Hey curious what others think, I'm a big believer in sustainable & permaculture based agriculture but also have heard of some instances where its helped, idk maybe that's monsanto propaganda I turn to you chacha to educate me.
"Golden Rice is a covert attempt to win wider approval for genetically modified food and will not solve problems of malnutrition. Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) – like other problems on malnutrition and hunger – is not caused by the lack of Vitamin A in food, but by people's inability to achieve a balanced diet." https://www.grain.org/article/entries/5177-golden-rice-is-unnecessary-and-dangerous
"Rainbow papaya (Carica papaya L.) is a genetically engineered (GE) cultivar with resistance to papaya ringspot virus (PRSV). This cultivar currently accounts for about 70% of Hawaii's papaya acreage. ... No differences were observed between GE and non-GE papaya for 36 nutrients at any of the tested fruit ripeness stages."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0889157510002693#:~:text=Rainbow%20papaya%20(Carica%20papaya%20L,70%25%20of%20Hawaii's%20papaya%20acreage.&text=No%20differences%20were%20observed%20between,the%20tested%20fruit%20ripeness%20stages.
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I'm not strictly opposed to this take, but I always point out to people that moving away from monoculture means no more mechanization, which means dramatically increased labor requirements, which in the US means vast exploitation. farm labor is a terrible job. obviously we should fight for farm labor workers and protections, but I'm not convinced farm labor can ever be a good job on a large scale
This is a really good point to make and one I rarely see voiced. Harvesting by hand is tough work, even the ones that are "easier" because its, say, fruit tree harvesting vs the back breaking labor of asparagus harvesting. Sure the fruit starts off above your waist but you still have to carry it in wearable bags back to the bins to be dumped. Even monocultural ag can have huge labor requirements. Hop fields are all identical female plants, but unless you want to scorch the earth that grows your hops with pesticides you have to pay people to manually pull the weeds from the hop fields. Hop fields are all trestled, along with a lot of fruit trees these days. Nothing goes into those fields that can't fit under the wires. Unless the machines are small enough, and certainly for the interim period until we could feasibly implement robot agriculture, it will be humans going in to do that kind of (for lack of a better term) 'clinical' work.
I think there's a lot of unexplored possibility for making farm labor less damaging and exploitative; and I think that a lot more of that side of agriculture would be getting explored in smaller non-mechanized situations that could also help reduce "out of sight out of mind" parts of our food chain.
I have worked as a farm laborer in the US and I'd do it again with the right management.
Right, the influence of agracorp on u.s domestic policy is so wide ranging, from devastating rural communities to pushing the processed foods from those monocrops onto inner cities