Nice aim but the devil's in the details.
Objective 3 Agriculture: produce differently Briefly: bring agricultural production into line with respect of the environment, human work on the land, product quality, and health.
I have no idea what this means in practice. Is it an endorsement of small scale organic farming? If so that means much higher prices and much more land taken away from nature.
Briefly: preserve rural and natural areas, put a stop to the increase of infrastructure building and "artificialising" of land, fight urban spread by bringing workplaces and homes closer together.
I agree with this if it means encouraging high density over low density development. But I don't see how the bringing workplaces and homes closer together is supposed to function - people change jobs, people live in two income families where members of the same household work in different places. What you want is to encourage employment hubs that can then be easily accessible by mass transit, with only the basic service jobs spread out among the residential areas. It also means that rather than just opposing sprawl style development, you have to also support the high density kind in the core urban areas.
Objective 8 Health: prevention before treatment Briefly: evaluate the importance of environmental damage in the overall cost of sickness, get prevention policy moving, particularly re food, pesticide use, the spread of GM crops.
What's with the blanket opposition to GM? I know this is a core belief of the environmentalist movement but I just don't get it. Sure, be careful. Yes the IP aspects are very worrying. But it also holds out promises of environmentally positive effects (e.g. reducing pesticides and increasing yields). The way I see it Greens and progressives should be fighting for proper regulation of GM crops and of the IP regime, not opposing GM altogether.
What if all of those jobs are near the family home? Employment and habitation hubs? *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
How? Let's take the Paris metropolis - what sort of scheme will manage to combine millions of jobs and homes in the same neighbourhood?
I have read that the yields of organic farming can be at or close to the level of industrial farming minus the latters' losses, but would have to dig up a reference. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
(Wild dream time...lose the air pollution and plant food in gardens, beside paths, plant vegetables..all different kinds, using permaculture principles...fill towns with apple trees, walnut trees...following permaculture principles...there would be no division between us and nature...we would live "in" nature again, with our food available...if we stretch out an arm. The only imports would be food that couldn't wouldn't grow under local climactic conditions...but then you could pick...say...pine nuts...pack 'em up (small scale!), ship them--via wind-powered rail networks!--to those who need pine nuts...(pinoli)...and get fresh basil in return...</wild dream>) Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
..Oh no! We don't have any tides. Dammit.
OK I'll find a Nordic student coming to so-called Language School in an area near you. As I understand from my daughters, there is a Department of Advanced Psychosexual Hydraulics at a College somewhere in your neck of the woods? You can't be me, I'm taken
I'll take exception to one of your comments, though:
small scale organic farming? If so that means much higher prices and much more land taken away from nature.
This is a talking-point regularly circulated by the pro-industrial/productivist lobby. Don't you wonder why it is you don't hear it when the corn (maize) ethanol lobby proposes increasing acreage of corn? Then we hear that in fact there's heaps of land lying fallow that could be used... Organic farming is capable of higher yields and of lower unit costs the wider-spread and better-organised it is (I suggest to Sven above that the lack of a well-organised commercial network in a sizeable market is one of the reasons that hamstrings organic farming and keeps costs higher; secondly, as we have seen with petro-farming over the decades, the more the production chain is organized and given technical support, the greater the technical capacity of the farmers and the yields they obtain. That can be just as true of organic farming). Finally, no, as I explain to Sven, Hulot is not only speaking of organic farming. Just a switch from subsidising industrial farming to subsidising higher-quality, local, labour-intensive farming.
Give that man an organic cow!
Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
Farming can also provide jobs for lower-skilled workers who are now no longer needed in such great numbers by industry. And rather a countryside inhabited by people and their families than a monoculture desert run by agri-managers...
Fine if done voluntarily. Encourage it through laws and regulations making it easier. But that's easier said than done since farmers tend to have a rather strong attachment to owning their own land, if possible.
btw, I think you misunderstood me. I didn't say people should like their cubicle jobs, just that a regular, limited work schedule which allows time for a proper life outside of work beats the alternative. There's more to life than work, and I don't think that it's good to encourage greater numbers of people to have jobs that completely dominate their lives. Sure some people like heavy physical labour - whether on a farm or on some construction project or wherever, but most don't and family farming is especially problematic because of its all consuming nature.
As for city bias - I plead guilty. I like crowds and having everything I could possibly want right near me. No car needed or desired. Trees on the streets and parks are also good, but I feel better surrounded by concrete, asphalt, and brick than I do surrounded by nature.
But I quite agree, someone, that it's not just a question of "family farms" that conjure up the image of grinding hard work and lack of freedom Marek brings up. There could certainly be other forms of organisation.
<cough> In Western Europe, afaik. <re-cough> ;)
;) Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
A 22-year study by Cornell that points to various benefits to organic cultivation of corn over the long term, and demonstrates equivalent yields in normal years and superior yields in drought years.
As far as the intensive/extensive farming debate goes, I think the example of Japan is interesting, as it has rather impressive yields despite what would be considered a very inefficient organization of agriculture -- lots of little farms, with lots of people working at them.
There are some interesting numbers on this point at the World Resources Institute on yields per hectare and whatnot. Comparing the US, home of industrial mega-farming, and Japan, where I look out the window and see 90 year old grandmothers tilling the ground by hand, you can get some sense of the efficiencies possible with small-scale agriculture.
Japan, cereals Average crop yield (kg per ha) 6147 US, cereals Average crop yield (kg per ha) 5824
Japan, Ag. Workers as Percent of Pop, %7.3 US, Ag. Workers as Percent of Pop, %2.9
Now, these are average numbers, and I am sure there are more efficient farms elsewhere that balance out the little plots farmed by 90-year old grandmothers where I live.
Admittedly, Japan has a far higher per-hectare fertilizer usage rate. The stats on this page are all fertilizer types combined.
Japan, fertilizer per hectare 295 US, fertilizer per hectare 111
But when I was studying Japanese history, I read that in the pre-industrial Edo period fish-meal fertilizers were a huge business, and used by most every farmer who had the means to do so. So, I started to wonder what proportion of Japan's fertilizers were of the traditional type, but can't find data on that.
This data is sorta tangential to the discussion
It may be that Japanese soil husbandry over centuries has delivered a more fertile soil today. Which would fit the Cornell study's showing that soil fertility increases over years of organic farming.
This article suggests that Japanese farming today uses chemical fertilisers causing environmental damage, which recourse to traditional fish-meal use may help to limit.
I have to admit, I was surprised at the distinctly greater fertilizer usage by the Japanese, as I'd always thought Americans were the worst. But I suppose if you're out there, looking at every crop and spraying by hand, then maybe you'd end up using more than one would with an even spraying via plane.
With land and labour scarcer and more expensive, and more intensely subsidised food prices in Japan, fertiliser use is more profitable - thus Japanese farmers get their optimal return with a higher amount of fertiliser. It's also a product of much more intensive agriculture, too. Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
