensuring that all progeny are male. Unless the drive itself is damaged through mutation, the number of females would be expected to dwindle each generation until the population collapses."
Jeez, that's encouraging ........ NOT ! :storm:
Don't mosquitoes upchuck a little bit of sick every time they latch on for a drink of your blood ?!! :cat:
I'm gunna sit back in a rockin' chair, placed in prime position, with a nice cup of tea with honey and watch the show! Should be awesome! The first time in the history of humanity that vested interests will enact an unknown, well controlled experiment without any untoward unexpected consequences!! Fan-bl**dy-tastic !!! :eek!:
Chosun :gh:
I always thought we had peaked as a civilisation with the advent of those automated bug sprayers that you set up in your living room, or outdoor bar-b-q area, gently and continually poisoning you as you go about your day, and that it was all downhill from there to the inevitable Mad Max apocalyptic conclusion ....... now I'm almost certain of it ! :gn:
...... "Another concern is that a gene drive system may have unintended consequences, by making its target species more pathogenic or by spreading to other species."
"A gene drive designed to render a population extinct is known as a crash drive. A crash drive being developed for mosquitoes consists of a gene engineered into the Y chromosome that shreds the X chromosome in the cells that make the mosquito’s sperm, thus ensuring that all progeny are male. Unless the drive itself is damaged through mutation, the number of females would be expected to dwindle each generation until the population collapses."
Jeez, that's encouraging ........ NOT ! :storm:
Don't mosquitoes upchuck a little bit of sick every time they latch on for a drink of your blood ?!! :cat:
I'm gunna sit back in a rockin' chair, placed in prime position, with a nice cup of tea with honey and watch the show! Should be awesome! The first time in the history of humanity that vested interests will enact an unknown, well controlled experiment without any untoward unexpected consequences!! Fan-bl**dy-tastic !!! :eek!:
Chosun :gh:
Nutcracker
Stop Brexit!
Not to mention that mosquitos are a keystone group for maintaining biodiversity - get rid of them, and you can say goodbye to most insect-eating birds, too. And bats.
The nuclear option. . ..
http://www.slate.com/articles/healt...are_a_global_scourge_and_must_be_stopped.html
http://www.slate.com/articles/healt...are_a_global_scourge_and_must_be_stopped.html
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