The moral component, or lack thereof, of septimus’ argument, can be discussed elsewhere, but it’s important to highlight the potential factual errors here. Does increasing crop yield contribute to population growth? Given that birth rate is inversely correlated with food supply, I can’t accept that as a given.
Correct. Genetic modification is responsible for a 95% reduction in pesticide use (in weight per field area) in corn. We’d have to look at yield increases to see how that translates to weight of pesticide per weight of product. But yields are going up, so it’s likely a larger reduction.
Good information. Thank you, Ruken.
No. Two sentences later, in that same post, I said “Anyway, that’s how mice do it. Humans, on the other hand, have developed other options, like contraception.” I thought it was pretty clear that I was saying the mice are using the only tool which is available to them but humans have other tools.
If you insist on trying to feed more and more and more people using methods which are not sustainable and will someday crash, you’re only increasing the amount of suffering which will inevitably happen when the crash finally gets here. In the long run, humans have a much better chance of surviving, and not starving, if we (I’m saying “we”-- not making exceptions, not dividing the world into “us” versus “them”. ) gradually reduce the population to a point where ALL OF US can eat locally grown organic food. This doesn’t require killing anyone, making anyone starve, or eating any babies. All it requires is that we have fewer babies.
I have not studied biology in a few years, but I seem to be missing something here. IIRC, seeds do not pass traits on to other plants, they sprout (unless sterile) into new plants. Traits are passed via some stuff in the stamens that finds its way, one way or another, into the pistil thing, where the seed is formed. The stuff in the stamens can fertilize the closest pistil, or it can find its way into other flowers (wind, bees, whatever) and get into other pistils, sometimes a ways away. So, while the seeds might be sterile, that is kind of irrelevant, if the pollen can carry part of the mod to another plant, and that plant can produce viable seeds, the sterility of the base crop may not matter.
These are list of false statements. more food does not promote more children and the idea that gmo seeds “promote mono-culture” shows an ignorance of how planting is planned and ignores that the high yielding hybrids would already have this effect, so there is no addition here.
Yes, the idea that the more food and the better nutrition will lead to more population growth does not match any data and is a form of unthought disdain.
This map shows ithttp://www.indexmundi.com/map/?v=31 as one can see the most extreme birth rates are in the Sahel or in the worst governed of the sub-saharan countries (like the DRC and the Angola) where the ordinary population has poor food access. The births are driven by families which have no path to invest in their children as educational capital and who face the risk of high death rates. The best fed countries with the good governance show great declines in the fertility.
You mean the traditional agriculture that in the wealthy countries becomes a hobby that they call organic? The traditional agricultures that do not produce enough food return and which are exhausting the land because of the over intensive use.
Yes this is what will happen if more efficient agriculture is not made available and instituted in the African continent,.
[qyote] gradually reduce the population to a point where ALL OF US can eat locally grown organic food. This doesn’t require killing anyone, making anyone starve, or eating any babies. All it requires is that we have fewer babies.
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This is very laughable. There is no point that such a thing is viable in any relevant time frame for the next generations, the idea of locally grown condemning whole populations to the malnuourishement and depriving them of the advantages of the trading. We have already seen in the Africa the results of the economically incorrect idea of auto sufficiency as ensuring a good nutrition and nourishment of a population. The wealthy fetish of the organic agriculture can not support any population in the billions. This vision is one of genocide.
Yes this is absolutely correct. The farmers like buying the hybrid seeds which one does not save because they do not breed true because there is great improvement in the yields and it is better for them.
The people I find talking of the seed saving and the romantic vision of the ancient farmer seem to be the sort who have never lived in the real circumstances of the frontier farmer. They engage in romanticism and anti-scientific dreaming.
It is needed more varietes for the various African soils and the problems we have in the continent in the fragility of the soils and in many areas the salinisation. to have these breeds quickly in time frames that do not condemn a generation to famine and the genocide so some wealthy and well-fed people can engage in romanticism, this requires the genetic modification (and even then we need many years of testing).
