All of the discussion on Roundup-ready crops, Biotechnology, Genetic
engineering, BST, linear vs. holistic thinking in agriculture...all this
discussion in the past few days leads me to quit lurking and make the
following contribution from another viewpoint.
High, off-farm inputs in agriculture--first chemical fertilizers, then
fossil fuels, then hybrid seed, then pesticides, then hormone implants
and hormone-laced feed, then the mad notion to turn herbivores into
carnivores with animal byproducts in feed, then gene splicing ... all the
rest--are aberrations of the last 100 years or so, most in the past
couple of decades. These practices are a temporary zit on the face of
the 12,000+ year history of agriculture. Temporary because they are
manifestly unsustainable.
Like the doctor who offers yet another medication to counteract the side
effects of the first prescription, agricultural scientists cheerfully
offer solutions for problems they themselves created in the first
place--solutions that must be purchased.
It is prevarication of the most baldfaced sort to claim that these
practices will feed the hungry people of the world. American
agricultural science already has one failed green revolution to its
credit; here is another in the making.
On the positive side: there is already in place a model for feeding
people through a holistic, local, human-scale, ecologically sound,
economically viable system--Community Supported Agriculture. I'll
happily explain, if someone asks, how and why there are more than 500 of
these farms thriving now in the U.S., up from one or two 10 years ago.
Woody Wodraska
woodyw@juno.com
"There is no scarcity abiding in Nature.
Any scarcity we see is our own doing."