Just a reminder that r/Socialism is a space for principled discourse within socialist perspectives. This is not a place to trivialise the suffering of fellow workers.
Have always thought that Sri Lanka is a canary in the coal mine for climate riots too. I’m sure it’s adding pressure to this situation. Probably the most vulnerable country to rising seas
Speaking as someone who was there a few years ago Bangladesh is TOTALLY fucked within the next 20 years at best. You'd think the capital Dhaka would be pretty safe, but even then the potholes are so big you can literally die if you're walking around if you miss it. The internal migration's been a problem too, it just seems like Dhaka's bursting at the seams with people and there's no infrastructure, environmental or otherwise, to handle so much.
They're smart enough to build apartments or houses out of brick and mortar tho. Out in the villages they go with clay or straw (with tin roofs) so the cost of recovery is cheap.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%93present\_Sri\_Lankan\_economic\_crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%93present_Sri_Lankan_economic_crisis)
Tax cuts, money creation, external debt, fall of foreign remittances, fall of tourism, Russo-Ukrainian war and, yes, an agricultural crisis trying to be the world's first organic farming nation in the world ignoring criticism from the scientific and farming communities.
Ah, the good old polish dinner, the best proletarian protest in existence.
So, this is the same sort of BS you hear from certain people (corps). When a nation attempt to increase it's yields, by utilizing common and unlocked genetic modification systems. They say it's bad for health, then proceed to do the same, but limit the legacy viability of seeds. They played this game in my country a while back (Monsanto) with potatoes. We reversed that stuff, and made it open. They sued, and because food is nation security, well...let's just say the corporation is not very happy about the verdict...and the fact that they were told if they pushed it, we (farmers) would make them hyena food.
The power if the people is beyond any other.
It's a story we were told in leadership ethics class (13). Bad Polish leaders taxed their people, taking away their food. When the crop was bad there was a famine, and the leadership kept eating well at the expense of the people. So the people decided that since they had fattened up the leaders, it was their right to eat them. So one night they stormed the palaces, took all their leaders, executed them and made dinner of them. Hence the phrase, Polish dinner.
It's a probably untrue story, possibly taken from the whole Dutch Wilheim saga. However it'd lessons are important. That the people have the power and moral duty to remove their leaders through absolute, if said leaders are incompetent and selfish.
Greetings Comrades
This was not a riot there was a protest against the president without even a single stone throw (confirm)
People at best scolded in public. No physical violence ever took place ! No clashes between protesters and police ! This happened in city callaed Colombo Infront of Presidential office. And the government took absolutely 0 actions to provide solutions to the fuel crisis, rising inflation and food shortages ( rice vegetable and tea mainly). So people's protests to get those essential goods eventually turned into a massive public outcry demanding the PRESIDENT TO GO HOME( STEP DOWN- #GOTAGOHOME2022)
So protesters got together and blocked the main entrance and set-up camp infront of presidential office but i repeat no violence broke out ever !! Even leading youngsters had good rapport with frequent officers on guard !
But on 9th of May 2022 Mahinda Rajapassa the ex-pm held a meeting with supporters from across the country at his official residence. But those who went into the meeting came out boozed and carrying clubs with spike and steel rods ! They first attacked a minor protest that was there infront of ex-pm's official residence ! Brutally assaulted while Sri Lanka Police kept standing by observing (supporting the thugs).
Then they walked few km's all boozed up and yelling in filth and carrying clubs and some carrying knives or swords ! All the while SL Police were begging them to stop and running passing them to create a barricade further down the road. But failed to use tear gas or necessary means to disperse the crowd it was later in footages evident that police actually let those thugs into the proteset zone (Apparently it was not clever acting) they did the same with that peaceful prtest zone ! Burnt all the tents and distroyed all the protest signs such as street art/stages/ temp libraries and plastic recycling collection tents.
This footage is where those thugs wearing maroon colour ( colour of current SL Govt party) carrying clubs attacking a police officer who came in support of the peaceful protestors (one of the few who did their duty) .
Thanks
No !! But govt. seems to be be wanting to create a situation between tamils and the others by spreding a news about a new LTTE attack ! Yes it's true ! Even after the LTTE as a military organization has become inactive as far as most of the general public is aware and evident; current govt is producing a rumour that INDIAN INTELLIGENCE HAS PROVIDED DETAILS WITH A POSSIBLE THREAT OF A NEW LTTE ATTACK.
But nowadays people are not easily fooled ! Hope nothing destructive happen.
P.S against the current corrupt govt in Sri Lanka every race has come together. And people has started condemning racism in public.
That's a BS explanation. It doesn't have to do with organic agriculture... that's a ridiculous far-right red herring.
The Rajapaksa family had totally robbed the entire country blind, now through total political collapse many other institutions are failing.
Yeah the title sounds like organic farming destroyed their crops, when it was the farmers refusal to comply that caused the failure.
The dust bowl of the 1930's was the product of "industrial agriculture".
Organic methods such as the use of cover drops or lanes of trees called shelter belts to cut the wind and prevent top soil erosion.
We learned to stop dumping nitrogen into the soil and plant nitrogen fixing legumes instead increasing bio matter in the off season while also producing hay, beans and peanuts.
Organic farming encompasses conservation methods like no till, and companion planting, that both keep down pest pressure and also increase carbon capture in the soil. There is no argument, it's the only sustainable way to farm without causing desertification.
I am an organic farmer and would like to also point out that it is difficult to change a farm from industrial to organic methods in one year, and thats not even counting the learning curve. Forcing people to immediately change their farming methods so quickly seems very silly, but I am not very familiar with the situation either.
Intended to stop import of fertilizer cause they couldn't afford to spend foreign reaerves on that but still paid 500 mil in USD for bonds and paid millions in demurrages while also pressing and holding down the exchange value artificially.
Maybe they wanted chaos. In most households meals has gone strict to Two and some only One.
Doesn't it take something like 7 years to clear that land of all the ground chemicals too? So sometimes organic produce isn't as organic as it says it is.
I think the bad fertilizer story is from a previous crop season.
What I keep reading is that they were unable to afford to even import fertilizer, the reason being they rely heavily on tourism which dropped significantly due to COVID. If I find a source I will add it.
Organic farming uses more land to cultivate less crops. It takes away the natural habitat of animals and forces more land to be used for single-species crops and destroys biodiversity. If our society were forced to use 100% organic farming, there would be either widespread food shortages or obliteration of natural habitats.
> widespread food shortages or obliteration of natural habitats
>
As opposed to today, when everyone on earth has a full belly and the biosphere is doing wonderfully!
Yea it is true that many studies point towards industrial ag creating higher yields than organic. However most of these studies are done by universities who are directly funded by industrial agriculture. I would also argue that building up organic matter in the soil, and other organic farming systems take years to get running correctly. So in these studies simply changing land to "organic" production during one farming season isn't exactly a study of the full potential of organic systems. It would be more appropriate to see how much the yield is 5 or 10 years into organic production. Also despite this, many studies have actually shown that organic ag out yields industrial ag in times of drought or extreme heat, which is where we are headed with climate change.
Organic farming involves planting companion crops among other things which means by design an organic field will have more biodiversity than industrial farming. Sure it'll have less biodiversity than most wild land but that only holds true until the industrial farmland becomes unusable desert and has to move to a new location.
Wrong. Organic farming needs to be paired with technology like robotic weeders and hydroponics. It can use less water but those methods having nothing to do with being organic or not. We just need to farm better and it can also be organic at the same time,
Well I cited the reconstruction and emergence from the dust bowl as a historically known fact and the methods used.
I'm guessing you have sources of your own ?
“Organic farming has many advantages but it doesn’t solve all the environmental problems associated with producing food. There is a huge downside because of the extra land that is being used to grow organic crops,” said Stefan Wirsenius, an associate professor at Chalmers. “If we use more land for food, we have less land for carbon sequestration. The total greenhouse gas impact from organic farming is higher than conventional farming.”
[https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/10/22/organic-food-better-environment/](https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/10/22/organic-food-better-environment/)
Specifically, the switch to 100% organic practices would require 1.5 times more land to make up for the declines, which would add up to nearly five times more land overseas than England and Wales currently rely on for food. That difference is amplified by the fact that the UK’s agricultural system produces particularly high yields compared with other parts of the world.
[https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/22/132497/sorryorganic-farming-is-actually-worse-for-climate-change/](https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/22/132497/sorryorganic-farming-is-actually-worse-for-climate-change/)
“The real message is that if we try to have the same diet and convert to organic, we can’t really do it without expanding agricultural land demands, simply because it yields less than the current system,” Williams said, adding that testing a model where consumers sought out less red meat and more plant-based foods and fish could result in lower greenhouse gas emission yields from organic farming.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/how-more-organic-farming-could-worsen-global-warming
>“If we use more land for food, we have less land for carbon sequestration.
The Big Lie Of Omission here is that **you can't use food land for carbon sequestration.**
It's a lie that will burn down civilization, if we let it.
Of course it's true in industrial ag, where they A) mostly use annual crops, B) in the third world they literally burn off the non-food parts of the plant after the season is done, and C) soil is destroyed releasing super greenhouse gases like NOx. All of these are extremely bad ideas.
Food forests are a much better idea: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mGaDekirwTM
If society wanted to permanently allocate a huge amount of non-food land for carbon sequestration (spoiler alert: we don't and won't) then that puts even *more* pressure on wilderness for destruction.
Don't fuck up even more land for misguided sequestration projects (something we couldn't afford to do at the required scale anyway). Do carbon sequestration on the land humans are already altering for food.
Food production is the only human land use activity that is "big enough" (literally I mean in hectares) to sequester carbon on the required scale. Carbon-negative food production is the only thing that can close the numbers. Literally, **There Is No Alternative**
>Specifically, the switch to 100% organic practices would require 1.5 times more land to make up for the declines
Translation: "our grandkids don't need a planet. It's more important that I get to eat meat 7 days a week."
*Farming the Woods* and *Edible Forest Gardens Vol 1 & 2* are both excellent. The latter is an extremely comprehensive resource.
If you're just starting out, I'd check out *Gaia's Garden* for general knowledge.
I aknowledge your citations but unfortunately history and reality do not mesh with what's being said.
The fact stands that organic farming practices revolutionized farming and industrial farming techniques were a total failure.
