Comments on: Why food is becoming more expensive

By: Brandon

Brandon — Mon, 03 May 2010 03:14:35 +0000

@bryan I think the problem is that stupid people are more numerous than smart people. Furthermore, these dull, lesser evolved "normal" people have a habit of protecting their kind with short-sighted claims of "humanity".

What we need to do is enslave the stupid. That will make them the first to deal with a food shortage and decrease their ridiculous breeding rates. As a result the rest of the population will restore it's former intelligence. As it stands, the idiots are the ones having 10+ kids and RUINING the world.

While it makes sense from an evolutionary stand point ("if you can't win with brains, you might win by numbers"), in all actuality, human kind doesn't win with that approach (unless your idea of winning is extinction).

It might be considered "inhumane", but 100 years from now, people will be a lot happier from such drastic action. As it stands, we're going backwards. We'll end up with riots in 50 years and we'll be back to the stone age 50 years thereafter.

We have approx. a century to get our shit together.

By: Stan Taylor

Stan Taylor — Mon, 05 May 2008 17:13:28 +0000

Bryan,

I call BS on your casual suggestion of a relationship between Morgellon's syndrome and GM crops.

It's not even known yet that the symptoms that are attributed to Morgellon's actually constitute a single cohesive illness. At this point, casually suggesting it's caused by GM crops is pure fear-mongering and tinfoil hat territory.

By: bryan

bryan — Mon, 05 May 2008 03:15:48 +0000

-) The world can only sustain so many people; even with industrial farming, there is an upper limit. We can either choose to exist below this limit (birth control) or we can have the limit imposed upon us (war/famine).

-) GM crops may not be they're all cracked up to be. Google "Morgellon’s Disease" for more.

By: Bob Haugen

Bob Haugen — Sun, 04 May 2008 13:42:14 +0000

One problem with the argument that current industrial agriculture is required to feed the world is that it is very petroleum-intensive (machinery, fertilizer and chemicals), and the petrol gets scarcer and more expensive all the time.

Same goes for Borlaug's methods.

By: Nathanael Holt

Nathanael Holt — Sun, 04 May 2008 11:10:11 +0000

I emotionally tend towards the organic/smaller scale farming side, while my head sees the necessity of large scale agriculture. Similarly, I understand the argument for higher fuel taxes to curb emissions, while I desire lower petrol prices to keep my household budget from meltdown (rural dweller!). While it would be useful to see the organic movement face this dilemma, I fear heels will be dug in and, at least over here in the UK, fundamentalists will drive the movement to the point of a split, leaving the realists engaging with large scale concerns and the Fundi's exhorting the back-to-basics notion of self-sufficiency.

But then my large-scale neighbour's farm is a barren monoculture, with minimal wildlife, that feels desolate and uncomfortable, while my family-run small scale neighbours have farms (all sheep around us) that ooze charm and variety, while surviving only through subsidy and a cultural resistance to any other option. Like you, I would rather buy organic local produce, but I doubt that the system that provides that food for me, could provide it also to the worlds poor.

By: Thomas Brownback

Thomas Brownback — Sat, 03 May 2008 20:56:57 +0000

(Wow, looks like I did something horribly wrong with my markdown, greatest apologies).

By: Thomas Brownback

Thomas Brownback — Sat, 03 May 2008 20:54:04 +0000

I’ve chimed in on this topic [before](http://rc3.org/2008/02/23/is-local-food-production-overrated/#comment-2414 “my previous rantings”), so I’ll just make one small aside.

Norman Borlaug has personally been responsible for most of the developments in increasing agricultural yields in the past several decades, especially in in Mexico, China and India (three areas that have seen radical economic improvements across the same decades, not sure if work has been done on establishing a correlation there or not).

It’s been said that “Dr. Borlaug has saved more lives than any other person who has ever lived, and likely has saved more lives in the Islamic world than any other human being in history.”

Here’s a neat chart from [his wikipedia page](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug “Norman Borlaug’s Wikipedia Page”): ![Norman's Life Work](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/30/Wheat_yields_in_developing_countries%2C_1951-2004.png “Wheat Yields in Developing Countries”)