GM Crops Are Not The Answer To Pest Control

Here is an example I know about. A variety of potatoes was developed that was supposed to be resistant to potato beetles. It was, except snails found this variety absolutely delicious!

As Newton figured it out 300 years ago : To every action there's equal reaction.

Genetic modification, as is the Green Revolution, are actions the ecology is trying to cope with and destroy, because they're against balanced and logical evolution.

Ecologies are self balancing systems and when people interfere with their balance mechanism, they fight back.

Certain societies have been able to farm the same pieces of land for thousands of years, because their work was within the ecological system, as organic farming is attempting today. But when the system is upset with artificial inputs, it fights back and tries to rebalance itself, which, in many cases results in self destruction, in the attempt to remove the interference.

In other words, there's no such thing as the "survival of the fittest" in ecological systems, because the self balancing mechanism promotes life forms to enhance its own survival, and when certain species overstay their welcome, they're destroyed by the system iself. Which has happened to many human civilizations in history. This is why and how all empires and economic theories self destruct.

Contrary to propaganda, ecological systems are not competitive, but co-operative, even when this co-operation appears to be a brutal competition for survival. All naturally evolved species within systems exist to slow down resource conversion and to ensure the system's survival.

This is something the human race hasn't been able to figure out yet and tries to blank out with faith based theories, resulting in the tragedies of history .

Ed Deak, Big Lake, BC.

Very interesting.

The mixed farms of our grandparents were efficient and successful - but could not compete with the monoculture farming that pushed its way in in the 60s.

Now we're discovering the inefficiencies of the new high-input kind of farming.

Maybe it's time to re-populate the countryside and go back to more labour-intensive methods in which the farmer was attached to the land and understood its care.

Many many personal tragedies lie behind the story of the rise of agri-business. But even greater mass tragedy lies in the future, when we deplete our soil, pave it over, and the remaining topsoil blows away. Nobody seems to have stopped to figure out what future generations are going to eat. Who cares, as long as big business makes a profit this year?

Eleanor

Sadly even the people that would care don't have clue that they need to.

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"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." Friedrich Nietzsche

