Killer robot posted:

This doesn't actually support what you're saying, unless you want to clarify.

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

That was sarcasm, millions are suffering from obesity thanks to the shift to highly processed foods.

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

You can't grow rice in places like Sudan.

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

Also, I'm not blinded- I grow my own food without needing pesticides and my garden is diverse and healthy. I know that it's not a large scale operation, but it still feeds my family and I.

The only people who benefit from modern intensive agriculture are the shareholders of large ag corporations.

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

This is wrong.

http://www.srfood.org/images/stories/pdf/officialreports/20140310_finalreport_en.pdf

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

That was sarcasm, millions are suffering from obesity thanks to the shift to highly processed foods.

Adventure Pigeon posted:

What does that have to do with organic versus industrial farming methods or, more specifically, GMOs?

Nintendo Kid posted:

That is not a thing that has happened, try again. People have been eating highly processed foods for thousands of years.

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

What the gently caress?

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

I didn't know ancient Mesopotamians were eating cheetos and drinking coca-cola.

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

I didn't know ancient Mesopotamians were eating cheetos and drinking coca-cola.

Adventure Pigeon posted:

Beer is as calorie dense as many colas. But more importantly, why would banning industrial farming and GMOs help the obesity epidemic beyond reducing food availability? What would people in countries where food supplies are already limited do?

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

Have intensive agricultural methods solved hunger in the world? No. Millions still suffer from hunger worldwide and obesity is on the rise in both developed and developing countries.

Do intensive agricultural methods harm the environment? Yes. Not only in it's contributions to CC, but also in massive amounts of chemical fertilizers harming our planet's water supply, and intensive farming harms our soil. Not to mention the amount of fossil fuels burned to grow, fertilize, harvest, package and ship a piece of iceberg lettuce is ridiculous.

Adventure Pigeon posted:

So basically, intensive farming hasn't solved world food problems, so we should move to organic, which is estimated to produce about 25-30% less food?

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v485/n7397/full/nature11069.html

quote:

But these yield differences are highly contextual, depending on system and site characteristics, and range from 5% lower organic yields (rain-fed legumes and perennials on weak-acidic to weak-alkaline soils), 13% lower yields (when best organic practices are used), to 34% lower yields (when the conventional and organic systems are most comparable). Under certain conditions—that is, with good management practices, particular crop types and growing conditions—organic systems can thus nearly match conventional yields

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

Have intensive agricultural methods solved hunger in the world? No. Millions still suffer from hunger worldwide and obesity is on the rise in both developed and developing countries.

Do intensive agricultural methods harm the environment? Yes. Not only in it's contributions to CC, but also in massive amounts of chemical fertilizers harming our planet's water supply, and intensive farming harms our soil. Not to mention the amount of fossil fuels burned to grow, fertilize, harvest, package and ship a piece of iceberg lettuce is ridiculous.

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

Have intensive agricultural methods solved hunger in the world?

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

Do intensive agricultural methods harm the environment?

Deteriorata posted:

So you're actually advocating deliberately starving millions of people to death rather than deal with an inefficient food distribution system. Wouldn't it be more humane and quicker to gas them rather than starving them?

Deteriorata posted:

So you're actually advocating deliberately starving millions of people to death rather than deal with an inefficient food distribution system. Wouldn't it be more humane and quicker to gas them rather than starving them?

meat sweats posted:

People have spent literally months trying to get this poster to understand that "starvation" and "obesity" are not the same problem and are in fact opposites. You can't get through because anti-GMO cranks are super dumb and because there is a philosophical disconnect where he just sees the monolithic face of the Bad Food Thing and doesn't understand words or issues beyond that. Part of it is typical stupid person inability to get outside one's own mind and circumstances -- he lives in urban California so he thinks "food deserts" and obesity are the problem. You can keep telling him that in Ethiopia and Bangladesh starvation is a problem, but it's like playing handball against curtains. You'll just get nothing back. He can no more understand the concept of "a person in East Africa with radically different circumstances than me" than the concept of a toy continuing to exist after it rolls behind the couch.

