Pesticides, monoculturalism and capitalism - oh my!
So here's my longpost on another environmental topic: Pesticides and monocultures
As you all know, pesticides are kinda bad, for everyone involved. They're usually toxic both for the humans, plants and other living things, but that's kinda the point as you want to kill whatever non-human living thing that's eating the crops.
Unfortunately,in the current state of agriculture, there is no real option besides pesticides. This is because our use of monocultural farming. A monoculture means that a large space is only inhabited by a single species, for example wheat, corn or potatoes. Monoculturalism does not exist naturally, it is solely man-made.
This disturbs the natural balance of food-availability. Humans are omnivores of the most extreme kind, we basically eat anything we can chew. But most species in the world are highly specialised in eating just a few or even a single source of food. This means that whenever such a huge quantity of food is available in a large area, the population of whatever creature eating that food will explode. It's like arriving to heaven for them - endless food, no predators. Such population-growth will also disturb neighbouring ecosystems easily.
This leaves no other viable option but pesticides to keep the food intact and extreme population growth of "undesirables" away. Genetically modified plants are also recently becomming an alternative, but with other side-effects instead (you really can't cheat nature all that much after all).
So why do we have these monocultures? Well, because capitalism demands it, mostly. You can't afford it to keep your plantations small and varied. Endless production and availability is a must. There's little money to be made in sustainable farming.
So what about these "organic options"? Well, there are certainly a few completely pesticide-free fruits and vegetables available, from small-scale farms and peoples backyards. But they are very few and the price tag is usually several times higher and not really available at your local grocery store.
Most such alternatives are still sprayed with pesticides anyways, even if they are marked with fancy labels that certifies them as "organic", "ecological" or whatever else you've seen. The difference is that such vegetables aren't sprayed with pesticides as a preventive measure, but only sprayed when the need occur and against whatever vermin that is attacking the crops. This compared to the general method of "spray everything against everything just in case". But it still very rarely means that the vegetable is free from pesticides, as again, such attacks on the crops is pretty much inevitable. No larger-scale farmer can afford to go without pesticides and neither can we as consumers.
Nor does it means that produce that aren't marked as "organic", "ecological" etc. are worse than those that are. To receive such certification, you need to pay whatever organisation available in your country (for example, KRAV here in Sweden) to visit your crops, analyse and study them every year, and if you pass their demands (which they set up themselves, they can be pretty arbitrary or vague, there is no global laws or terms that sets up what constitues as organic farming) then you are allowed to have your produce marked in their name as organic. Of course, this means that small-scale farmers - those who usually have the best produce when it comes to environmentally friendly - can't afford to pay for such a label. Thus they end up in the same pile as the worst pesticide offenders.
And as a consumer, you don't have a way of knowing. The safe bet is to go for the ones with the organic marking. But you'll most likely not receive an apple completely free of pesticides. Just maybe less than you could have.
This is just one among many other issues with the global agriculture today, and as usual, capitalism plays a major role in it.
