a briefing document

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C O L O U R K E 'Y

Index

earth management in agriculture

the advanced science: food production, genetic engineering and ecology

how to avoid or delay difficult political decisions—transgenic crops

pessimism and optimism - yin and yan of our small planet

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introduction

Agri-business looks to make profits from farming customers who are often poor people in still to be developed parts of the world. Generally, agri-business looks to its profits, not to the negative consequences for the local population and their environment, of the so-often inappropriate technology that is being sold.

Collected together here are a series of items which show how to feed populations, without ruining the planet and while enabling the populations concerned to become self-sufficient and to escape, at least to some degree, the poverty trap caused by high death rates and low education levels.

earth management in agriculture

“The researchers studied three different methods of soybean farming: conservation (no-till drilling); conventional tillage, and organic farming. Their findings showed that the conservation method produced the highest crop yield, 15% more than conventional tillage and 110% more than organic farming. It also held the most carbon in the soil--41% more soil carbon than conventional tillage and 48% more than organic. This catching and holding of soil carbon, called sequestration, keeps carbon from being incorporated into carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

“So now ask a question: Who is the natural constituency for earth-friendly biotechnology? Who cares enough to lobby governments to underwrite research - frequently unprofitable research - on transgenic crops that might restore soils or cut down on pesticides in poor countries? Who cares enough to teach Asian or African farmers, one by one, how to farm without ploughing? Who cares enough to help poor farmers afford high-tech, earth-friendly seed? Who cares enough to agitate for programs and reforms that might steer displaced peasants and profit-seeking farmers away from sensitive lands? Not politicians, for the most part. Not farmers. Not corporations. Not consumers.

“At the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank in Washington, the molecular biologist Don Doering envisions transgenic crops designed specifically to solve environmental problems: crops that might fertilize the soil, crops that could clean water, crops tailored to remedy the ecological problems of specific places. "Suddenly you might find yourself with a virtually chemical-free agriculture, where your cropland itself is filtering the water, it's protecting the watershed, it's providing habitat," Doering told me. "There is still so little investment in what I call design-for-environment." The natural constituency for such investment is, of course, environmentalists.”

The item should mention the energy problem but does not.

It is also pointed out that a huge industry is awakening in education; and countries would do well to develop it quickly, not only as a means of maintaining competitive economies but as a means of modernising the rest of the planet.

This would lower friction, lower population pressure and lower the spread of both destruction and environmental contamination.

how to avoid or delay difficult political decisions—transgenic crops

“The scientific panel, while pointing out areas of uncertainty that need further research, voiced no fundamental objection to transgenic agriculture.”
—
“ Some senior plant-biotech researchers have already announced plans to leave Britain this year. "Public opposition has caused industry to bleed away, which reduces funding opportunities and options for the future employment of students," says Mark Tester of the University of Cambridge, who is shortly to join the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics at the University of Adelaide. One company, Bayer CropScience of Hauxton, near Cambridge, suspended its field trials of GM crops late last month, complaining that its experimental plots could not be guaranteed protection from protesters intent on their destruction.”

a map giving the present advance of transgenic crop farming is available at this link.

It makes no sense to be be for, or against, transgenic species.
Each modification should be examined on its individual merits.

norman borlaug and the green revolution

An American, Norman Borlaug was awarded a Nobel Prize for Peace in 1970, “primarily for his work in reversing the food shortages that haunted India and Pakistan in the 1960s”.

Borlaug’s mission was to cause the environment to produce significantly more food. “Borlaug's leading research achievement was to hasten the perfection of dwarf spring wheat.” “Borlaug's majestic accomplishment came to be labeled the Green Revolution.”

The World Bank, and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations no longer sponsor Borlaug’s work, having been heavily influenced by fallacious environmental arguments than high-yield farming damages the eco-system and encourages human over- population.