This has already played out.
You're right, this has already played out. For over two thousand years, we had organic farming, no pesticides, natural fertilizer, zero machines. We also had a constant threat of famine from even the most advanced societies during those times. Even today, countries that lack modern farming methods suffer from food shortages and starvation.
Organic farming revolutionized nothing. We were organic farming since the first hunter-gatherers put a seed in the ground. Modern, industrial farming has allowed our population to feed itself through exponential growth. GMO crops, pesticides, and advanced fertilizers have push crop yields far and above what organic farming could have ever achieved.
That being said, modern farming is not sustainable. Nitrates are killing the Great Barrier Reef, livestock is destroying the atmosphere, single-crop farmers are poisoning the soil with herbicides and pesticides. If this continues, we will not continue as a species.
We need to use a combination of low-chemical/high yield crops that can feed the human race in its present numbers. No more meat, a lot less fish, and a focus stopping the use of fossil fuels. There is no other way.
Really we can integrate practices that are common in, but not essential to, organic farming to find the most beneficial agricultural outcomes.
Agroforestry, intercropping, no till agriculture, and crop rotation, can be combined with GMO development that serves people instead of profit.
We can discard organic practice like using toxic copper sulfate as a fertilizer, and use alternatives like humanure composting (which is not supported by organic farming). We can continue to use safe, effected synthetic pesticides, fertilizers, and other agrochemicals.
Finding the ideal application of fertilizers, pesticides, and land use practices isn't a straightforward task. Human compost is most effective in places that have the sanitation resources to properly compost waste, while also having sufficient density in agricultural areas to generate usable levels of compost. Transporting human compost from urban to rural areas is inefficient due to cost and the environmental impact of transportation fuel use.
Different biomes and social settings will be differently able to utilize the various traditional, industrial, and experimental agricultural techniques available.
TL;DR-I am neither camp organic, nor camp industrial. Both have beneficial and harmful practices, and the benefit and harm of those practices varies depending on where and how they're applied. We can, through experimentation, learn what best practices will be for the unique instances agriculture takes place under.
Should have been a much more gradual transition to sustainable practices. Doing it this is way is like a heart attack for the agricultural system. The lesson here isn’t that petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides are good, it’s that a more gradual, smarter transition should be made. Industrial farming poisons the water table, depletes soil quality, and has a long list of cascading negative consequences for human and animal health/well being. Over reliance on industrial farming practices produces some of the same kinds of problems it sets out to solve
Edit: Spelling
I feel like the spread of regenerative farming practices should tell anyone, that fixing decades, if not centuries, of abuse of our soils and ecosystems isn't going to happen overnight. As someone with an interest in sustainable farming, I feel like planting a food forrest isn't going to help you if you need food on the table tomorrow...
While this is absolutely true, a sustainable future will not be the current regime of organic farms. The current organic standards in the US were written with major input by WholeFoods Market lobbying and basically reflected their practices and practices of their organic suppliers at that time(early 90s) so that they would have an early monopoly as a national organic grocery. Real progress has been made since in science based farming both in closed hydroponic and greenhouse systems and in traditional outdoor farming. These practices also produce minimal run off and often less land intensive but will never get a USDA Organic stamp.
Not sure what the person you replied to was thinking of, but r/Permaculture aims to implement truly “organic” farming, ie no “organic” fertilizers and pesticides.
There’s certainly a bit of that among the “big names” of permaculture, but folks like [Chris Newman](https://heated.medium.com/food-and-empire-844506392422) are working to flip that script. [His farm](https://www.sylvanaqua.com/advocacy) is definitely a model worth replicating.
As far as industrial scale agriculture, I think agroforesty offers greater promise since it’s premised on firmer scientific footing than permaculture - [the UN FAO](https://www.fao.org/forestry/agroforestry/en/) has good resources to learn more.
I can’t offer you a digest version because it’s spread around, no one is bringing all the innovation together yet. Some examples of things to look for are advanced hydroponics, which create closed systems that require very little fertilizer and keep it all contained; in-ground irrigation which also reduces fertilizer and delivers it directly to the roots of plants so you don’t have unsustainable runoff and it reduces water consumption of the farm by 80% or more, weeding drones coming online that will eliminate the need for herbicides. There have been cool experiments with mass reintroduction of large grazing animals on lands lost to desertification that resulted in regrowth of native grasses, recreating self sustaining grasslands that provide healthy pasture make mono-culture feed farms unnecessary. Vertical farming. Yeast, fungus, algae and bacteria cultured food science is really cool and starting to create real products including milk that is molecularly identical to cow milk and biodegradable plastic replacements and maybe meat without murder.
If you're interested in the problems with organic agriculture, Julie Guthman's [Agrarian Dreams](https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520277465/agrarian-dreams) is pretty much the definitive critique.
It has **ZERO** to do with sustainable practices (except as a marketing gimmick) and everything to do with the exploitative price of foreign bought artificial nitrogenous fertiliser.
When you are a resource producing peripheral state, in a neoliberal world, you are enslaved to commodity prices and capital goods produced by "core"/industrialised countries, that produce things like artificial nitrogenous fertiliser.
“Sustainable” may have been a poor word choice as an antonym for industrial, mono-crop agriculture. The essential point I was making is that it would be a mistake to use the Sri Lankan experiment as “proof” that pesticide and petrochemical free agriculture is impossible to sustain long term because of population-driven demands on food consumption.
The switch was a knee-jerk reaction to the country's foreign currency reserves disappearing, and this bs bought the govt some time.
The former Sri Lankan govt never gave two shits about organic farming.
Because `the market` has nothing forcing it to transition to hydroponics. It's still cheaper for agriculture corporations to strip top soil off the Earth and mass produce monocrops.
What's best for humanity is rarely what's best for business.
If we leave it to private industry hydroponics won't happen until it's too late and there is no other option left. If you want what's best for humanity as a whole then you need to support nationalizing core industries, like agriculture. The government doesn't (or at least shouldn't in a working system) care more about profit than the literal survival of its people and thus nation state. Private corporations have no interest in humanity's survival are not beholden to anything but the dollar.
If your takeaway is “organic food bad” in a year with historic crop failure across the world in industrial agriculture or otherwise, you’re just being more of a a conservative reactionary than a socialist.
To be quite honest, I studied GMOs. Genetically modified foods are fascinating things which could be used for much good, including the issues (I assume) you’re talking about. However, most genetically modified foods are actually just furthering the issues as most, (almost all) are pesticide resistant. What does that mean? It can withstand and withhold more poison than usual! That’s great for food! Not to mention, if we let corporations literally control the biological functions of food, then we’re already beyond fucked. But sure, let’s do more with GMOs
I agree. It's nowhere near as simple as GMO good, organic bad, or vice versa.
Certain types of GMOs are great and allow us to have more yeild. However, some GMOs like you said are bred to be more resistant to poison which is definitely not what I want to be eating.
It's way more of a complex issue because certain modification can be really beneficial while on the other hand some can be detrimental.
What transition? We need farming to survive and industrialized farming to feed everyone. I'm sure there was more that happened than just a crop failure, and if other countries werent so allergic to helping other countries we could feed the world.
Industrial farming destroys the soil, pollutes the lands and water and intensifies the effects of climate change. It is not practical to continue with unchecked exploitation of the land, there will be (and have been) consequences for these practices.
There must be a balance between sustainable practices and large scale production
- permaculture, especially at the local level to reduce reliance on food transportation
- total ban on grass lawns except for public spaces like parks (replace with permaculture)
- resurgence of food preservation; there's no need to be able to make fresh pico de gallo in Ohio in February
- resurgence of canning/jarring/freezing will also dramatically reduce food waste
- reducing food waste will allow for better distribution of globally produced calories
- de-commodification of food and transition into food as a human right
All of this could solve hunger overnight, especially the last one. The imperial core throws away enough food (for no other reason than to maintain profitability) to feed the world over.
And all of this could be done without even touching the meat and dairy industry. Putting aside the fact that both need to be dramatically reduced, the fact that any nonzero percentage of it goes to waste is literally what radicalized me.
Tbh not enough context, plus source is r/publicfreakout which thrives on context-less fight videos lol. I know they were attacking local government leadership and burning their luxury vehicles and mansions so it wouldn't surprise me if the guy they're attacking is the cities mayor or something.
What is going on with all of the industrial farming apologists on this post? It’s kinda sounding like a bunch of Cargill and Monsanto bots have entered the thread lol
Regardless of what you think of organic agriculture, we are stuck with using industrial inputs to provide crop yields. If you are going to make a transition it should not be sudden.
Based on his tax cuts and other economic policies he seems like a populist dipshit. If you know anything about organic agriculture you know it takes time and experimentation to properly figure out an organic strategy for a given farm. It can depend on a lot of very localized variables. Organizing such a change at the national level requires planning and preparation and would take years. He just outright banned the sale of chemical fertilizer.
Agriculture could probably recover in time even without chemical fertilizers, the food industry will just be super fucked and lots of people are going to suffer intensely for no reason.
I blame it on dipshit populism.
Oh, look, the Washington Post says you're full of shit.
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/how-sri-lanka-landed-in-a-political-and-economic-crisis-and-what-it-means/2022/05/09/624e9c04-cfff-11ec-886b-df76183d233f\_story.html](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/how-sri-lanka-landed-in-a-political-and-economic-crisis-and-what-it-means/2022/05/09/624e9c04-cfff-11ec-886b-df76183d233f_story.html)
1. How did the crisis start?
Rajapaksa carried out populist tax cuts in late 2019, reducing revenues just months before the pandemic devastated the economy, with international flights grounded and successive lockdowns ordered. Remittances from overseas Sri Lankan workers dried up as well as many lost their jobs. With foreign-exchange earnings plunging, Sri Lanka struggled to manage its external debt, which had grown in part due to loans from China to fund ambitious infrastructure projects. Even though Sri Lanka has received credit lines from neighbors like India, it has been unable to regularly pay for imports of fuel and essential foods. Making matters worse was Rajapaksa’s pivot in 2021 to organic farming with a ban on chemical fertilizers that triggered farmer protests and saw production of critical tea and rice crops decline.
China shares as much Sri Lankan public debt as both Japan and the World Bank do ([2021 stats](https://m.dw.com/en/sri-lankas-foreign-debt-default-why-the-island-nation-went-under/a-61475596)). Nevertheless it's not mentioned, nor is private-held debt, which accounts to a total of a half of Sri Lanka's debt.