We need to go organic because it's too easy to raise too much food. We need to go organic because it's too hard for some people to get food. There's too much food choice. There's not enough food choice. Everyone is fat. Everyone is starving. To a rational person it makes no sense that someone could hold all of these beliefs at once; to a conspiracy theorist, the fact that you keep challenging him on it is just more evidence that sinister agents are trying to suppress his truth.

quote:

Measured against the requirement that they should contribute to the realization of the right to food, the
food systems we have inherited from the twentieth century have failed. Of course,
significant progress has been achieved in boosting agricultural production over the past
fifty years. But this has hardly reduced the number of hungry people, and the nutritional
outcomes remain poor. Using a new method for calculating undernourishment that began
with the 2012 edition of the State of Food Insecurity in the World report, United Nations
agencies estimate hunger in its most extreme form to have decreased globally from over 1
billion in 1990–1992, representing 18.9 per cent of the world’s population, to 842 million
in 2011–2013, or 12 per cent of the population.3
However, these figures do not capture
short-term undernourishment, because of their focus on year-long averages; they neglect
inequalities in intra-household distribution of food; and the calculations are based on a low
threshold of daily energy requirements that assume a sedentary lifestyle, whereas many of
the poor perform physically demanding activities.4

5. Calorie intake alone, moreover, says little about nutritional status. Lack of care or
inadequate feeding practices for infants, as well as poor health care or water and sanitation,
also play a major role. As detailed by the Special Rapporteur (see A/HRC/19/59), even
when food intake is sufficient, inadequate diets can result in micronutrient deficiencies such
as a lack of iodine, of vitamin A or of iron, to mention only the deficiencies that are the
most common in large parts of the developing world. Globally, over 165 million children
are stunted – so malnourished that they do not reach their full physical and cognitive
potential – and 2 billion people globally lack vitamins and minerals essential for good
health. Too little has been done to ensure adequate nutrition, despite the proven long-term
impacts of adequate nutrition during pregnancy and before a child’s second birthday, both
in low-income countries where undernutrition is the major concern5
and in middle- and
high-income countries.6
Moreover, inadequate diets are a major contributing factor to the
increase of non-communicable diseases occurring now in all regions of the world.
Worldwide, the prevalence of obesity doubled between 1980 and 2008. By 2008, 1.4 billion
adults were overweight, including 400 million who were obese and therefore at heightened
risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease or gastrointestinal cancers.7

6. The exclusive focus on increasing agricultural production has also had severe
environmental impacts. The twentieth-century “Green Revolution” technological package
combined the use of high-yielding plant varieties with increased irrigation, the
mechanization of agricultural production and the use of nitrogen-based fertilizers and pesticides. Thanks to State support in the form of subsidies and marketing, this was
effective in increasing the production volumes of major cereals (particularly maize, wheat
and rice) and of soybean. The Green Revolution was an attempt to meet the challenge as it
was framed at the time: to ensure that increases in agricultural productivity would match
population growth and the dietary transition facilitated by rising incomes. It led, however,
to an extension of monocultures and thus to a significant loss of agrobiodiversity and to
accelerated soil erosion. The overuse of chemical fertilizers polluted fresh water, increasing
its phosphorus content and leading to a flow of phosphorus to the oceans that is estimated
to have risen to approximately 10 million tons annually. Phosphate and nitrogen water
pollution is the main cause of eutrophication, the human-induced augmentation of natural
fertilization processes which spurs algae growth that absorbs the dissolved oxygen required
to sustain fish stocks.8

