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How 4H Is Helping Big Ag Take Over Africa
Lasrick writes 4H is in Africa, helping to distribute Big Ag products like DuPont's Pioneer seeds through ostensibly good works aimed at youth. In Africa, where the need to produce more food is especially urgent, DuPont Pioneer and other huge corporations have made major investments. But there are drawbacks: "DuPont's nutritious, high-yielding, and drought-tolerant hybrid seed costs 10 times as much. While Ghanaians typically save their own seeds to plant the next year, hybrid seeds get weaker by the generation; each planting requires another round of purchasing. What's more, says Devlin Kuyek, a researcher with the sustainable-farming nonprofit Genetic Resources Action International, because hybrid seeds are bred for intensive agriculture, they typically need chemicals to thrive."
What are the possible choices for farmers?
1. grow crappy crops with free seeds and lots of expensive water,
2. grow good groups with seeds that you need to pay for but use less water?
#2 will make you more money, so the cost of the seeds is a non-factor. #1 will make you poor, because when it doesn't rain your crops die.
So, what exactly is the issue?
Perhaps the alternative is seeds for fragile crops that will die in a drought and never yield much despite access to cheap chemical fertilizers? Look, I get that it's fun to hate on "Big Ag", but I also get that hippies are fond of biting the hand that feeds them. And Big Ag doesn't just feed hippies, it feeds the world, and there currently isn't any good substitute for it.
Instead of disparaging charitable works in Africa that a rational person will perceive to be doing good to feed hungry people, why don't you focus on donating money to promote "open source" crop lines somewhere in the States so there are good alternatives to give to Africa and the rest of the world? Put your money where your mouth is (in a couple of senses).
Chemicals are *everywhere*, in all of our food, and many will kill you! I only eat chemical-free food, mainly neutrons and assorted leptons.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
"Big Agriculture", and not "Big Silver". I thought this was about mining silver in Africa.
Well, consider that the 'better' crops can essentially be held hostage. When you don't have natural seeds commonly sold anymore, guess who suddenly has a monopoly on agriculture?
'This year's a seeds are going to cost double because of manufacturing problems.. You DO want a crop this year, right?'
I've never owned a farm.
I've never planted or harvested a crop.
I've never used fertilizer.
I've never seen GMO seeds.
I've never gone a day without food.
I've never been to Africa.
But I know this is really bad.
Sent from my iPhone
I've never owned a farm.
I've never planted or harvested a crop.
I've never used fertilizer.
I've never seen GMO seeds.
I've never gone a day without food.
I've never been to Africa.
But I know this is really bad.
Sent from my iPhone
You don't know anything about the topic, and aren't involved or affected, but you're going to pass judgement on other people's choices.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
If he is, he has the weight of evidence supports him.
http://www.plosone.org/article...
In short, after factoring in the higher costs of using GM seed, GMO crops help developing farms substantially. Even more so than the farmers in developed markets.
Actually, just beware people
...GMO crops help developing farms substantially.
What, are they bullet proof? Africa is a victim of corrupt resource management. Nothing can be done until that is addressed. GMO won't do it.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
This post is spot on, because many of the people impacted by the influx of GMO seeds are sustenance farmers, not profit based farms. Attempting to convert them to a money making agriculture system does not work very well because the people have little to no income sources to go buy food that people are selling. The few jobs these companies create do not support the economy, and the pay is so low that it can't support the economy.
The current reality is that these small governments must subsidize what used to be sustenance based economies. Until manufacturing, repair facilities, etc.. are functional in the country there is no choice, because there are no income sources. And lets face it, there are no plans to bolster anything else in these economies
In other words, the only people currently gaining from these programs are the people pushing the programs. There is plenty of information out there on the subject, you can start with this one, or this one, or this one (get the point? There is plenty of information). Sure, Dupont is not the same company but a new face on a same exact problem.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Speak the truth and be modded a troll by a group of people who've probably never gone hungry for more that a few hours at a time their entire lives.
most farmers in Africa are subsistence farmers. It is a good year if they have enough for themselves and a little extra to sell. Free seeds that improve yields by 9-25% in developed countries, and an additional 14% points in developing countries is a chance to get ahead instead of just scraping by (planned to post a link to the article on the economist websites here I pulled those numbers, but can't paste for some reason on my phone).
it's easy to look down on GE seeds with a life time of full bellies in your past, your future, and your children's futures as far as you can see. Try going hungry despite spending all you can spare on food and then rail against seeds that have never made a single person sick and have fed billions.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
"the sustainable-farming nonprofit Genetic Resources Action International"
Yea, that's an unbiased and science based organization right there.