And why was monoculture so successful? Because it was based on having available lots of (relatively) cheap energy from hydrocarbons like oil and natural gas. Now just as hydrocarbon energy sources are probably approaching a worldwide <a href="http://www.odac-info.org">peak in production</a> which will naturally be followed by a permanent production decline and long term rising prices, we are also finding out that to maintain production levels we need ever increasing inputs of energy and hydrdocarbon based fertilizers and pesticides into the system to make up for the depletions of nutrients in tbe soil, the loss of topsoil due to erosion and urban sprawl, and increases in pest attacks brought about by the years of monoculture and factory farming.<br><br> In other words, we are trying to keep running up the "down" escalator and using larger and larger quantities of the world's increasingly scarce and expensive energy and hydrocarbon resources in order not to loose momentum. Even if we did have unlimitted supplies of oil and natural gas as the Peak Oil sceptics like to maintain, the current factory farming, agri-business approach to agriculture appears to be unsustainable in the long term and likely to fail at some point.<br><br> <a href="http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html"> Eating Fossil Fuels</a> by Dale Allen Pfeifer:<br><br> SNIP<br><br> <b>The Green Revolution</b><br><br> In the 1950s and 1960s, agriculture underwent a drastic transformation commonly referred to as the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution resulted in the industrialization of agriculture. Part of the advance resulted from new hybrid food plants, leading to more productive food crops. Between 1950 and 1984, as the Green Revolution transformed agriculture around the globe, world grain production increased by 250%.{4] That is a tremendous increase in the amount of food energy available for human consumption. This additional energy did not come from an increase in incipient sunlight, nor did it result from introducing agriculture to new vistas of land. The energy for the Green Revolution was provided by fossil fuels in the form of fertilizers (natural gas), pesticides (oil), and hydrocarbon fueled irrigation.<br><br> The Green Revolution increased the energy flow to agriculture by an average of 50 times the energy input of traditional agriculture. In the most extreme cases, energy consumption by agriculture has increased 100 fold or more.<br><br> In the United States, 400 gallons of oil equivalents are expended annually to feed each American (as of data provided in 1994). Agricultural energy consumption is broken down as follows:<br><br> · 31% for the manufacture of inorganic fertilizer<br><br> · 19% for the operation of field machinery<br><br> · 16% for transportation<br><br> · 13% for irrigation<br><br> · 08% for raising livestock (not including livestock feed)<br><br> · 05% for crop drying<br><br> · 05% for pesticide production<br><br> · 08% miscellaneous <br><br> Energy costs for packaging, refrigeration, transportation to retail outlets, and household cooking are not considered in these figures.<br><br> To give the reader an idea of the energy intensiveness of modern agriculture, production of one kilogram of nitrogen for fertilizer requires the energy equivalent of from 1.4 to 1.8 liters of diesel fuel. This is not considering the natural gas feedstock. According to The Fertilizer Institute (http://www.tfi.org), in the year from June 30 2001 until June 30 2002 the United States used 12,009,300 short tons of nitrogen fertilizer. Using the low figure of 1.4 liters diesel equivalent per kilogram of nitrogen, this equates to the energy content of 15.3 billion liters of diesel fuel, or 96.2 million barrels.<br><br> Of course, this is only a rough comparison to aid comprehension of the energy requirements for modern agriculture.<br><br> In a very real sense, we are literally eating fossil fuels. However, due to the laws of thermodynamics, there is not a direct correspondence between energy inflow and outflow in agriculture. Along the way, there is a marked energy loss. Between 1945 and 1994, energy input to agriculture increased 4-fold while crop yields only increased 3-fold. Since then, energy input has continued to increase without a corresponding increase in crop yield. We have reached the point of marginal returns. Yet, due to soil degradation, increased demands of pest management and increasing energy costs for irrigation (all of which is examined below), modern agriculture must continue increasing its energy expenditures simply to maintain current crop yields. The Green Revolution is becoming bankrupt.<br><br> Continued at: <a href="http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html"> Eating Fossil Fuels</a><BR><BR> For a somewhat more optimistic view of the possibilities we have to feed ourselves in less energy intensive and sustainable fashion:<br><br> <b>Sustainable Food System for Sustainable Development</b><br><br> <b>Mae-Wan Ho,</b> Director, Sustainable World Global Initiative, PO Box 32097 London NW1 0XR, UK www.i-sis.org.uk<br><br> <i>Lecture for Sustainable World International Conference 14-15 July, House of Commons, Westminster, London</i><br><br> SNIP<br><br> <b>A profusion of local inventions for sustainable food production</b><br><br> There is a profusion of local inventions for producing food sustainably, increasing productivity while saving energy and water, and harvesting energy from farm wastes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They are described in detail in successive issues of our must-read magazine. I mention a few.<br><br> Jesuit priest, Henri de Laulanie, working with farming communities in Madagascar in the late 1980s invented a system of rice intensification that is now practiced by 100 000 farmers in the country and spreading to other countries in Africa and Asia . It depends on transplanting rice seedlings at an earlier age and spaced wider apart than usual, emphasis on organic inputs, and most importantly, keeping the soil moist rather than flooded during the growing season. This encourages the rice plants to put out more side shoots, grow deeper, stronger roots, increasing yields from 2t/ha to 8t within the second year, and 12t/ha or more in later years. These results met with scepticism from the conventional scientific community; but have been confirmed by Chinese crop scientist Yuan Longping, co-winner of 2004 World Food Prize. Other Chinese scientists documented savings on seeds by 60%, 100% on fertilizers, and most of all, saving 3 000 tonnes of water/ha.<br><br> Agricultural wastes are a major source of the most serious greenhouse gases: methane and nitrous oxide. The perfect solution is to harvest the methane as ‘biogas’ for energy, while reducing nitrous oxide emission, saving the nitrogen as organic fertilizer nutrient for crops. How? By digesting the agricultural wastes anaerobically (in the absence of air) with bacteria normally present in the wastes, especially cattle dung. No one knows who first invented biogas. Anecdotal evidence suggests that biogas was used for heating bath water in Assyria during the 10th century BC , and the first digestion plant to produce biogas from wastes was built in a leper colony in Bombay, India in 1859. Based on this ancient invention, scientists in the United States and Canada are recently producing hydrogen, the ultimate clean fuel, as well as methane from food and agricultural wastes .<br><br> Biogas is becoming popular in many Third World countries, and emerging as a major boon, bringing health, social, environmental and financial benefits . Nepal’s successful biogas programme saves 625 000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents from being pumped into the atmosphere each year, earning it US$5 million in carbon trading that can be invested back into clean energy to generate yet more income from carbon trading.<br><br> As you can see, there is a lot of potential for putting in place post-fossil fuel, minimum-emission food systems, especially in poor countries; but we are stymied by our political leaders’ overwhelming commitment to a dominant model of infinite, unbalanced growth that has brought us global warming and the imminent collapse of food production, as I mentioned earlier in my introduction to our Global Initiative.<br><br> There are many success stories from the grassroots. You will hear the one about Ethiopia from Sue Edwards to-morrow. I shall describe another showing how science and indigenous knowledge can work wonders together , which also illustrates a model of sustainable balanced growth that I believe should replace the dominant model.<br><br> SNIP<br><br> <B>Sustainable development & human capital</B><br><br> There has been a widespread misconception that the only alternative to the dominant model of infinite, unsustainable growth is to have no growth at all. I have heard some critics refer to sustainable development as a contradiction in terms. IFWMS, however, is a marvellous demonstration that sustainable development is possible. It also shows that the carrying capacity of a piece of land is far from constant; instead it depends on the mode of production, on how the use of the land is organised. Productivity can vary three- to four-fold or more simply by maximising internal input, and in the process, creating more jobs, supporting more people.<br><br> The argument for population control has been somewhat over-stated by Lester Brown [24, 25], and others predicting massive starvation and population crash as oil runs out. I like the idea of “human capital”, if only to restore a sense of balance that it isn’t population number as such, but the glaring inequality of consumption and dissipation by the few rich in the richest countries that’s responsible for the current crises. The way Cuba coped with the sudden absence of fossil fuel, fertilizer and pesticides by implementing organic agriculture across the nation is a case in point . Julia Wright will say more about that to-morrow. There was no population crash; although there was indeed hardship for a while. It also released creative energies, which brought solutions and many accompanying ecological and social benefits.<br><br> For the past 50 years, the world has opted overwhelmingly for an industrial food system that aspired to substitute machines and fossil fuel for human labour, towards agriculture without farmers . This has swept people off the land and into poverty and suicide. One of the most urgent tasks ahead is to re-integrate people into the ecosystem. Human labour is intelligent energy, applied precisely and with ingenuity, which is worth much more than appears from the bald accounting in mega-Joules or any other energy unit. This is an important area for future research.<BR><BR> <A HREF="http://www.indsp.org/pdf/SFSSSD.pdf">Sustainable Food System for Sustainable Development</a> (This is a PDF file so you will need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view).