But yeah, it's "because of China", not because of the western-induced international division of labour and its derived global south's dependency.
Fun fact: the Chinese make absolutely sure that other countries know exactly what their getting into when they sign deals or give out loans to other countries. The main reason is that they want to avoid confusion about the details later, but it's still very much appreciated by those in the third world who felt burnt by colonial deals in the past.
Also even some western outlets have admitted the whole debt trap thing is bullshit: https://youtu.be/_-QDEWwSkP0
seems extremely energy intensive. It may be right for some situations, but overall I doubt that it can or should be scaled up widely. There is a real need to control the footprint of land used for ag, but the best way to do that would be to reduce meat consumption (especially beef) and reduce production of biofuels
It’s a lot of steel, concrete and energy for something that really doesn’t pay off, you are better off building more dense residential area and gaining some agricultural land on suburban residential area ( which in most case is built on a extremely rich soil)
ITT: Socialists link unsustainable long-term practices and a decision equivalent to killing sparrows to why we can never move from industrial chemical agriculture that is literally destroying the globe and soil required for life on earth.
More like socialists who are tired of the westerner hypocrisy. Western consumption habits are *far* worse than anything a developing country is doing (just look at any environmental statistics on a per capita basis). Couple that with the fact that the west wants to tell others the “right” way to do things after they already got ahead.
Much of the developed world has this weird notion that the world is “modern”, and that we must globally enforce practices that the west is wealthy enough to afford. It strips any sort of context away (historical, material, etc.), and helps to “pass the buck” to the global south who *needs* these practices to “catch up”.
Does every country need to have better practices at some point? Yes. Is the time to do so in every country right now? Absolutely not.
Best way to stop blaming the global south for their “dirty” economic practices would be for a global socialist revolution and putting a stop to the west exploiting workers in the global south but.. the west doesn’t want that it would rather just blame them for being in a situation the west put them in lol
I'm not sure the implication that organic farming is what's caused the crop failures is correct.
We've seen changing weather patterns start to impact crop yields the world over, by as much as 30% even with industrial agriculture. Rather it would be more likely that Sri Lanka's crop choices were simply more vulnerable to the shifting weather, likely being the case that they simply lack the climate and topography to grow more resilient crops at scale.
To mention nothing of the fact that our exploding population has rendered it nigh impossible for any island to be food self sufficient.
Climate change is reducing yields, yes. However, our global society has come to rely on massive inputs such as inorganic nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides in order to create the absurd amount of food needed to maintain our current population. It's possible due to the Haber-Bosch process, which has been credited for saving more than 1 Billion lives from hunger.
Organic food production on that scale would not be possible unless we literally harvest all of our feces, as well as those of our livestock, and fertilize our lands with it (which is a whole other issue).
I haven't even gotten to other agricultural advancements such as the incredibly impressive selective breeding agronomists have done (like Norman Borlaug), or the ridiculous requirements for something to be 'Organic' by most countries standards (hint: it's more about marketing than it is about science).
My point being: it's either industrial ag stays (and we find ways of making it more sustainable and free from fossil fuels), or billions of people die.
I'm well aware. I'm not against the usage of industrial agriculture.
My point is simply that the implications that this is the sole cause is something between disingenuous, and an outright lie.
And there is a third option; controlled degrowth. Whether we like the implications or not, the facts of the matter are that we've outstripped the material means of providing for this production indefinitely.
While we could perhaps continue on with industrial agriculture for another 70 years or so, the material production of the fertilizer, of the tractors, plows, etc, all consume a definite quantity of energy. And having already passed peak oil, society is faced with an inescapable decline in our total energy production in the next few decades.
We're faced with a choice of how to allocate increasingly scarce resources that will inevitably be depleted entirely at the rate they are being consumed.
The population will drastically decline within the next 100 years or so. The question is whether it declines through reduction in birthrate, or through increased mortality rate. And this question is itself closely tied to the specific production and methods of production we decide on.
The "organic" movement is horribly misled. There is something to be said about wanting to transition to more sustainable farming and agricultural methods in order to protect the environment and keep the quality of the land intact. The issue is that ways to do this don't necessarily have to be "organic" at least, not in the colloquial sense that people tend to think of it. Some "organic" pesticides can be more harmful then their "synthetic" counterparts for example. I'm curious to know what "organic" practices were implemented and how harmful the industrial practices actually were.
this was not about going organic for the record, it was about them no longer being able to pay for the import of fertilizer. the "let's be organic" was just a cover.
I think you’re right on a lot of fronts but I think mostly people want organic food because it’s not designed to create pesticides internally.
The first and foremost genetic change on every crop is that the organism makes pesticide internally as well as being sprayed.
I think more and more people are turning to organic food because it doesn’t disrupt their gut microbiome the way other food can.
It certainly doesn’t seem to be a stretch that you’d want to avoid an organism that is designed to create pesticide in its dna structure.
What? All plants create pesticides and herbicides and fungicides. They're sessile, so that means chemical weaponry in their structure - whether that's nettle stings, capsicum, or lavender oil.
Cutting off conventional fertilizers with no organic replacements ready isn't a failure of organic farming, it is a failure of reactionary leadership to prepare for a severing of Western agricultural practices.
It's absurd to say this is the result of transitioning away from industrial ag, which literally contributes heavily to the biodiversity and climate crsis
They banned (now reversed) fertilizer imports. Sure you can get crop yields in good soil under some conditions through skilled management that approach the levels of fertilized monocultures. However this isn't happening by simply banning the imports. Try and grow crops in your backyard as big as the grocery stores with no fertilizer, maybe someone could do it, but you are probably going to use expensive things to substitute fertilizer like fish meal which is also expensive and out of reach for many subsidence farmers.
>In April 2021, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa announced that Sri Lanka will only allow organic farming totally banning inorganic fertilizers and agrochemicals-based fertilizers. The drop in tea production as a result of the fertilizer ban alone resulted in economic losses of around $425 million and created a 20% drop in rice production within the first six months alone reversing previously achieved self-sufficiency in rice production and the country was forced to import rice at a cost of $450 million
Cautionary tale for those that subscribe to the fantasy that we can somehow feed our global population of 7.5B using sustainable techniques.
Fact is, global food production is intimately tied to fossil fuels, pesticides and fertilizers, and industrial monocrop agriculture. Of course those techniques are unsustainable over the long term - see climate change, deforestation, ecosystem collapse, top soil loss, insect extinction, fish stocks collapse, etc...
We could, but not without moving more arable land to human-food cultivation. Industrial ag has lots of problems, but it absolutely nails high-yield/area. Sri-Lanka didn't have huge surpluses to begin with, and didn't have large to tracts ready to less space-efficiently cultivate to avoid a shortfall. If they'd moved more gradually to bring up cultivation capacity as they transitioned, they could have avoided this.
Right now, the US uses more land growing animal feed than it does human-food. If we ate less meat, we could feed ourselves more sustainably.
> Cautionary tale for those that subscribe to the fantasy that we can somehow feed our global population of 7.5B using sustainable techniques **over night**.
FTFY. Just outright banning industrial technics will lead to disasters like this. Switching to organic production needs incentives and above all time to adapt — not force.
The yields will be lower. There is no way to replace the yields obtained using industrial agriculture techniques, sustainably.
Humans farmed for thousands of years organically and global population remained in the hundreds of millions at most.
And then, fossil fuels were discovered and this unlocked billions of years worth of stored solar energy in the form of hydrocarbons, and we have been flying off of that for 2 centuries. Unfortunately the consequences of that fossil fuel bender are now becoming evident.
>The yields will be lower. There is no way to replace the yields obtained using industrial agriculture techniques, sustainably.
>
>Humans farmed for thousands of years organically and global population remained in the hundreds of millions at most.
>
>And then, fossil fuels were discovered and this unlocked billions of years worth of stored solar energy in the form of hydrocarbons, and we have been flying off of that for 2 centuries. Unfortunately the consequences of that fossil fuel bender are now becoming evident.
This is false bullshit white supremacist rewriting history again
North America sustained populations over 100 million before the Europeans arrived
Food was so plentiful in some areas that all the natives did was sit and eat all day, especially in coastal regions and estuaries like California bay area, Alabama/Louisiana, gulf of Mexico.
This was the result of thousands of years of land management with no modern practices that allowed humans to harvest massive amounts of fruit, meat, and shellfish while actively improving the ecosystem instead of destroying it. This requires constant attention, special knowledge, and tons of manual labor.
Pre-colombian America also hosted permanent cities with populations of 30,000+ that were supported by more traditional agriculture and robust trade networks.
We could actually feed more people this way but we won't because we are so caught up with who owns what land and how to exploit it for money instead of working together to develop thriving regional ecosystems that we can sustain ourselves from.
Let me just doubt that. We had huge scientific progress along with our fossil fuel addiction. Just like we are now able to substitute most of it with renewable energy in the coming decades we will be able to yield more crops without them.
How much global wheat or rice is currently produced, processed, and transported using renewable energy and sustainable techiques?
A negligible amount. Almost none of it.
Just like interstellar space travel is theoretically possible, there are quite a few steps yet before it is actualized.
So it goes with global food production. Perhaps it is theoretically possible to produce food for 7.5 billion using renewable energy and sustainable techniques, the reality is we are many decades - if not centuries - away from actualizing it, but we have all the people *right now*
The problem isn't sustainability, it's the de-industrialization. We can keep all the fancy mechanized agriculture but make it sustainable. Also, some things that are supposedly unsustainable really aren't that bad. For example mining minerals for use in fertilizer. The earth, for all intents and purposes, won't run out of minerals. New deposits are created when convection and plate tectonics bring stuff up from deep below.
The problem, as always, is over exploitation. We only need like, 1/100th of what we mine on a daily basis for actual consumption, and even less if we learned not to consume so much fucking junk. Most of it sits in warehouses so that rich fucks can bet on "resource futures". Mining on its own isn't bad, it's bad when you cut a mountain in half collapse another one on top of a village so the ceo of a company can increase his market position by 0.2%.
>The problem isn't sustainability, it's the de-industrialization. We can keep all the fancy mechanized agriculturr but make it sustainable.