Yes, you can't fix hunger without fixing the underlying social issues. Everyone knows that, stop stating the obvious like it is an actual argument. You want to end world hunger, fix corruption, poverty, income inequality, infrastructure, education, healthcare, social welfare, sexual inequality, and all those other ills. But that is easier said than done. Do you have a solution to all those social, economic, and political problems? Because you're smarter by far than me if you do. Ticktock, people are hungry, and every second counts. In the meantime, I don't know how anyone could say that improving the lot of impoverished farmers is a bad thing. It isn't a panacea, but look at the benefits Bt cotton has brought to India (the ignorant but oft repeated claims them causing suisides notwithstanding), or the promise of Bt eggplant in Bangladesh, and tell me you think its a bad thing.
It's such a strange claim, you know. I doubt any anti-GMO activist would reject improvements in, say, automobile safety and say that instead of a technological solution people should all just drive safer. But suddenly when you talk about agriculture, that sort of reasoning is valid, the only way forward is wait for someone to fix that myriad of human centric problems and hope that too many people don't go hungry in the meantime, but don't you dare touch the technological side of things. How utterly absurd it is.
Africa is a victim of corrupt resource management. Nothing can be done until that is addressed.
Africa is not monolithic. There are certainly corrupt countries in Africa. But Ghana, the subject of TFA, is one of the least corrupt, and most prosperous countries on the continent. The are a democracy, with well functioning institutions, a free press, near universal literacy, and a per capita GDP of about $4k, which makes them a middle income country.
Kosher labeling is required by the Jewish community, and a Kosher Jew can't purchase anything not stamped and certified Kosher. People pay for the Kosher labeling and won't purchase anything else. The Jewish inspectors that stamp approval take pride in their ability and don't try and hide the Kosher label. They stand by the label and it's prominently displayed on _every_ package. Culturally speaking "Kosher" means "up front", "on the up and up", "open and honest"
You are really trying to compare that to a group that is so afraid of stamping their label on a product that they spend billions of dollars lobbying and advertising to hide what they are doing? If there is no harm, and no fear of harm, Monsanto and Dupont should be proud to stamp the box with their logo and "GMO MADE FOOD!" for all the world to see.
The Government does not have to force Jewish Rabbi's to stamp things Kosher, BECAUSE THEY ALREADY STAMP THE PACKAGE! When companies try to hide ingredients you are damn right people should be concerned and yes the Government should force them to label the package.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Hybrids have been around officially for over 200 years, unofficially 5000.
It's called selective breeding. It's been going on since man discovered agriculture.
Hybrids loosing effectiveness in subsequent generations, is a well known problem. It's not something engineered in by man. Mother nature is a bitch,
This isn't Monsanto enforcing a patent for their GMO seeds, that do spread that gene.
These are hybrid seeds, with no GMO genes. They've just been carefully selected.
Many hybrids are mules. Look at seedless grapes. The desired hybrid can't reproduce.
The post is a bit skewed, the text for the link to the story tells the story. The author has an agenda.
The problem comes in if in a couple of years the DuPont seed is not readily available, perhaps due to war or perhaps just a corporate decision to raise prices above what is locally affordable.
Always stupid to be too dependent on an entity across the sea who doesn't give a fuck about you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
You are confused about what homeopathy means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.... Homeopathic medicine is very specifically not medicine.
You are thinking of traditional medicine. Which is, indeed, not 100% hogwash (not 0% either).
quite frankly if there is no proven harm there should be no harm in a label.
It's just arbitrary. Might as well label something as made by people with princess leia hair. I'm pretty sure there's no proven harm, but I would oppose a label for that.
Agitate for people to label things as non-GMO. That's what you really want anyway. When you go to the store for milk you don't check each liquid vessel to exclude the ones that contain traces of apple, orange, alcohol, etc.., you go for milk. If you want something that contains no GMO, then ask for no-GMO labels (and enforce truth-in-advertising laws).
Lets not forget that a large reason for GMO seeds is to increase yields by protecting plants from pests. We are already seeing super pests [ucsusa.org] that can bypass the built in GMO protection and creating a much larger threat to agriculture than existed previously.
Here is an actual point. However, labelling isn't likely to solve that, you'd have to completely ban them. I'm extremely skeptical that we are worse off, but I'm willing to hear more. So far it looks just like the same "Red Queen's Race" evolution has always provided.