Hector St Claire makes a good point:
This is correct, but to make the tractors, the other inputs a primary need is to have the varieties that have the yields - consistently across years - that make these things profitable and sustainable. We have seen too many of the naive western ngos come and scatter around the equipment assets and talk about self-sustaining of the local farmer, but they have no sense of the agronomics or the risk, and their efforts fail.
Thank you for refuting the following
It is too common that the anti gmo promote false or misleading statements as was done here.
I agree with your conclusion that organic agriculture cannot support a human population of several billion. My estimate is that it could support 1 billion, maybe 2. So, what would it take to get the human population from 7 billion down to 2 billion? If every woman on Earth decided “As long as there are more than 2 billion people, I will have just one baby.”, how long would it take for the population to drop from 7 billion down to 2 billion? The answer is surprisingly short, about 80 years. I would certainly call that a “relevant time frame for the next generations”, as you put it.
Before you say it’s impossible to persuade all those woman to make that choice, consider the fact that, in the last 80 years, we have already succeeded at persuading women to stop having 5 babies each and instead only have 2.
And before someone accuses me of saying I think my own family should be an exception to the rule, let me tell you that my parents decided in the 1960s to have just two biological children, and adopted three more. Of the five of us (me and my four siblings) plus our five spouses (ten adults total), we had a total of five children. I will be very happy if those five children grow up and get married and then those ten adults only have five more children. That’s a rate of 1 child per couple, exactly what I’m describing can get us back down to just 2 billion humans on Earth in just 80 years.
That’s great! I’m all in favor of encouraging people to have fewer babies.
What I’m NOT in favor of us intentionally hamstringing the development of the ability to feed the people we do have, and by doing so, force some of them to starve to death. There’s a big difference between working to reduce the birth rate and making it so that many will have to starve. You’re advocating for the latter.
But you want your family to be excepted from the starving to death part, I presume.
I suspect you are being overly optimistic. Consider that one child still represents population increase over the medium-term: with likely 80-year lifespans, the lives of children and parents overlaps considerably, population management needs to be much more aggressive than simple breeding reduction. We do not want to force breeding-exclusion by criteria or lot, but the martial alternative is not more appealing. So, just let the problem develop and see how our subsequent generations handle it.
Well, now we know the results of the Ayn Rand-Vandana Shiva mind-meld experiment. :eek:
Why do you think ‘everyone in the world eating organically produced food’ is a goal to which we should aspire?
I don’t eat organic food, I don’t encourage other people to eat organic food (though neither do I discourage them), and while I think 11 billion people might well be too many for the earth to support, I don’t see any reason why a population of 2 billion is optimal either. I don’t have kids at the moment, but if I had to choose between ‘having three children and eating food produced with artificial pesticides, fertilizer and genetically modified seed’ versus ‘having one child and eating organic food’, I would obviously, obviously prefer the former, no question. And I would imagine most people worldwide would choose the same.
Of course, one of the benefits of GMO approaches, compared to traditional breeding, is that you can introduce a small amount of genetic material at a time, instead of whole genomes or chromosomes. That means you’re less likely to introduce, along with desired trait X, some undesirable trait like susceptibility to a particular disease. It’s a more targeted and precise method of introducing a gene: thus it doesn’t reduce the ability to maintain genetic diversity, rather it improves it.
Food crashes were much more common when we relied on locally grown, organic food. This is obvious when you think about it. In an economy with locally grown food, when area A has a crop failure, people starve. In an economy where food is transported long distances, when area A has a crop failure it can be compensated by a surplus in area B.
Sorry, I should be more precise. Read: “seeds that carry a gene resulting in sterile pollen”.
But is that the case? Pollination, as I understand it, is a pretty complex process possibly involving multiple gametophytes, just because frankencrop’s seeds are sterile may not guarantee that its pollen is as well. Some of these plant genomes rely on tetraploid or hexaploid chromatic combinations, meaning there is a lot of room for modded coding to get in.