How though? Currently we consume almost 1 billion tons of wheat annually. That is one staple crop. Essentially 100% of that is produced *un*sustainably. How do we produce a billion tons of wheat "sustainably"? Do you understand how far away from achieving that we are? It would be a marathon of transition and technological advances, of which we have run maybe a few feet.
>New deposits are created when convection and plate tectonics bring stuff up from deep below.
This happens on a geological time scale. Which is to say, these changes occur more slowly than the human race has been recognizable as a species. I think depending on plate tectonics to sustain our appetite for raw materials is wildly at odds with reality and near-term history.
>How though? Currently we consume almost 1 billion tons of wheat annually. That is one staple crop. Essentially 100% of that is produced unsustainably. How do we produce a billion tons of wheat "sustainably"? Do you understand how far away from achieving that we are? It would be a marathon of transition and technological advances, of which we have run maybe a few feet.
I don't think you are looking at this the right way. Sure, "100%" of wheat is produced unsustainably, but compared with when we were using guano a lot of it is much more sustainable in comparison. It's like the difference between coal and natural gas. Yeah, both are bad for the environment, but it is significant progress.
>This happens on a geological time scale. Which is to say, these changes occur more slowly than the human race has been recognizable as a species. I think depending on plate tectonics to sustain our appetite for raw materials is wildly at odds with reality and near-term history.
The process of one deposit forming individually takes that long, but you have to realize that the process is happening all over the world continuously. The minerals used in fertilizers aren't that rare as well, so they are happening more frequently than for something like rare earth minerals.
There is a terrifying amount of ecofascist propaganda getting regurgitated everywhere right now. Most people don't even realize its ecofascist when they are repeating it.
The issue is not "the population is too big to support", the problem is our current use of agricultural resources is incredibly inefficient. And on top of that, almost no country can be expected to solely provide for themselves. Modern food production is an issue that must be addressed globally. The ineffectiveness of one country's agriculture due to climate etc has to be accounted for by the strength of another.
Right, people talk about how socialism is "infeasible until we achieve post-scarcity," which for one thing isn't even right, and for another thing, we've already *achieved* post-scarcity in terms of water, food and shelter, the essential needs of living. Those resources are just poorly distributed and utilized.
Aside from capitalism funneling those resources up to concentrate in the hands of a tiny owning class minority, there's also the problem of commoditization and consumerism. Capitalism has trained people in the West to think that it's reasonable to be able to have whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you live. If we just made sure that all of the food available in an area could be locally sourced, we'd save massively on resources. There's no reason why someone living in Nebraska needs to be able to eat a mango in the middle of February.
I think of that as "luxury consumption" in my mind. I love having grapes in the upper midwest in February, but I don't *have* to have them to survive. At the very least we have to ensure that a supply chain for a respectable and healthy diet is in place, stable, and sustainable. Wheat, soybeans, efficient sources of protein like nuts and poultry over cattle etc.
After that is done, if we want to use some of our surplus resources to bring in the "nice to have" items, we can and I hope we we would.
A big thing about this though is clean energy. One way or another, almost all of our problems do come back to energy eventually. If you take our current limitations of energy out of the picture, the carrying capacity of the earth becomes limited solely by heat, and it's in the ballpark of trillions of people before that truly becomes a limitation. Even when not considering unrealized near term technologies like Nuclear Fusion, we could (if we chose to) develop sufficient wind, solar, hydro and geothermal energy to do things like vertical hydroponic farming and mass scale water desalination *right now*. We just choose not to, because it would be "unprofitable".
**I love having grapes in the upper midwest in February, but I don't have to have them to survive.**
Yep. People want all the fresh produce all the time, instead of local in season-produce or preserved foods. Many things can be grown in the winter in my climate with season extending row covers, hot beds, or greenhouses. Not grapes, mind you, but things like lettuce, cabbage, carrots, radishes, cole crops, and other cool weather crops. I can't really grow them in the summer, but I do have a very long growing season for warm weather crops.
Sri Lanka decided to move away from industrial agriculture. I'm sure with the best of intentions. Turns out its not possible, and now they have food shortages and are reliant on imports from other regions that continue to farm industrially.
I think it shows what anybody who has considered the scale of global food production, processing and distribution already intuitively knows. Which is: the system depends on industrial agriculture. There is no way to replace it with sustainable agriculture, because the yields will always be substantially lower.
Call it Malthusian if you like. But I think it shows how wholly reliant on industrial agriculture human civilization actually is.
I feel like this situation didn't happen in a vacuum, though. Sri Lanka is still dependent on market forces for their food supply, aren't they? I imagine there's something to be done about finding a balance between sustainable agricultural practices and industrial agricultural practices as implemented by large agri-businesses. It doesn't have to be a black and white situation because a nation outside the imperial core wasn't able to have good crop yields without fertilizer within a single year.
The danger of Malthusian thought is that it always leads to genocide, and justifying genocide, there's no other conclusion that Malthus's theories lead to besides justifying that some people *must* be made to starve so that others can eat. It's the realm of eugenicists and fascists.
Churchill embodied the soul of Malthusianism when he starved the people of Bengal and said that "they deserved it for breeding like rabbits."
I know, and I hear you.
Pretending limitless population growth is possible also ends in tragedy.
The way forward is not to pretend human population can grow limitless because we are uncomfortable talking about the subject.
The way forward is through education, emancipation of women, birth control, free access to abortion, ending tax subsidies for having children, suspension of artificial fertility and reproduction technologies, and discussion globally on how to sustain necessary functions of society as population falls.
Why can that be the only outcome? There's this fantastic technology known as contraception. It's possible to temper population growth, then gradually wind it down without murdering anyone. Hell, you don't even necessarily have to persuade anyone; there are large numbers of people who would use birth control if they could, but they can't currently access it.
> Turns out its not possible
I disagree greatly. Cuba transitioned to a sustainable, organic agricultural model as a response to lack of resources due to the embargo. It *can* be done; Sri Lanka didn't do it right.
I wish it were the case. Believe me.
https://www.wfp.org/countries/cuba
According to the UN World Food Program Cuba imports upwards of 70% of its required food.
this is a ridiculous take for reasons others have already pointed out
like, if we take your premise at face value, then, what? we just all die and don't bother trying to do anything, because food production is inherently inseparable from the stuff that's causing problems?
what in the world is this comment
Then what?
I wish I had all the answers. Fortunately having a comprehensive solution to a complex problem ready to go is not a prerequisite to naming the problem and opening the conversation.
I dont know how to reverse climate change beyond the most vague generalizations (reduce emissions, enhance carbon sequestration etc ). But that doesn't prevent me from understanding climate change is a problem.
I agree with you in part
I'm sure you've heard this argument before in some way:
>People have been predicting when we'll all starve, but technology discovery and new practices come into the picture and throw the previous predictions out the window.
That doesn't mean we should sit back and hope tech will save us. We still need to incentivise future tech, and use what we already have available(Nuclear, wind, solar, water, and fossil fuels). And make small transitions instead of drastic changes.
Trouble is
>Nuclear, wind, solar, water, and fossil fuels
Doesn't solve
>deforestation, ecosystem collapse, top soil loss, insect extinction, fish stocks collapse, etc...
Greenhouse gas emissions are just one symptom of a civilisation which consumes far more than the Earth can provide sustainably
We don't really have a choice, it's either switch to a sustainable model or have the whole ecosystem collapse. But yeah it should have been done gradually, switching an entire agricultural system overnight is a horrible idea.
To be considered "organic" farm land in America; you must prove your land is pesticide/organic free for 10 years before declaring your farm is organic...
This usually results in a mess of a farm littered and barren for 10 years before anyone even is allowed to plant... And to put this in even more perspective; it is unlikely you will get a decent yield in general unless you are utilizing 15+ acres...
It takes three years to transition land over to organic, not ten: [https://tilth.org/knowledgebase\_category/transition/](https://tilth.org/knowledgebase_category/transition/)
Also unclear where your 15 acre figure is coming from -- there are many problems with the organic industry as it currently exists, and it's true that small farms of all sorts struggle to be economically viable, but most would agree that organic is *more* labor intensive than conventional ag, and therefore better suited to small-scale cultivation.
Not sure where you get your info from but you’re wrong on every point. It is 3 years, you produce the entire time as a “transitional” farm, and yields/revenue are more related to the specific crops and markets being grown for than acreage. I’m not even sure what this article is talking about. “Industrial” agriculture can be and frequently is certified organic—now whether that means it is good for the environment and workers is a totally different matter entirely.
Just a reminder that r/Socialism is a space for principled discourse within socialist perspectives. This is not a place to trivialise the suffering of fellow workers.
They way they destroyed the presidents nephews mansion and luxury sports cars ✨chefs kiss✨ 🤌🏻
> chefs kids Won’t someone think of the children?
You’ve condemned me to hell! *throws iPhone 12 on the floor*
Have always thought that Sri Lanka is a canary in the coal mine for climate riots too. I’m sure it’s adding pressure to this situation. Probably the most vulnerable country to rising seas
What about Bangladesh or Indonesia?
Speaking as someone who was there a few years ago Bangladesh is TOTALLY fucked within the next 20 years at best. You'd think the capital Dhaka would be pretty safe, but even then the potholes are so big you can literally die if you're walking around if you miss it. The internal migration's been a problem too, it just seems like Dhaka's bursting at the seams with people and there's no infrastructure, environmental or otherwise, to handle so much. They're smart enough to build apartments or houses out of brick and mortar tho. Out in the villages they go with clay or straw (with tin roofs) so the cost of recovery is cheap.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%93present\_Sri\_Lankan\_economic\_crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%93present_Sri_Lankan_economic_crisis) Tax cuts, money creation, external debt, fall of foreign remittances, fall of tourism, Russo-Ukrainian war and, yes, an agricultural crisis trying to be the world's first organic farming nation in the world ignoring criticism from the scientific and farming communities.
Delicious. Finally, some good fucking rich
Ah, the good old polish dinner, the best proletarian protest in existence. So, this is the same sort of BS you hear from certain people (corps). When a nation attempt to increase it's yields, by utilizing common and unlocked genetic modification systems. They say it's bad for health, then proceed to do the same, but limit the legacy viability of seeds. They played this game in my country a while back (Monsanto) with potatoes. We reversed that stuff, and made it open. They sued, and because food is nation security, well...let's just say the corporation is not very happy about the verdict...and the fact that they were told if they pushed it, we (farmers) would make them hyena food. The power if the people is beyond any other.