7. The most potentially devastating impacts of industrial modes of agricultural
production stem from their contribution to increased greenhouse gas emissions. Together,
field-level practices represent approximately 15 per cent of total human-made greenhouse
gas emissions, in the form of nitrous oxide (N2O) from the use of organic and inorganic
nitrogen fertilizers, methane (CH4) from flooded rice fields and livestock, and carbon
dioxide (CO2) from the loss of soil organic carbon in croplands and, due to intensified
grazing, on pastures. In addition, the production of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, the
tillage, irrigation and fertilization, and the transport, packaging and conservation of food
require considerable amounts of energy, resulting in an additional 15 to 17 per cent of total
man-made greenhouse gas emissions attributable to food systems.9
The resulting climate
changes could seriously constrain the potential productivity of current agricultural methods.
For some countries, the changing climate conditions of the past thirty years already appear
to have offset a significant portion of the increases in average yields that arose from
technology, carbon dioxide fertilization and other factors.10
Under a business-as-usual
scenario, we can anticipate an average of 2 per cent productivity decline over each of the
coming decades, with yield changes in developing countries ranging from -27 per cent to
+9 per cent for the key staple crops.11

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

Adventure Pigeon posted:

You basically bolded the part that said "if everything is perfect, organics only show a small loss in productivity" and ignored the part where it said "things are rarely perfect so on average the loss is about 25-30%".

Also, by "particular crop types", they mean fruits. Grains and vegetables both show considerable losses.

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

Hunger and obesity are like two sides of a coin.

quote:

Listen, I'm not crazy

quote:

or a conspiracy theorist.

quote:

blah blah blah

meat sweats posted:

In that they are opposites in one linguistic sense, yes. Otherwise, they are not alike at all.


I'll be the judge of your crazy/dumb ratio.


MONSANTO BLACK VANS COMING TO POISON OUR FOOD WITH CHEMTRAILS


So, you quote a report saying overuse of industrial agricultural inputs can be bad, to support your tinfoil opposition to GMOs, which largely include crops that need fewer industrial agricultural inputs to thrive.

The typical not-all-there strategy of dumping huge blocks of text that you found in a Google search for "GMO bad" and challenging everyone else to figure out how they support your position may work when you're commenting on Jenny McCarthy articles on the HuffPo, but here at least some people are intelligent.

quote:

I don't have an issue with GMOs

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

I didn't know ancient Mesopotamians were eating cheetos and drinking coca-cola.

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

I dont have an issue with GMO's.

Nintendo Kid posted:

Not any more than organic claptrap.

Adventure Pigeon posted:

pure organic farming

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

what is pure organic farming and when have I advocated shifting completely to it? Doing that would be catastrophic.

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

Less intensive farming. Less outside inputs in farms worldwide. More small scale environmentally friendly farming. More environmental regulations. Educating the public about food choices and health. Limiting or removing corporation's ability to advertise unhealthy foods. Empowering poor communities by teaching them ecological agriculture methods that are self sufficient and can allow people that are socio-economically disadvantaged to grow and sell their own produce and food.

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

Less intensive farming. Less outside inputs in farms worldwide. More small scale environmentally friendly farming. More environmental regulations. Educating the public about food choices and health. Limiting or removing corporation's ability to advertise unhealthy foods. Empowering poor communities by teaching them ecological agriculture methods that are self sufficient and can allow people that are socio-economically disadvantaged to grow and sell their own produce and food.

Adventure Pigeon posted:

I'd even agree that there are objectively unhealthy food categories - it's hard to argue for soda.

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

I dont have an issue with GMO's.

Nintendo Kid posted:

Soda is no more unhealthy than tons of juices and other "natural" foods out there. But whenever actual proposals come around to restrict unhealthy foods, what you end up is people deciding that having a little extra fiber or vitamins (which could be easily added to sodas) magically makes those other things "healthy".

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

Less intensive farming. Less outside inputs in farms worldwide. More small scale environmentally friendly farming. More environmental regulations. Educating the public about food choices and health. Limiting or removing corporation's ability to advertise unhealthy foods. Empowering poor communities by teaching them ecological agriculture methods that are self sufficient and can allow people that are socio-economically disadvantaged to grow and sell their own produce and food.