As long as neoclassical market capitalism, or any other 'ism is ruling the world, we'll be going downhill in an accelerated pace.

The solution is an economic system built on physical, natural laws, not ideologies and other harebrained theories.

One of the more rationally thinking economists, Friedrich Schumacher, wrote about this in his "Small Is Beautiful" books some 40 years ago. So have Veblen and Odum, who suspected 70-80 years ago that the developing trend will become an inevitable tragedy for the world.

The problem is, how do you put a car, travelling down a road at an accelerating speed, into reverse, without wrecking the system and causing accident?

Eleanor is right about the more labour intensive methods, not only in farming, but also in other industries. The problem is that today's economists, brainwashed and paid off by a special interest sector, can not come to grip with the reality that human labour doesn't cost anything to an economy. So they're trying to eliminate it and introduce very costly, but temporarily profitable systems, to divert the benefits to their masters.

They don't care, or have the intelligence to consider, what happens next year, or in the next generation, only what the next quarterly report shows on the stockmarkets.

Ed Deak.

Wow, you've written a lot, to be buried way down in the Comments section!

Just wanted to ask you - what do you think of "carbon trading" which you mentioned above in connection with Nepal?

Our new Min of the Envt Rona Ambrose has stated that she doesn't see the point in carbon trading. I thought this was promising, since I always thought carbon trading was kind of a sleazy plan for getting out of reducing one's own emissions.

Eleanor