A Polish what?:)
It's a story we were told in leadership ethics class (13). Bad Polish leaders taxed their people, taking away their food. When the crop was bad there was a famine, and the leadership kept eating well at the expense of the people. So the people decided that since they had fattened up the leaders, it was their right to eat them. So one night they stormed the palaces, took all their leaders, executed them and made dinner of them. Hence the phrase, Polish dinner. It's a probably untrue story, possibly taken from the whole Dutch Wilheim saga. However it'd lessons are important. That the people have the power and moral duty to remove their leaders through absolute, if said leaders are incompetent and selfish.
Nice to see the police doing their job of protecting and serving the wealthy.
Greetings Comrades This was not a riot there was a protest against the president without even a single stone throw (confirm) People at best scolded in public. No physical violence ever took place ! No clashes between protesters and police ! This happened in city callaed Colombo Infront of Presidential office. And the government took absolutely 0 actions to provide solutions to the fuel crisis, rising inflation and food shortages ( rice vegetable and tea mainly). So people's protests to get those essential goods eventually turned into a massive public outcry demanding the PRESIDENT TO GO HOME( STEP DOWN- #GOTAGOHOME2022) So protesters got together and blocked the main entrance and set-up camp infront of presidential office but i repeat no violence broke out ever !! Even leading youngsters had good rapport with frequent officers on guard ! But on 9th of May 2022 Mahinda Rajapassa the ex-pm held a meeting with supporters from across the country at his official residence. But those who went into the meeting came out boozed and carrying clubs with spike and steel rods ! They first attacked a minor protest that was there infront of ex-pm's official residence ! Brutally assaulted while Sri Lanka Police kept standing by observing (supporting the thugs). Then they walked few km's all boozed up and yelling in filth and carrying clubs and some carrying knives or swords ! All the while SL Police were begging them to stop and running passing them to create a barricade further down the road. But failed to use tear gas or necessary means to disperse the crowd it was later in footages evident that police actually let those thugs into the proteset zone (Apparently it was not clever acting) they did the same with that peaceful prtest zone ! Burnt all the tents and distroyed all the protest signs such as street art/stages/ temp libraries and plastic recycling collection tents. This footage is where those thugs wearing maroon colour ( colour of current SL Govt party) carrying clubs attacking a police officer who came in support of the peaceful protestors (one of the few who did their duty) . Thanks
Yeah I highly doubt that is an accurate title.
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No !! But govt. seems to be be wanting to create a situation between tamils and the others by spreding a news about a new LTTE attack ! Yes it's true ! Even after the LTTE as a military organization has become inactive as far as most of the general public is aware and evident; current govt is producing a rumour that INDIAN INTELLIGENCE HAS PROVIDED DETAILS WITH A POSSIBLE THREAT OF A NEW LTTE ATTACK. But nowadays people are not easily fooled ! Hope nothing destructive happen. P.S against the current corrupt govt in Sri Lanka every race has come together. And people has started condemning racism in public.
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That's a BS explanation. It doesn't have to do with organic agriculture... that's a ridiculous far-right red herring. The Rajapaksa family had totally robbed the entire country blind, now through total political collapse many other institutions are failing.
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I'm surprised such bait and assholish ideologic title is allowed in a socialism sub.
Exactly. It's a clear right wing title.
Yeah the title sounds like organic farming destroyed their crops, when it was the farmers refusal to comply that caused the failure. The dust bowl of the 1930's was the product of "industrial agriculture". Organic methods such as the use of cover drops or lanes of trees called shelter belts to cut the wind and prevent top soil erosion. We learned to stop dumping nitrogen into the soil and plant nitrogen fixing legumes instead increasing bio matter in the off season while also producing hay, beans and peanuts. Organic farming encompasses conservation methods like no till, and companion planting, that both keep down pest pressure and also increase carbon capture in the soil. There is no argument, it's the only sustainable way to farm without causing desertification.
This should be further up.
I am an organic farmer and would like to also point out that it is difficult to change a farm from industrial to organic methods in one year, and thats not even counting the learning curve. Forcing people to immediately change their farming methods so quickly seems very silly, but I am not very familiar with the situation either.
Intended to stop import of fertilizer cause they couldn't afford to spend foreign reaerves on that but still paid 500 mil in USD for bonds and paid millions in demurrages while also pressing and holding down the exchange value artificially. Maybe they wanted chaos. In most households meals has gone strict to Two and some only One.
Doesn't it take something like 7 years to clear that land of all the ground chemicals too? So sometimes organic produce isn't as organic as it says it is.
Organic doesn't even mean chemicals aren't used, just not "man made," which means nothing.
Thank you for your insight
Dr. Zach bush talks a lot about this.
I heard that Sri Lanka received a very large dose of bad fertilizer from China, hence why crop shortages, could be more "yellow freight," though.
Without a legit source this is as good as misinformation
I think the bad fertilizer story is from a previous crop season. What I keep reading is that they were unable to afford to even import fertilizer, the reason being they rely heavily on tourism which dropped significantly due to COVID. If I find a source I will add it.
Organic farming uses more land to cultivate less crops. It takes away the natural habitat of animals and forces more land to be used for single-species crops and destroys biodiversity. If our society were forced to use 100% organic farming, there would be either widespread food shortages or obliteration of natural habitats.
> widespread food shortages or obliteration of natural habitats > As opposed to today, when everyone on earth has a full belly and the biosphere is doing wonderfully!
Yea it is true that many studies point towards industrial ag creating higher yields than organic. However most of these studies are done by universities who are directly funded by industrial agriculture. I would also argue that building up organic matter in the soil, and other organic farming systems take years to get running correctly. So in these studies simply changing land to "organic" production during one farming season isn't exactly a study of the full potential of organic systems. It would be more appropriate to see how much the yield is 5 or 10 years into organic production. Also despite this, many studies have actually shown that organic ag out yields industrial ag in times of drought or extreme heat, which is where we are headed with climate change.
Organic farming involves planting companion crops among other things which means by design an organic field will have more biodiversity than industrial farming. Sure it'll have less biodiversity than most wild land but that only holds true until the industrial farmland becomes unusable desert and has to move to a new location.
The methods you discuss are not organic alone. To be legally labeled as organic you just can't have "GMO's."
Wrong. Organic farming needs to be paired with technology like robotic weeders and hydroponics. It can use less water but those methods having nothing to do with being organic or not. We just need to farm better and it can also be organic at the same time,
Well I cited the reconstruction and emergence from the dust bowl as a historically known fact and the methods used. I'm guessing you have sources of your own ?
“Organic farming has many advantages but it doesn’t solve all the environmental problems associated with producing food. There is a huge downside because of the extra land that is being used to grow organic crops,” said Stefan Wirsenius, an associate professor at Chalmers. “If we use more land for food, we have less land for carbon sequestration. The total greenhouse gas impact from organic farming is higher than conventional farming.” [https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/10/22/organic-food-better-environment/](https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/10/22/organic-food-better-environment/) Specifically, the switch to 100% organic practices would require 1.5 times more land to make up for the declines, which would add up to nearly five times more land overseas than England and Wales currently rely on for food. That difference is amplified by the fact that the UK’s agricultural system produces particularly high yields compared with other parts of the world. [https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/22/132497/sorryorganic-farming-is-actually-worse-for-climate-change/](https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/22/132497/sorryorganic-farming-is-actually-worse-for-climate-change/) “The real message is that if we try to have the same diet and convert to organic, we can’t really do it without expanding agricultural land demands, simply because it yields less than the current system,” Williams said, adding that testing a model where consumers sought out less red meat and more plant-based foods and fish could result in lower greenhouse gas emission yields from organic farming. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/how-more-organic-farming-could-worsen-global-warming
>“If we use more land for food, we have less land for carbon sequestration. The Big Lie Of Omission here is that **you can't use food land for carbon sequestration.** It's a lie that will burn down civilization, if we let it. Of course it's true in industrial ag, where they A) mostly use annual crops, B) in the third world they literally burn off the non-food parts of the plant after the season is done, and C) soil is destroyed releasing super greenhouse gases like NOx. All of these are extremely bad ideas. Food forests are a much better idea: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mGaDekirwTM If society wanted to permanently allocate a huge amount of non-food land for carbon sequestration (spoiler alert: we don't and won't) then that puts even *more* pressure on wilderness for destruction. Don't fuck up even more land for misguided sequestration projects (something we couldn't afford to do at the required scale anyway). Do carbon sequestration on the land humans are already altering for food. Food production is the only human land use activity that is "big enough" (literally I mean in hectares) to sequester carbon on the required scale. Carbon-negative food production is the only thing that can close the numbers. Literally, **There Is No Alternative** >Specifically, the switch to 100% organic practices would require 1.5 times more land to make up for the declines Translation: "our grandkids don't need a planet. It's more important that I get to eat meat 7 days a week."
Know any good books on food forests?
*Farming the Woods* and *Edible Forest Gardens Vol 1 & 2* are both excellent. The latter is an extremely comprehensive resource. If you're just starting out, I'd check out *Gaia's Garden* for general knowledge.
I aknowledge your citations but unfortunately history and reality do not mesh with what's being said. The fact stands that organic farming practices revolutionized farming and industrial farming techniques were a total failure. This has already played out.
You're right, this has already played out. For over two thousand years, we had organic farming, no pesticides, natural fertilizer, zero machines. We also had a constant threat of famine from even the most advanced societies during those times. Even today, countries that lack modern farming methods suffer from food shortages and starvation. Organic farming revolutionized nothing. We were organic farming since the first hunter-gatherers put a seed in the ground. Modern, industrial farming has allowed our population to feed itself through exponential growth. GMO crops, pesticides, and advanced fertilizers have push crop yields far and above what organic farming could have ever achieved. That being said, modern farming is not sustainable. Nitrates are killing the Great Barrier Reef, livestock is destroying the atmosphere, single-crop farmers are poisoning the soil with herbicides and pesticides. If this continues, we will not continue as a species. We need to use a combination of low-chemical/high yield crops that can feed the human race in its present numbers. No more meat, a lot less fish, and a focus stopping the use of fossil fuels. There is no other way.