Because it’s been proven to work. I’m not arguing specifically for organic agriculture. What I’m arguing for is sustainability, and organic is the closest thing to sustainable that we have now. I’m arguing for things that have stood the test of time, and I mean millennia, no just decades.
For thousands and thousands of years, we ate food that was produced without chemical pesticides, without GMO seeds, without Roundup, without tons of artificial fertilizer made with phosphorus that came from a strip mine, without pumping water up from deep underground aquifers, without relying on machines run by a finite supply of fossil fuels.
What happens when the phosphorus mines run out? What happens when fossil fuels aren’t cheap anymore? What happens when we accidentally cause the extinction of all the honey bees because we tried too hard to kill the boll weevils? There are so many things that could go wrong and cause this huge precarious system to collapse. It seems irresponsible to me to keep making the system MORE complicated and MORE vulnerable to collapse.
Okay, tell me your best guess of what’s the optimal number and then ask yourself if GMOs will be leading us toward that number or away from it.
I think you’re mistaken about that. Food crashes are more common in monoculture, which is what long distance transportation of food encourages. Also, you’re assuming that transportation itself won’t go bust. That’s a pretty big assumption considering how heavily we rely on our (finite) supply of fossil fuels in order to move food around.
This idea that a technology that helps combat starvation is somehow evil because it does so is sickening to me. Yes, I know both of you have said that you don’t believe that, but that’s what your statements boil down to. GMOs are bad because they allow less people to starve. I’m surprised I need to point this out, but that’s horrifying. It’s doubly horrifying coming from people who damn well know that it’s not going to be them and their families suffering. I wonder if the people who actually have to worry about starvation have such a cavalier attitude towards it.
Overpopulation is a problem. It’s absolutely a problem worth fixing. But you know how we don’t go around fixing it? Killing people. We don’t kill people to fix overpopulation. We don’t withhold from them what they need to live. We don’t intentionally stunt technologies that could help these people live. We focus on birth rates and sex education, and we deal with the people (may I remind you that overpopulation is made up of people just like you and I, and I welcome you to voluntarily undergo the fate you seem so willing to consign random strangers in the third world to!) in an ethical and sensible manner.
Oh yeah, and here’s a neat little kicker.
Even if we managed to completely stop and reverse population growth now, GMOs would still be awesome. You know why? Because we’d need less space and resources to grow the same amount of food. We could feed a billion people with organic farming and our current farming resources. Maybe. We could feed a billion people with modern farming and far, far less.
I doubt you have the remotest idea how much land would have to be converted to agriculture to sustain an all-organic model. We’re talking about land that currently sustains wildlife, and which can stay wild because conventional farming is so much more productive that less acreage is needed to feed people.
Farmers used to plant crops for a few years, then after the nutrients were drained from the soil, cleared more forest land and farmed temporarily on that…and on and on. You consider that a “sustainable” model for modern times?
What is so complicated (for example) about saving Hawaiian papaya farming through a GM disease-resistant variety (or potentially saving the American citrus industry or Arabica coffee growing) through biotechnology? Is it better to sit on our hands and watch those farmers go down the tubes and see commodity prices skyrocket through scarcity? Or slather on lots of pesticides in a desperate attempt to kill pathogens that can be controlled through genetic modification?
I see you want to go back to the “good old days” of “thousands and thousands of years” ago, when famine was a real threat for “civilized” people, who still died by the thousands and thousands of nutritional deficiency disorders.
Your nostalgia is severely misplaced.
What the hell. You equate “organic farming” with stupid farming? Because we have learned nothing about farming practices? Farming practices that even the Native Americans knew how to effect?
Consider the Dust Bowl. That was some pretty darn high-tech farming going on there. Why did it happen? Primarily because of market forces that drove farmers to ruin so that they had to abandon their fields to the wind and the drought.
Monoculture is one of the biggest threats we face. GM is not the solution to that. Growing enough food for everyone can be done without technical tricks and without chewing up all the wild land, we just need to be flexible and smart about how we do it and not force ag to focus on peak profits.