There are plenty of adequate varieties. What's needed is support for farmers so they can get back (since a combination of Washington Consensus policies with subsidised dumping by rich-world producers has debilitated farming in many poorer countries) to growing subsistence crops for themselves and their country, and cash crops to get national and regional markets working and bring farmers some money to prime the pump. This is perfectly possible without Monsanto's pesticide GMs that are in fact conceived to offer advantages to intensive rich-country agriculture.
And no, we're not in a privatised, monopolistic economic environment, not yet.
Subsistence farming is inadequate to deal with the rising population and there is also a need to get yields up as land is taking out of agricultural production and used for something else, or ruined by overuse.
There is also a worldwide trend away from the land and into cities. The remaining farmers will have to produce more to feed all those no longer engaging in agriculture. I'm not suggesting any specific course of action, just pointing out that condemning the monopolies isn't a plan, just a reaction.
I have no strong opinions on GM foods, but I suspect that those who oppose them as a matter of principle are not looking into the issue deeply enough.
I do agree that "patenting" life is obscene. Policies not Politics ---- Daily Landscape
The distribution issue, while very real, is akin to blaming the price of oil on speculators and environmentalists when considering food production as a whole.
you are the media you consume.
The "trend" to the cities happens because peasant farmers cannot make a living on the land, for reasons I outline above. The trend needs to be reversed by making it possible to live from farming. Why do you accept it as seemingly inevitable, as something that is just "happening"?
You have no strong opinion, you say, but your own ideas appear to be based on an a priori belief that widescale industrial farming must be the only way to feed the world. But widescale industrial farming in poorer or developing countries lends itself to colonial exploitation by large corporations in a free-trade environment, which in turn means plantation-type monocultures that are agronomically fragile and environmentally unsustainable. The counter-project is to support and empower smaller-scale farming carried out by those who (still) have practical knowledge of local conditions. There are immense gains in yields to be made simply by the use of existing well-adapted varieties along with better farming practice in an environment in which farming pays the farmer (not currently the case in the countries we are discussing).
The claim that the activity is the last, best hope to improve the agricultural productivity of the world is very bold, given that it has not even been shown to be a hope in improving agricultural productivity.
It might be conceivable that Monsanto could use this technology to produce GM seeds that can be used in a progressive agricultural system in, say, the eastern DRC ... the former "breadbasket of Central Africa" ... should political stability return to the area.
But the fact is that to date Monsanto has done no such thing. The streams of income come from having seeds that cannot be saved and re-used and from crops that encourage more intensive use of artificial inputs. So whether or not GM could be used as a technology to contribute to a more sustainable agricultural for developing nations, in both the sense of ecological sustainability and in the sense of being self-propagating within developing economies ...
... its not doing that now, and its not clear that there is any reason why a commercial corporation would ever put their attention to the task of doing so.
This is a case of "you know, if Junior ever set his mind to it, he could make a big contribution to the local team with that cricket/baseball bat" ... when in reality what Junior does with the bat is go around the neighborhood beating people upside the head. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
This is a case of "you know, if Junior ever set his mind to it, he could make a big contribution to the local team with that cricket/baseball bat" ... when in reality what Junior does with the bat is go around the neighborhood beating people upside the head, if they don't pay protection money. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