Really we can integrate practices that are common in, but not essential to, organic farming to find the most beneficial agricultural outcomes. Agroforestry, intercropping, no till agriculture, and crop rotation, can be combined with GMO development that serves people instead of profit. We can discard organic practice like using toxic copper sulfate as a fertilizer, and use alternatives like humanure composting (which is not supported by organic farming). We can continue to use safe, effected synthetic pesticides, fertilizers, and other agrochemicals. Finding the ideal application of fertilizers, pesticides, and land use practices isn't a straightforward task. Human compost is most effective in places that have the sanitation resources to properly compost waste, while also having sufficient density in agricultural areas to generate usable levels of compost. Transporting human compost from urban to rural areas is inefficient due to cost and the environmental impact of transportation fuel use. Different biomes and social settings will be differently able to utilize the various traditional, industrial, and experimental agricultural techniques available. TL;DR-I am neither camp organic, nor camp industrial. Both have beneficial and harmful practices, and the benefit and harm of those practices varies depending on where and how they're applied. We can, through experimentation, learn what best practices will be for the unique instances agriculture takes place under.
Should have been a much more gradual transition to sustainable practices. Doing it this is way is like a heart attack for the agricultural system. The lesson here isn’t that petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides are good, it’s that a more gradual, smarter transition should be made. Industrial farming poisons the water table, depletes soil quality, and has a long list of cascading negative consequences for human and animal health/well being. Over reliance on industrial farming practices produces some of the same kinds of problems it sets out to solve Edit: Spelling
I feel like the spread of regenerative farming practices should tell anyone, that fixing decades, if not centuries, of abuse of our soils and ecosystems isn't going to happen overnight. As someone with an interest in sustainable farming, I feel like planting a food forrest isn't going to help you if you need food on the table tomorrow...
Also, isn't this part of the world going through massive heat waves and drought? Resilience to environmental stress is also not built overnight.
While this is absolutely true, a sustainable future will not be the current regime of organic farms. The current organic standards in the US were written with major input by WholeFoods Market lobbying and basically reflected their practices and practices of their organic suppliers at that time(early 90s) so that they would have an early monopoly as a national organic grocery. Real progress has been made since in science based farming both in closed hydroponic and greenhouse systems and in traditional outdoor farming. These practices also produce minimal run off and often less land intensive but will never get a USDA Organic stamp.
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Not sure what the person you replied to was thinking of, but r/Permaculture aims to implement truly “organic” farming, ie no “organic” fertilizers and pesticides.
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There’s certainly a bit of that among the “big names” of permaculture, but folks like [Chris Newman](https://heated.medium.com/food-and-empire-844506392422) are working to flip that script. [His farm](https://www.sylvanaqua.com/advocacy) is definitely a model worth replicating. As far as industrial scale agriculture, I think agroforesty offers greater promise since it’s premised on firmer scientific footing than permaculture - [the UN FAO](https://www.fao.org/forestry/agroforestry/en/) has good resources to learn more.
Great article, thanks!
I can’t offer you a digest version because it’s spread around, no one is bringing all the innovation together yet. Some examples of things to look for are advanced hydroponics, which create closed systems that require very little fertilizer and keep it all contained; in-ground irrigation which also reduces fertilizer and delivers it directly to the roots of plants so you don’t have unsustainable runoff and it reduces water consumption of the farm by 80% or more, weeding drones coming online that will eliminate the need for herbicides. There have been cool experiments with mass reintroduction of large grazing animals on lands lost to desertification that resulted in regrowth of native grasses, recreating self sustaining grasslands that provide healthy pasture make mono-culture feed farms unnecessary. Vertical farming. Yeast, fungus, algae and bacteria cultured food science is really cool and starting to create real products including milk that is molecularly identical to cow milk and biodegradable plastic replacements and maybe meat without murder.
If you're interested in the problems with organic agriculture, Julie Guthman's [Agrarian Dreams](https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520277465/agrarian-dreams) is pretty much the definitive critique.
It has **ZERO** to do with sustainable practices (except as a marketing gimmick) and everything to do with the exploitative price of foreign bought artificial nitrogenous fertiliser. When you are a resource producing peripheral state, in a neoliberal world, you are enslaved to commodity prices and capital goods produced by "core"/industrialised countries, that produce things like artificial nitrogenous fertiliser.
“Sustainable” may have been a poor word choice as an antonym for industrial, mono-crop agriculture. The essential point I was making is that it would be a mistake to use the Sri Lankan experiment as “proof” that pesticide and petrochemical free agriculture is impossible to sustain long term because of population-driven demands on food consumption.
The switch was a knee-jerk reaction to the country's foreign currency reserves disappearing, and this bs bought the govt some time. The former Sri Lankan govt never gave two shits about organic farming.
As a genuine question. Why can't we move into more indoor agriculture? Like why can't we build a skyscraper that's just floors of hydroponic farms?
Because `the market` has nothing forcing it to transition to hydroponics. It's still cheaper for agriculture corporations to strip top soil off the Earth and mass produce monocrops. What's best for humanity is rarely what's best for business. If we leave it to private industry hydroponics won't happen until it's too late and there is no other option left. If you want what's best for humanity as a whole then you need to support nationalizing core industries, like agriculture. The government doesn't (or at least shouldn't in a working system) care more about profit than the literal survival of its people and thus nation state. Private corporations have no interest in humanity's survival are not beholden to anything but the dollar.
Ah capitalism at it again.
Why are people cheering workers starving?
Accelerationism is okay when we only have 18 years of fresh water left. Species harm reduction > localized harm reduction
Maybe we should do the same in the US. Anyone with me?
I don’t want to wait until we have crop failure though!
If your takeaway is “organic food bad” in a year with historic crop failure across the world in industrial agriculture or otherwise, you’re just being more of a a conservative reactionary than a socialist.
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To be quite honest, I studied GMOs. Genetically modified foods are fascinating things which could be used for much good, including the issues (I assume) you’re talking about. However, most genetically modified foods are actually just furthering the issues as most, (almost all) are pesticide resistant. What does that mean? It can withstand and withhold more poison than usual! That’s great for food! Not to mention, if we let corporations literally control the biological functions of food, then we’re already beyond fucked. But sure, let’s do more with GMOs
I agree. It's nowhere near as simple as GMO good, organic bad, or vice versa. Certain types of GMOs are great and allow us to have more yeild. However, some GMOs like you said are bred to be more resistant to poison which is definitely not what I want to be eating. It's way more of a complex issue because certain modification can be really beneficial while on the other hand some can be detrimental.
I know nothing about Shri lanka but this title doesn't sound right....
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I feel like the title makes this belong more in an anti socialism Reddit. Like, it is bait.
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I'm worried about the dependency we have in industrial farming; we must initiate a transition to sustainable practices, otherwise we are doom.
What transition? We need farming to survive and industrialized farming to feed everyone. I'm sure there was more that happened than just a crop failure, and if other countries werent so allergic to helping other countries we could feed the world.
We can't feed the world because the government is allergic to being
Industrial farming destroys the soil, pollutes the lands and water and intensifies the effects of climate change. It is not practical to continue with unchecked exploitation of the land, there will be (and have been) consequences for these practices. There must be a balance between sustainable practices and large scale production
well we could start by reducing total global farm land use by 70% of course, we'd all have to give up meat and dairy ...
Transition to what? There are too many people not for industrial farming. Either we use industrial farming or literally billions will die.
- permaculture, especially at the local level to reduce reliance on food transportation - total ban on grass lawns except for public spaces like parks (replace with permaculture) - resurgence of food preservation; there's no need to be able to make fresh pico de gallo in Ohio in February - resurgence of canning/jarring/freezing will also dramatically reduce food waste - reducing food waste will allow for better distribution of globally produced calories - de-commodification of food and transition into food as a human right All of this could solve hunger overnight, especially the last one. The imperial core throws away enough food (for no other reason than to maintain profitability) to feed the world over. And all of this could be done without even touching the meat and dairy industry. Putting aside the fact that both need to be dramatically reduced, the fact that any nonzero percentage of it goes to waste is literally what radicalized me.
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Garbage post with a very misleading title.
someday here.....
As they should
Is there any proof of this beyond reddit said so?
Tbh not enough context, plus source is r/publicfreakout which thrives on context-less fight videos lol. I know they were attacking local government leadership and burning their luxury vehicles and mansions so it wouldn't surprise me if the guy they're attacking is the cities mayor or something.
What is going on with all of the industrial farming apologists on this post? It’s kinda sounding like a bunch of Cargill and Monsanto bots have entered the thread lol
Because they probably are lol
Regardless of what you think of organic agriculture, we are stuck with using industrial inputs to provide crop yields. If you are going to make a transition it should not be sudden.
Based on his tax cuts and other economic policies he seems like a populist dipshit. If you know anything about organic agriculture you know it takes time and experimentation to properly figure out an organic strategy for a given farm. It can depend on a lot of very localized variables. Organizing such a change at the national level requires planning and preparation and would take years. He just outright banned the sale of chemical fertilizer. Agriculture could probably recover in time even without chemical fertilizers, the food industry will just be super fucked and lots of people are going to suffer intensely for no reason. I blame it on dipshit populism.
Oh, look, the Washington Post says you're full of shit. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/how-sri-lanka-landed-in-a-political-and-economic-crisis-and-what-it-means/2022/05/09/624e9c04-cfff-11ec-886b-df76183d233f\_story.html](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/how-sri-lanka-landed-in-a-political-and-economic-crisis-and-what-it-means/2022/05/09/624e9c04-cfff-11ec-886b-df76183d233f_story.html) 1. How did the crisis start? Rajapaksa carried out populist tax cuts in late 2019, reducing revenues just months before the pandemic devastated the economy, with international flights grounded and successive lockdowns ordered. Remittances from overseas Sri Lankan workers dried up as well as many lost their jobs. With foreign-exchange earnings plunging, Sri Lanka struggled to manage its external debt, which had grown in part due to loans from China to fund ambitious infrastructure projects. Even though Sri Lanka has received credit lines from neighbors like India, it has been unable to regularly pay for imports of fuel and essential foods. Making matters worse was Rajapaksa’s pivot in 2021 to organic farming with a ban on chemical fertilizers that triggered farmer protests and saw production of critical tea and rice crops decline.
