The LiquidLegends Lounge - Page 629

Regarding GMO products in developing countries to combat malnutrition:
Some products themselves are fine and have found some success at this. But it's important to situate this in the exploitative reality of global capitalism (particularly in regards to the agricultural sector), and to take a holistic view of health. In many cases, the implementation of (copyrighted/corporate/etc.) GMO products will be done in such a way that, to vastly oversimply, makes the poor poorer and the rich richer. In many communities in the global south, health has declined sharply in many aspects despite improvement in other areas (nutrition, medicine, etc.) in a way that raises strong questions about the efficacy of western intervention (primarily when it's half-assed with regards to good intentions).
Golden rice specifically is about as legit as it gets, though (ofc it's not perfect but it's p.decent).

USDA etc:
I think the general consensus is it's pretty riddled with corporate corruption. It's still proving to be pretty reliable for the most part (95%+ at least), although mistakes have been made, and it's more or less impossible for the layperson to predict which cases will turn out which way, so the fear around it is really pretty understandable imo. I do think a lot of people tend to assume that a corrupt USDA makes the situation worse than it would be without any USDA though, which is certainly evidently not the case.

Broader western conventional agriculture:
Yes defs rife with problems, but it's important to recognize how interrelated a lot of agricultural practices are with other aspects of society. A few examples that strongly affect what methodologies are available to us would be: local materials, systems of distribution, food safely regulations, zoning laws, systems of inheritance, scale of investment, supply/demand on the global scale, the ever-shifting role of government, and so on (and these things are interrelated too ofc). So a lot of systems of agriculture are products of specific and complex societal contexts that aren't really able to be easily adjusted or swapped / experimented with.

Also on that note, starting in 2017 I'll be taking on a few experiments with regards to methodology in my agricultural context. If you're interested, one of the things I'll be looking at is the efficacy of / how no-till multi-culture farming can function in reclaimed "destroyed" soils primarily made of clay in an area with a high water table (ie, if you dig more than 2.5-3 feet you hit water). Locally, we have a series of laws that more or less ban construction on farmland, ideally preserving it, but in practice simply reducing the price of farmland to way below market value which traps farmers into staying in the occupation scale of investment etc (this is a different point). One problematic workaround people are trying now is to start greenhouse projects, which permit the construction of roadways and such on farmland, and burying construction debris under the roadways (big money) and then abandoning the greenhouse project completely, leaving the soil more or less unusable for conventional western agricultural practices (rebar will wreck your machines). Some of these lands are subsequently being converted into parks and such, but I'm trying to find ways to retain agricultural use. The clay is an issue because it rains a lot here, and post-saturation we get lots of runoff, but also the soil becomes concrete-like when it dries out in spring (this is tangentially related to global warming effecting the pathing of migratory birds, since ducks and geese stay here over winter now and they contribute to this problem (this gets complex and is a story for another time)), meaning that tillage is typically considered absolutely necessary. The water table is relevant (strickly speaking, we're a delta (island in the middle of a river) and below sea level) because any excess of chemical applications drains quickly, and long-term chemical techniques basically don't work, so alternative pest management is likely to be a necessity. It's fun!