They feel their own economic desperation intensely. How much sympathy can they muster for the desperation of those hospitalized with a racing antibiotic-resistant infection, or their loved ones?
Many of those people will end up economically desperate, too.
Some politicians are more to blame than others: those who bend the country towards "one dollar one vote" instead of "one person one vote". Those who lend them ideological support are as bad or worse.
This maddening win by the agricultural lobby over public health is an the downstream result of privileging corporations over individuals.
In the very first paragraph they say "..has evaded all efforts to contain it..". I'm guessing every effort to 'contain' it involved shooting for the same output level that may no longer be easily obtainable without resorting to extremes. That which cannot be sustained won't be.
https://www.growingproduce.com/citrus/insect-disease-update/...
1) anti-vaxers 2) anti-nuclear 3) anti-GMO
A (much) Better public education is desperately needed
Those GMO seeds are covered by Intellectual Property Law and that power lets the company controls every aspect of how that seed is used by the farmer.
And when the farmer resists it end up in court.
The first assumption is scientifically incorrect. GMO is just another tool for altering organisms. Whether those alterations are good or bad depends on how the tool is used. It does allow a wider range of alterations than traditional techniques, and is faster, so enlarged both the set of good alterations possible and the set of bad alterations possible.
History, or a trip to the grocery store, suggests that the second assumption is questionable.
As Uncle Ben said, with great power comes great responsibility. GMO is great power, but will the people who wield that power do so responsibly? That is not a science question.
Patented organisms let their owners extract economic rent. This covers nearly all GMO and many hybrids.
Monoculture, which you'll get when the whole industry comes to rely on a particular GMO, invites disaster. The first pest organism to defeat the GMO wipes out the entire industry.
Despite the above, I'd love to see a food company brazenly advertise products that are 100% GMO. It would be funny and might even sell really well.
-There's no reason genetic variety can't be introduced on purpose, and pest resistance is part of what GMOs select for.
Among other things, industrial produce is noticeably lower quality than farmers market produce, cf tomatoes. The whole ecosystem benefits enormously from variety in produce.
How do you interpret peoples’ fear of the food?
The fear of eating it is all baseless fearmongering by the likes of homeopaths and crystal healers.
The general arguments against GMO are entirely without merit, in my opinion. Moreover, their consequences are monstrous, imposing costs on the third world just so first worlders can practice a deplorable philosophical fetish (or, more banally, inflame anti-GMO passions as a kind of agricultural protectionism.)
Do you know what Bt corn is and how it works?
Do you know what strains of Bt have been incorporated into the various corn cultivars?
Are you familiar with the Aizawa strain of Bt?
Did you know that Aizawa Bt is extremely toxic to honeybees?
Do you think the widespread adoption and cultivation of Bt-engineeered corn crops, which of course are prolipherated through pollination to neighboring fields and into the wider ecosystem could possibly have any negative consequences whatsoever?
Do you think the near-extintion of critically important pollinating species is a legitimate reason to question incorporating highly damaging toxin-producing genes from bacteria into corn?
https://www.nature.com/articles/nm0409-349a
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/contaminated-vacci...
I'm for vaccines but there needs to be a lot more transparency and education to the public in terms of benefits/risks for each vaccine out there, because such ratio is very different from one vaccine to another (and what they are supposed to protect from). Plus, we also have to admit that all clinical trials for vaccines are done independently of each other's, and we don't really know the impact of doing 20 vaccines on the same individual versus doing only 1 in a controlled trial.
Example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_maize#Con...
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/adoption-of-genetical...
Upwards of 90% of all major crops (corn, soy, cotton, beets) have BT, HT or both. Other GMO crops and traits are dwarfed by scale of this mass cultivation.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/DataFiles/47649/alltables.x...
Notice that traits like drought resistance don’t come up at all.
If we are using existing reactor technology then basically these nuclear plants would basically have to built thousands of feet below ground in some sort of solid rock area and then waste areas would need to be created such that it can contain the waste for hundreds of thousands of years. If an absolute disaster were to occur then the entire underground facility would need to basically be completely sealed off permanently before radioactive dust or materials are leaked. The facility would also need to be designed such that even if a disaster occurs that an underground nuclear explosion does not occur and if it does occur that it is not so massive that it somehow bursts out to the surface or creates fissures.
Currently I am anti-nuclear based on the existing way things are run but if nuclear is implemented correctly, with safety as the most important priority, then I would support it. If I recall correctly, there is a company funded by Bill Gates that is creating micro reactors. That might have potential in the underground nuclear facility I have.
I’d question, is it a net win for the environment and workers?
The general concept is that tilling/plowing is used to mow over weeds, and killing weeds with chemicals is an alternative.
Your question is a good one. I don't know the answer. The articles listed above describe the environmental and health downsides.
A distinct problem - also described in these articles - that may spell doom for Roundup-Ready crops is the emergence of resistant weeds.
There are alternatives to industrial-scale weed control outside of tilling and herbicides. One way is to grow cover crops in the "off season", then cut them and leave them in a thick mat that starves weeds of sun while also gradually rotting and fertilizing the soil, then cut little holes in this mat where you plant seeds. The USDA NRCS promotes methods like this largely through educational programs. Farmers adopt them because they ultimately save costs on herbicides and fertilizer.
Who knows maybe in a few decades we'll produce all food through some industrial process resembling hydroponics, with energy from Nuclear Fusion replacing sunlight, and weeds will be a distant memory.
And go bankrupt, because you're competing against GMO crops. Just like there are damn few transport companies these days using horse-drawn carriages.
So, not an issue in theory, but in practice.
Incidentally, this isn't something that has ever been a real issue.
One farmer claimed it was, but it was pretty conclusively proven that he lied.