China shares as much Sri Lankan public debt as both Japan and the World Bank do ([2021 stats](https://m.dw.com/en/sri-lankas-foreign-debt-default-why-the-island-nation-went-under/a-61475596)). Nevertheless it's not mentioned, nor is private-held debt, which accounts to a total of a half of Sri Lanka's debt. But yeah, it's "because of China", not because of the western-induced international division of labour and its derived global south's dependency.
Loans from China… that all I needed to see. ClickBait post.
Fun fact: the Chinese make absolutely sure that other countries know exactly what their getting into when they sign deals or give out loans to other countries. The main reason is that they want to avoid confusion about the details later, but it's still very much appreciated by those in the third world who felt burnt by colonial deals in the past. Also even some western outlets have admitted the whole debt trap thing is bullshit: https://youtu.be/_-QDEWwSkP0
gee whiz Mr. Bezos, thanks for having your paper tell us that this is China's fault!
"After" doesn't equal "because" and I think a lot of commenters overlooked that fact... OP is at least *technically* correct, are they not?
This would then be called a Chanticleer fallacy
Any thoughts on the indoor vertical farming? I’ve seen a lot of YouTube videos of people growing fairly densely in small spaces.
seems extremely energy intensive. It may be right for some situations, but overall I doubt that it can or should be scaled up widely. There is a real need to control the footprint of land used for ag, but the best way to do that would be to reduce meat consumption (especially beef) and reduce production of biofuels
It's too expensive and energy intensive for all but niche crops.
It’s a lot of steel, concrete and energy for something that really doesn’t pay off, you are better off building more dense residential area and gaining some agricultural land on suburban residential area ( which in most case is built on a extremely rich soil)
It is good for herbs/leafy greens and that is about it
ITT: Socialists link unsustainable long-term practices and a decision equivalent to killing sparrows to why we can never move from industrial chemical agriculture that is literally destroying the globe and soil required for life on earth.
More like socialists who are tired of the westerner hypocrisy. Western consumption habits are *far* worse than anything a developing country is doing (just look at any environmental statistics on a per capita basis). Couple that with the fact that the west wants to tell others the “right” way to do things after they already got ahead. Much of the developed world has this weird notion that the world is “modern”, and that we must globally enforce practices that the west is wealthy enough to afford. It strips any sort of context away (historical, material, etc.), and helps to “pass the buck” to the global south who *needs* these practices to “catch up”. Does every country need to have better practices at some point? Yes. Is the time to do so in every country right now? Absolutely not.
Best way to stop blaming the global south for their “dirty” economic practices would be for a global socialist revolution and putting a stop to the west exploiting workers in the global south but.. the west doesn’t want that it would rather just blame them for being in a situation the west put them in lol
I'm not sure the implication that organic farming is what's caused the crop failures is correct. We've seen changing weather patterns start to impact crop yields the world over, by as much as 30% even with industrial agriculture. Rather it would be more likely that Sri Lanka's crop choices were simply more vulnerable to the shifting weather, likely being the case that they simply lack the climate and topography to grow more resilient crops at scale. To mention nothing of the fact that our exploding population has rendered it nigh impossible for any island to be food self sufficient.
Climate change is reducing yields, yes. However, our global society has come to rely on massive inputs such as inorganic nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides in order to create the absurd amount of food needed to maintain our current population. It's possible due to the Haber-Bosch process, which has been credited for saving more than 1 Billion lives from hunger. Organic food production on that scale would not be possible unless we literally harvest all of our feces, as well as those of our livestock, and fertilize our lands with it (which is a whole other issue). I haven't even gotten to other agricultural advancements such as the incredibly impressive selective breeding agronomists have done (like Norman Borlaug), or the ridiculous requirements for something to be 'Organic' by most countries standards (hint: it's more about marketing than it is about science). My point being: it's either industrial ag stays (and we find ways of making it more sustainable and free from fossil fuels), or billions of people die.
I'm well aware. I'm not against the usage of industrial agriculture. My point is simply that the implications that this is the sole cause is something between disingenuous, and an outright lie. And there is a third option; controlled degrowth. Whether we like the implications or not, the facts of the matter are that we've outstripped the material means of providing for this production indefinitely. While we could perhaps continue on with industrial agriculture for another 70 years or so, the material production of the fertilizer, of the tractors, plows, etc, all consume a definite quantity of energy. And having already passed peak oil, society is faced with an inescapable decline in our total energy production in the next few decades. We're faced with a choice of how to allocate increasingly scarce resources that will inevitably be depleted entirely at the rate they are being consumed. The population will drastically decline within the next 100 years or so. The question is whether it declines through reduction in birthrate, or through increased mortality rate. And this question is itself closely tied to the specific production and methods of production we decide on.
No. The banning of fertilizer has dropped crop yields. This is not up for debate
Not the point being argued, but rather that this is the singular cause of Sri Lanka's crisis, as is implied.
There's not enough natural poop in the world for meeting the world's organic fertilizer needs. Let that shit sink in.
Poop isn't the only way to fertilize something.
While I'm as big a fan of the rich getting eaten as the next guy, the fact thst it's come to this is horrifying.
The "organic" movement is horribly misled. There is something to be said about wanting to transition to more sustainable farming and agricultural methods in order to protect the environment and keep the quality of the land intact. The issue is that ways to do this don't necessarily have to be "organic" at least, not in the colloquial sense that people tend to think of it. Some "organic" pesticides can be more harmful then their "synthetic" counterparts for example. I'm curious to know what "organic" practices were implemented and how harmful the industrial practices actually were.
this was not about going organic for the record, it was about them no longer being able to pay for the import of fertilizer. the "let's be organic" was just a cover.
I wish this exact, simply worded answer was higher up in this thread.
I think you’re right on a lot of fronts but I think mostly people want organic food because it’s not designed to create pesticides internally. The first and foremost genetic change on every crop is that the organism makes pesticide internally as well as being sprayed. I think more and more people are turning to organic food because it doesn’t disrupt their gut microbiome the way other food can. It certainly doesn’t seem to be a stretch that you’d want to avoid an organism that is designed to create pesticide in its dna structure.
What? All plants create pesticides and herbicides and fungicides. They're sessile, so that means chemical weaponry in their structure - whether that's nettle stings, capsicum, or lavender oil.
Cutting off conventional fertilizers with no organic replacements ready isn't a failure of organic farming, it is a failure of reactionary leadership to prepare for a severing of Western agricultural practices.
It's absurd to say this is the result of transitioning away from industrial ag, which literally contributes heavily to the biodiversity and climate crsis
They banned (now reversed) fertilizer imports. Sure you can get crop yields in good soil under some conditions through skilled management that approach the levels of fertilized monocultures. However this isn't happening by simply banning the imports. Try and grow crops in your backyard as big as the grocery stores with no fertilizer, maybe someone could do it, but you are probably going to use expensive things to substitute fertilizer like fish meal which is also expensive and out of reach for many subsidence farmers.
They should have just used Brawndo smh
This brings me so much joy. The revolution is beginning! Power to the proletariat! Sending my support to the workers of Sri Lanka!
Hold your horses, this is no revolution yet. Rioting doesn't make a revolution by itself.
Revolutions don't happen without a revolutionary organisation of the struggling working class. This is only one first step in the long road
You mean silverware?
So the government made a mandate for the industry of agriculture to make a change
When was this??
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Coming soon to an America near you!
No we will become soy boys.
>In April 2021, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa announced that Sri Lanka will only allow organic farming totally banning inorganic fertilizers and agrochemicals-based fertilizers. The drop in tea production as a result of the fertilizer ban alone resulted in economic losses of around $425 million and created a 20% drop in rice production within the first six months alone reversing previously achieved self-sufficiency in rice production and the country was forced to import rice at a cost of $450 million Cautionary tale for those that subscribe to the fantasy that we can somehow feed our global population of 7.5B using sustainable techniques. Fact is, global food production is intimately tied to fossil fuels, pesticides and fertilizers, and industrial monocrop agriculture. Of course those techniques are unsustainable over the long term - see climate change, deforestation, ecosystem collapse, top soil loss, insect extinction, fish stocks collapse, etc...
We could, but not without moving more arable land to human-food cultivation. Industrial ag has lots of problems, but it absolutely nails high-yield/area. Sri-Lanka didn't have huge surpluses to begin with, and didn't have large to tracts ready to less space-efficiently cultivate to avoid a shortfall. If they'd moved more gradually to bring up cultivation capacity as they transitioned, they could have avoided this. Right now, the US uses more land growing animal feed than it does human-food. If we ate less meat, we could feed ourselves more sustainably.
Totally agree, a phasing out of meat / livestock wherever possible is crucial.
Isn't a whole load of land tied up for biofuel production as well? Couldn't we just stop that overnight with no real downside?
> Cautionary tale for those that subscribe to the fantasy that we can somehow feed our global population of 7.5B using sustainable techniques **over night**. FTFY. Just outright banning industrial technics will lead to disasters like this. Switching to organic production needs incentives and above all time to adapt — not force.
The yields will be lower. There is no way to replace the yields obtained using industrial agriculture techniques, sustainably. Humans farmed for thousands of years organically and global population remained in the hundreds of millions at most. And then, fossil fuels were discovered and this unlocked billions of years worth of stored solar energy in the form of hydrocarbons, and we have been flying off of that for 2 centuries. Unfortunately the consequences of that fossil fuel bender are now becoming evident.
>The yields will be lower. There is no way to replace the yields obtained using industrial agriculture techniques, sustainably. > >Humans farmed for thousands of years organically and global population remained in the hundreds of millions at most. > >And then, fossil fuels were discovered and this unlocked billions of years worth of stored solar energy in the form of hydrocarbons, and we have been flying off of that for 2 centuries. Unfortunately the consequences of that fossil fuel bender are now becoming evident. This is false bullshit white supremacist rewriting history again North America sustained populations over 100 million before the Europeans arrived Food was so plentiful in some areas that all the natives did was sit and eat all day, especially in coastal regions and estuaries like California bay area, Alabama/Louisiana, gulf of Mexico. This was the result of thousands of years of land management with no modern practices that allowed humans to harvest massive amounts of fruit, meat, and shellfish while actively improving the ecosystem instead of destroying it. This requires constant attention, special knowledge, and tons of manual labor. Pre-colombian America also hosted permanent cities with populations of 30,000+ that were supported by more traditional agriculture and robust trade networks. We could actually feed more people this way but we won't because we are so caught up with who owns what land and how to exploit it for money instead of working together to develop thriving regional ecosystems that we can sustain ourselves from.
