Residual posting

I was going to write a post but instead I got distracted and wrote a comment on another blog: http://crookedtimber.org/2011/02/12/can-we-feed-the-world-will-we/

When reading this article I thought that it missed part of the point. Although it touched on it in couple times but I don’t believe it was properly articulated.

As a younger person concerned about the food that I eat and food security it seems to me that a large part of the problem would be reforming land use in the developed world. And this has been brought up here, e.g. meat consumption per capita is enormously energy intensive, management intensive systems are more productive than energy intensive systems, using human waste as a direct input for urban agriculture (why not the vast amounts of table scraps too).

There seems to be problems with our agricultural practice at every turn, and yet I can’t help but feel like this article supports the over arching structure of it. Maybe my opinion is somewhat naive, seeing as how I didn’t grow up through the green revolution, but I can’t help but feel like trying to apply western practices else where in the world could produce anything but failure. We can’t even set up democracies there!

The amount of pollution it produces is unmitigated. Have you seen pictures of algae blooms? Fish kills in the united states due to raw animal sewage being dumped rivers.http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/02/100305-baltic-sea-algae-dead-zones-water/

“Unsustainable fishing can be replaced, to a substantial extent by aquaculture, as discussed in this Scientific American article.”
Sea lice linked to aquaculture are decimating wild fish stocks. This is not sustainable.http://www.goodfoodworld.com/2010/12/farmed-salmon-and-sea-lice-whats-killing-wild-pink-salmon/

The colorado river already doesn’t reach the sea.http://www.counterpunch.org/colorado.html

Why would we ever want to reproduce this elsewhere? I guess the answer is to stop millions of people to starving to death. However I agree with some of the other readers we must use increased labour to increase yields. Maybe western governments should implement 2 years of mandatory woofing. Woofing = volunteering as agricultural labour on organic farms (cheap way to travel!). My personal response to this quandary is to dumpster dive.