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

Educating the public about food choices and health. Limiting or removing corporation's ability to advertise unhealthy foods.

quote:

Empowering poor communities by teaching them ecological agriculture methods that are self sufficient and can allow people that are socio-economically disadvantaged to grow and sell their own produce and food.

quote:

Less intensive farming. Less outside inputs in farms worldwide. More small scale environmentally friendly farming. More environmental regulations.

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

Less intensive farming. Less outside inputs in farms worldwide. More small scale environmentally friendly farming. More environmental regulations. Educating the public about food choices and health. Limiting or removing corporation's ability to advertise unhealthy foods. Empowering poor communities by teaching them ecological agriculture methods that are self sufficient and can allow people that are socio-economically disadvantaged to grow and sell their own produce and food.

quote:

One Third of Food Produced for Human Consumption Is Uneaten

A new report suggests that some 1.3 billion metric tons of food in the world is lost (on the production side of the food supply chain) or wasted (on the consumption side) each year. That’s about one-third of total edibles produced for humans.

quote:

Yes, we probably will need to grow more crops, but not as much as this narrative suggests. That’s because people often confusegrowing more crops with making more food available to the world. They’re not the same thing. What we really need to do isdeliver more food and good nutrition to the world. And there is another way to deliver more food to the world besides simply growing more crops: Better use of the crops we already grow, making sure they create as much nutritious food as possible.

...

Food waste alone takes roughly 30-40% of the world’s calories, but it rarely receives the attention is deserves. (While we can’t fully eliminate food waste, surely we can cut it substantially in the coming decades.) Meanwhile, the use of crops for animal feed (instead of for direct human consumption) can be extremely inefficient in feeding people. Furthermore, some key crops are increasingly being used for biofuels, at the expense of producing food. Altogether, this leaves tremendous opportunities to feed more people with the same level of crop production by shifting more of our animal agriculture to pastures and grass-fed operations, and moving biofuel production away from food crops. Basically, how we use crops matters as much as how many crops we grow.

My colleague Emily Cassidy recently made this point very clearly. She noted that the typical Midwestern farm couldtheoretically provide enough calories to feed about 15 people daily from each hectare of farmland. But there’s a catch: People would need to eat the corn and soybeans these farms grow directly, as part of a plant-based diet, with little food waste. What Cassidy found was that the actual Midwestern farm today provides only enough calories to feed roughly five people per day per hectare of farmland, mainly because the vast majority of the corn and soybeans are being used to make ethanol or to feed animals. Amazingly, feeding five people per day per hectare is comparable to the production of an average farm in Bangladesh today.

In other words, we grow a lot of crops, but it’s not translating to as much food.

quote:

Work in our lab, led by Nathan Mueller, has shown how focusing on improved soil nutrition and water availability is key to boosting crop yields around the world. Mueller’s research shows that in developing countries many places exhibit substantial “yield gaps”—the difference between the crop yields we see today, and the crop yields that are possible with improved farming practices—which can be largely closed by improving agronomic practices, such as adding organic matter, small doses of fertilizer (chemical or organic), and extra water (especially with efficient systems like drip irrigation). At this point, it’s hard for me to imagine how GMOs would dramatically help farmers in poor countries right now, where yield gaps are large, especially when yields are currently limited by the availability of soil nutrients and water.

The prevailing narrative about the global food supply needs to be replaced by a more accurate narrative that can better guide future investments and decisions.

Of course, GMOs and other advanced technology might be able to help in the quest for a food-secure world, especially if they are not primarily used in large monocultures of nonfood crops, but they are no silver bullet. Hopefully they can help. But in the near-term, I’m placing my bets on lower-technology approaches, targeted at small landholders, especially for improved soil and water management.

shrike82 posted:

Does anyone with knowledge of the field have any sense about neonicotinoid pesticides affecting the bee population?
I've been hearing a lot about it online but those making the most noise about it, whether for and against, aren't credible to me (mother jones on one side and AEI shills on the other).

Killer robot posted:

Now, it isn't going to say anything about the food being healthy, the practices being environmentally sound, or any harm being prevented to poor farmers, but only because organic has nothing to do with those.