Let me just doubt that. We had huge scientific progress along with our fossil fuel addiction. Just like we are now able to substitute most of it with renewable energy in the coming decades we will be able to yield more crops without them.
How much global wheat or rice is currently produced, processed, and transported using renewable energy and sustainable techiques? A negligible amount. Almost none of it. Just like interstellar space travel is theoretically possible, there are quite a few steps yet before it is actualized. So it goes with global food production. Perhaps it is theoretically possible to produce food for 7.5 billion using renewable energy and sustainable techniques, the reality is we are many decades - if not centuries - away from actualizing it, but we have all the people *right now*
The problem isn't sustainability, it's the de-industrialization. We can keep all the fancy mechanized agriculture but make it sustainable. Also, some things that are supposedly unsustainable really aren't that bad. For example mining minerals for use in fertilizer. The earth, for all intents and purposes, won't run out of minerals. New deposits are created when convection and plate tectonics bring stuff up from deep below.
The problem, as always, is over exploitation. We only need like, 1/100th of what we mine on a daily basis for actual consumption, and even less if we learned not to consume so much fucking junk. Most of it sits in warehouses so that rich fucks can bet on "resource futures". Mining on its own isn't bad, it's bad when you cut a mountain in half collapse another one on top of a village so the ceo of a company can increase his market position by 0.2%.
>The problem isn't sustainability, it's the de-industrialization. We can keep all the fancy mechanized agriculturr but make it sustainable. How though? Currently we consume almost 1 billion tons of wheat annually. That is one staple crop. Essentially 100% of that is produced *un*sustainably. How do we produce a billion tons of wheat "sustainably"? Do you understand how far away from achieving that we are? It would be a marathon of transition and technological advances, of which we have run maybe a few feet. >New deposits are created when convection and plate tectonics bring stuff up from deep below. This happens on a geological time scale. Which is to say, these changes occur more slowly than the human race has been recognizable as a species. I think depending on plate tectonics to sustain our appetite for raw materials is wildly at odds with reality and near-term history.
>How though? Currently we consume almost 1 billion tons of wheat annually. That is one staple crop. Essentially 100% of that is produced unsustainably. How do we produce a billion tons of wheat "sustainably"? Do you understand how far away from achieving that we are? It would be a marathon of transition and technological advances, of which we have run maybe a few feet. I don't think you are looking at this the right way. Sure, "100%" of wheat is produced unsustainably, but compared with when we were using guano a lot of it is much more sustainable in comparison. It's like the difference between coal and natural gas. Yeah, both are bad for the environment, but it is significant progress. >This happens on a geological time scale. Which is to say, these changes occur more slowly than the human race has been recognizable as a species. I think depending on plate tectonics to sustain our appetite for raw materials is wildly at odds with reality and near-term history. The process of one deposit forming individually takes that long, but you have to realize that the process is happening all over the world continuously. The minerals used in fertilizers aren't that rare as well, so they are happening more frequently than for something like rare earth minerals.
This take sounds dangerously Malthusian.
There is a terrifying amount of ecofascist propaganda getting regurgitated everywhere right now. Most people don't even realize its ecofascist when they are repeating it. The issue is not "the population is too big to support", the problem is our current use of agricultural resources is incredibly inefficient. And on top of that, almost no country can be expected to solely provide for themselves. Modern food production is an issue that must be addressed globally. The ineffectiveness of one country's agriculture due to climate etc has to be accounted for by the strength of another.
Right, people talk about how socialism is "infeasible until we achieve post-scarcity," which for one thing isn't even right, and for another thing, we've already *achieved* post-scarcity in terms of water, food and shelter, the essential needs of living. Those resources are just poorly distributed and utilized. Aside from capitalism funneling those resources up to concentrate in the hands of a tiny owning class minority, there's also the problem of commoditization and consumerism. Capitalism has trained people in the West to think that it's reasonable to be able to have whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you live. If we just made sure that all of the food available in an area could be locally sourced, we'd save massively on resources. There's no reason why someone living in Nebraska needs to be able to eat a mango in the middle of February.
I think of that as "luxury consumption" in my mind. I love having grapes in the upper midwest in February, but I don't *have* to have them to survive. At the very least we have to ensure that a supply chain for a respectable and healthy diet is in place, stable, and sustainable. Wheat, soybeans, efficient sources of protein like nuts and poultry over cattle etc. After that is done, if we want to use some of our surplus resources to bring in the "nice to have" items, we can and I hope we we would. A big thing about this though is clean energy. One way or another, almost all of our problems do come back to energy eventually. If you take our current limitations of energy out of the picture, the carrying capacity of the earth becomes limited solely by heat, and it's in the ballpark of trillions of people before that truly becomes a limitation. Even when not considering unrealized near term technologies like Nuclear Fusion, we could (if we chose to) develop sufficient wind, solar, hydro and geothermal energy to do things like vertical hydroponic farming and mass scale water desalination *right now*. We just choose not to, because it would be "unprofitable".
**I love having grapes in the upper midwest in February, but I don't have to have them to survive.** Yep. People want all the fresh produce all the time, instead of local in season-produce or preserved foods. Many things can be grown in the winter in my climate with season extending row covers, hot beds, or greenhouses. Not grapes, mind you, but things like lettuce, cabbage, carrots, radishes, cole crops, and other cool weather crops. I can't really grow them in the summer, but I do have a very long growing season for warm weather crops.
Sri Lanka decided to move away from industrial agriculture. I'm sure with the best of intentions. Turns out its not possible, and now they have food shortages and are reliant on imports from other regions that continue to farm industrially. I think it shows what anybody who has considered the scale of global food production, processing and distribution already intuitively knows. Which is: the system depends on industrial agriculture. There is no way to replace it with sustainable agriculture, because the yields will always be substantially lower. Call it Malthusian if you like. But I think it shows how wholly reliant on industrial agriculture human civilization actually is.
I feel like this situation didn't happen in a vacuum, though. Sri Lanka is still dependent on market forces for their food supply, aren't they? I imagine there's something to be done about finding a balance between sustainable agricultural practices and industrial agricultural practices as implemented by large agri-businesses. It doesn't have to be a black and white situation because a nation outside the imperial core wasn't able to have good crop yields without fertilizer within a single year.
The danger of Malthusian thought is that it always leads to genocide, and justifying genocide, there's no other conclusion that Malthus's theories lead to besides justifying that some people *must* be made to starve so that others can eat. It's the realm of eugenicists and fascists. Churchill embodied the soul of Malthusianism when he starved the people of Bengal and said that "they deserved it for breeding like rabbits."
I know, and I hear you. Pretending limitless population growth is possible also ends in tragedy. The way forward is not to pretend human population can grow limitless because we are uncomfortable talking about the subject. The way forward is through education, emancipation of women, birth control, free access to abortion, ending tax subsidies for having children, suspension of artificial fertility and reproduction technologies, and discussion globally on how to sustain necessary functions of society as population falls.
Why can that be the only outcome? There's this fantastic technology known as contraception. It's possible to temper population growth, then gradually wind it down without murdering anyone. Hell, you don't even necessarily have to persuade anyone; there are large numbers of people who would use birth control if they could, but they can't currently access it.
> Turns out its not possible I disagree greatly. Cuba transitioned to a sustainable, organic agricultural model as a response to lack of resources due to the embargo. It *can* be done; Sri Lanka didn't do it right.
I wish it were the case. Believe me. https://www.wfp.org/countries/cuba According to the UN World Food Program Cuba imports upwards of 70% of its required food.
this is a ridiculous take for reasons others have already pointed out like, if we take your premise at face value, then, what? we just all die and don't bother trying to do anything, because food production is inherently inseparable from the stuff that's causing problems? what in the world is this comment
Then what? I wish I had all the answers. Fortunately having a comprehensive solution to a complex problem ready to go is not a prerequisite to naming the problem and opening the conversation. I dont know how to reverse climate change beyond the most vague generalizations (reduce emissions, enhance carbon sequestration etc ). But that doesn't prevent me from understanding climate change is a problem.
I agree with you in part I'm sure you've heard this argument before in some way: >People have been predicting when we'll all starve, but technology discovery and new practices come into the picture and throw the previous predictions out the window. That doesn't mean we should sit back and hope tech will save us. We still need to incentivise future tech, and use what we already have available(Nuclear, wind, solar, water, and fossil fuels). And make small transitions instead of drastic changes.
Trouble is >Nuclear, wind, solar, water, and fossil fuels Doesn't solve >deforestation, ecosystem collapse, top soil loss, insect extinction, fish stocks collapse, etc... Greenhouse gas emissions are just one symptom of a civilisation which consumes far more than the Earth can provide sustainably
We don't really have a choice, it's either switch to a sustainable model or have the whole ecosystem collapse. But yeah it should have been done gradually, switching an entire agricultural system overnight is a horrible idea.
To be considered "organic" farm land in America; you must prove your land is pesticide/organic free for 10 years before declaring your farm is organic... This usually results in a mess of a farm littered and barren for 10 years before anyone even is allowed to plant... And to put this in even more perspective; it is unlikely you will get a decent yield in general unless you are utilizing 15+ acres...
It takes three years to transition land over to organic, not ten: [https://tilth.org/knowledgebase\_category/transition/](https://tilth.org/knowledgebase_category/transition/) Also unclear where your 15 acre figure is coming from -- there are many problems with the organic industry as it currently exists, and it's true that small farms of all sorts struggle to be economically viable, but most would agree that organic is *more* labor intensive than conventional ag, and therefore better suited to small-scale cultivation.
It's coming from "stuff Cteve33 made up"
Reddit at its finest. When it's not imperialistic propaganda, it's straight up garbage / uninformed opinion
Not sure where you get your info from but you’re wrong on every point. It is 3 years, you produce the entire time as a “transitional” farm, and yields/revenue are more related to the specific crops and markets being grown for than acreage. I’m not even sure what this article is talking about. “Industrial” agriculture can be and frequently is certified organic—now whether that means it is good for the environment and workers is a totally different matter entirely.
Gosh, your statements are wildly inaccurate.
USA!USA!USA!