"hybrid seeds get weaker by the generation" -- False, there is a level of heterzygosity that the population with stablize at. The second generation takes the biggest hit and after you can get up to 2/3 of the yeild for most hybrids of corn. " hybrid seeds are bred for intensive agriculture, they typically need chemicals to thrive." Hybrid seeds can be bred for whatever purpose you want, including low-input agriculture. Even said selecting artificial populations would be most benificial to many of the farmers as you can effectively replant
it's easy to look down on GE seeds with a life time of full bellies in your past, your future, and your children's futures as far as you can see. Try going hungry despite spending all you can spare on food and then rail against seeds that have never made a single person sick and have fed billions.
The same argument was used for the green revolution. But it's led to starvation as cropland has become nonviable due to use of its inherently destructive methods. Some sources suggest that the green revolution did not actually save a single life, but we know beyond any shadow of a doubt that it has had massive costs. You can in fact get more crops per acre with zero-tilth intensive planting of guilds, but it requires a lot more human labor so we went another direction and now our ability to produce food by traditional means is at risk.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How are you getting to that conclusion? The title of the study is "A Meta-Analysis of the Impacts of Genetically Modified Crops" The author's results are
"On average, GM technology adoption has reduced chemical pesticide use by 37%, increased crop yields by 22%, and increased farmer profits by 68%. Yield gains and pesticide reductions are larger for insect-resistant crops than for herbicide-tolerant crops. Yield and profit gains are higher in developing countries than in developed countries."
Simply saying something, whether you honestly believe it or not, does not make it true.
World hunger is at the lowest it has ever been. https://www.wfp.org/stories/10... How exactly to interpret that to mean that the green revolution has led to starvation?
Producing foods by traditional means was a large part of the reason hunger was worse in the past than it is now. There were fewer people, more of them were directly involved in food production (both in real terms and as a percent of the population) and yet there was MORE hunger than today. The modern techniques were developed because the worked better, not out of some perverse desire to make people less food secure. Large agriculture takes feeding the world as a mission statement. Every conference I've ever attended is peppered with references to the disconnect between population projections (going up FAST) and available land projections (trending downward in developed countries, and stagnant in developing ones).
We need to produce twice as much food in 2050 as in 2010, yet we need to do it with LESS land and finite resources than we did in 2020. Going backward with regard to efficiency and yields is not a viable solution unless you are willing to let a lot of people starve needlessly.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
People are starving in India because people have always been starving in India. There have always been people starving everywhere. The question is whether there are MORE people starving in India now than before green revolution.
I don't have access to data that goes that far back, but the FAOStat page for India puts the per capita food supply at 2459 kcal/person/da, which is 25% higher than the FDA RDA of 2000 kcal/day. It is also a little more than 200 kcal more than 1996.
Greater consumption by the wealthiest can of course result in an increase in the average, without changing things in a meaningful way for those at the bottom. Fortunately the FAOStat page also indicates that the prevalence of under nutrition went from 21% in 1999 to 18% in 2012. Again small changes, but definitely an improvement when you consider that India has 1/6th of the world population. That 3% point improvement in access to nutrition for India represents 0.5% of the GLOBAL population. Not too shabby.
AS to the population issue. I agree that population control could help, but I see improving production as far more likely than getting the global population to agree to reduced population growth. Data shows that the best way to slow population growth in a country is to increase the quality of life. There is a consistent negative correlation between quality of life in a nation and the reproduction rate from citizens (discounting immigration and immigrant families from developing nations).
GMO crops enable no-till farming. That is but one of the ways that they CONTRIBUTE to sustainable agriculture. If you'd ever planted a GMO crop you might know that.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
People are starving right here, where these farming methods dominate overwhelmingly. There is more than enough food on the planet to feed everyone on it. Suggesting that we need to use destructive farming methods is foolish at best.
Yes, and much of that food is produced using modern farming practices. If the US were to revert to the traditional agricultural practices people view through the rose-tinted-glasses of affluence and satiety there would be MORE people starving both inside and outside of the US. We are a net exporter of grains, and those surpluses are possible because of those modern production techniques. There are many nations that are dependent upon US grain to feed a significant portion of their population. Cutting off US exports because we've decided to throw out the last 20 to 30 years of agricultural improvements would throw the world food supply into havoc. A drought in the Midwest US a couple of years ago was global news and affected food prices just about everywhere. What we grow in the US helps to feed the world.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde