Yo I'm eye-rollingly dismissive of shit like chemtrails and fluoride etc, but have you read what Vandana Shiva and Arundhati Roy have to say about Monsanto and GMO's? Bc that stuff actually seems firmly fucked up, in a non-wingnutty way....
Yes I have read what they say. I know this is a wildly unpopular opinion, but… I disagree with them on a lot of things, and I say that as a vegan who is building a permaculture food forest on my homestead.
There’s a lot of critiques leveled at Monsanto and GMOs that actually have more to do with the system that they exist in. Monsanto is just one biotech company of many, it’s not even the largest one. GMOs haven’t been found to be any more dangerous than any other traditionally bred plant. GMOs are actually way more studied than other plants, due to companies wanting to make sure that the plant will do what they want it to do, and to get through the rigorous patent system. Obviously the patent system is FUBAR, but Monsanto didn’t invent it. Plants have been patented in the USA since hybrids were first developed, almost a hundred years ago. Monocropping can be done with traditional/heirloom plants, I know organic farmers who monocrop (monocropping means you can use tractors, and other kinds of technology, it means food is cheaper and therefore more widely available to the populace - permies will praise polycultures but don’t mention that shit has to be hand-harvested, thereby making it unaffordable to the poor, or the fact that many official permie places don’t pay their laborers). These are all incredibly complex systems.
The biggest problem with organic production is that there aren’t a lot of good sources of organic nitrogen. Manure is wet and heavy, it’s expensive to ship. It can also burn the crap out of your crops. Chilean nitrogen is mined, with all the devastating environmental consequences associated with mining. As much as I love and use clover and other legumes, it only gets you so far. Organic farming has lower yields due to this issue with nitrogen, which means you actually need more land to feed the same amount of people. Traditionally, humans have handled this by chopping down more forests, to create more farmland. We’re still doing this all over the world, like the Amazon.
This may not sound like a big deal, except that globally, we’re running out of arable land, we’re running out of topsoil, due to erosion and desertification and of course we’re running out of forests. If we relied on animal manure for all of our nitrogen, we’d have to chop down every last forest for them to have enough room to graze. We’re running out of freshwater, as we pump water out of aquifers that took thousands of years to slowly accumulate, and then we dump it on crops, because flooding a field with water requires less expense and effort to the farm than laying out microdrip irrigation which gets clogged all the time.
The problem with conventional sources of nitrogen and other fertilizers is that they end up negatively impacting the health of soil and water ecosystems, which is the opposite of what we need to be doing with our soils.
If you look into the Monsanto court cases (I have, b/c I‘m a nerd try to be informed.. court cases make for long boring reading), you’ll find that in every single case that Monsanto sued a farmer, the farmer broke their contract. When you purchase GMOs, which again you can do so through multiple companies, you must actually sign a legal contract, stating that you won’t collect seeds for the next year. They made this contract b/c everyone went apeshit when they were considering putting the so-called terminator gene in their plants that would’ve left the seeds sterile (so no one would try to collect them). That didn’t go over so well, so they didn’t do it, and instead relied upon a contract. Well, in the court cases, the farmers saved the seeds. This is actually not very bright, because GMOs are hybrids, so they won’t breed true anyway. That is, the next generation won’t be quite like the previous generation. And in farming, seeds are actually not your biggest cost, so it’s not like this was some sort of stroke of business genius here. The farmers could’ve just bought their seeds from someone else if they didn’t want to sign the contract, they could’ve opted for non-GMO seeds. But they didn’t, b/c they wanted the characteristics that those particular seeds had. They were after the genetics.
Some people also get upset at Monsanto and Dow for having manufactured chemicals during war, but they were chemical manufacturers, and the US government forced companies to do so. All US chemical companies that existed within a certain era have been forced to produce all kinds of crazy shit for the US gov’t for military use.
Most current GMOs are commodity crops. They’re the feed that is fed to animals, they’re the biofuels that are added to gasoline, they’re the oils that we use in our cooking, they’re the cotton that makes our clothing. It’s also the high fructose corn syrup that is stupidly added to our food, especially low quality food, to make it more palatable, to hide the other shitty processed ingredients.
So if someone tells you these complex issues can be solved with one solution or one easy quick fix, like say, permaculture or organic agriculture, at best they’re misrepresenting the issues. These are massive issues that go beyond the soil. They’re about complex systems. They’re about money. They’re about the pressures that the ever-growing human population is putting on the earth, as the earth heats up, the oceans acidify, and most governments seem unable to plan beyond the next election cycle. To me, Shiva and Roy, neither of whom actually have a background in ag, (Shiva’s PhD in Physics - quantum theory, Roy trained as an architect before becoming an author) are not the best sources of information out there on complex agricultural issues.
I could go on for ages, about trade protectionist policies and sugar lobbies and why the Iowa presidential primaries mean we grow more corn than we’ll ever need, but I’ll go ahead and stop here.
If you’d like to read yet more about this, I highly recommend checking out biodiverseed, she has a big archive where she’s thoughtfully tackled this issue multiple times.