“In developing nations where population growth is surging, high-yield agriculture holds back the rampant deforestation of wild areas. Waggoner calculates that India's transition to high-yield farming spared the country from having to plough an additional 100 million acres of virgin land -- an area about equivalent to California. In the past five years India has been able to slow and perhaps even halt its national deforestation, a hopeful sign. This would have been impossible were India still feeding itself with traditionally cultivated indigenous crops.”
—
“[...] statistics suggest that high-yield agriculture brakes population growth rather than accelerating it, by starting the progression from the high-birth-rate, high-death-rate societies of feudal cultures toward the low-birth-rate, low-death-rate societies of Western nations. As the former Indian diplomat Karan Singh is reported to have said, "Development is the best contraceptive." In subsistence agriculture children are viewed as manual labor, and thus large numbers are desired. In technical agriculture knowledge becomes more important, and parents thus have fewer children in order to devote resources to their education.”

Having further achieved the Green Revolution in China and in Mexico, at over 80 years old Borlaug was working to do the same in Africa.

“Borlaug's Africa project is a private-sector effort run by an obscure Nobel Peace Prize winner and a former American President [Jimmy Carter, another Nobel Peace Prize winner] whose altruistic impulses are made sport of in the American press. Its goal is something the West seems almost to have given up on -- the rescue of Africa from human suffering.”

pessimism and optimism - yin and yan of our small planet

A rather pessimistic but interesting essay by a “the world is coming to an end and you are all dooooommmmedddddd merchant”: museletter.com

“Over all - including energy costs for farm machinery, transportation, and processing, and oil and natural gas used as feedstocks for agricultural chemicals - the modern food system consumes roughly ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food energy produced.”

and some remedial reading that discusses the manipulation of enclosed bio-environments. The following is from an ecology e-book (24 sectioned chapters) : kk.org

“I once had a tiny living planet stationed on my desk. It even had a number: world #58262. I didn't have much to do to keep my planet happy. Just watch it every now and then.

“World #58262 was smashed to smithereens at 5:04 P.M., October 17, during an abrupt heave of the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. A bookcase shook loose from my office wall during the tremor and spilled over my desk. In a blink, a heavy tome on ecosystems crushed the glass membrane of my living planet, irrevocably scrambling its liquid guts in a fatal Humpty Dumpty maneuver.

“World #58262 was a human-made biosphere of living creatures, delicately balanced to live forever, and a descendent of Folsome's and Hanson's microbial jars. Joe Hanson, who worked at NASA's Advance Life-support Program in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech, had come up with a more diverse world than Folsome's microbes. Hanson was the first to find a simple combination of self-sustaining creatures that included an animal. He put tiny brine shrimp and brine algae in an everlasting cosmos.” [In chapter 8]

image credit: Biosphere 2

The full-scale version of this self-contained living ark is Biosphere2, now up for sale. Columbia University has taken over the Bio2 project.

“Unlike NASA, the Synergians wouldn't rely on technology as the solution. Their idea was to stuff as many biological systems-plants, animals, insects, fish, and microorganisms-as they possibly could into a sealed glass dome, and then rely on the emergent system's own self-stabilizing tendencies to self-organize a biospheric atmosphere. Life is in the business of making its environment agreeable for life. If you could get a bunch of life together and then give it enough freedom to cultivate the conditions it needed to thrive, it would go forever, and no one needed to understand how it worked.” [Quoted from kk.org]

“The intentions behind Bio2 were certainly noble. Caught in the wake of the 1970's warnings of global environmental apocalypses and the hairy-chested humanism that would dominate the 1980's, Bio2's founders figured the latter could solve the former. This planet may be becoming a dank, pollutant-soaked hellhole but we can always just live on the moon. Yet somewhere in its path to glory, the Bio2's well-intentioned arrogance dissolved into farce, a situation with a whole new set of lessons entirely.” [Quoted from dartreview.com]

 

related material
Table of wealth distribution and food security

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