Meanwhile the pesticide manufacturers are following the cigarette company playbook and busily funding bullshit research and top notch PR to deflect blame. This is what happens. We blanket our fields and their surroundings with chemicals specifically designed to highly efficiently kill insects and are surprised when insects die in droves. But sure, blame people living in cities.
But keep in mind that pesticides (in the correct quantities) are crucial for high yields, whereas I am not sure whether tobacco is crucial for anything.
no, insects are simply the carriers... also all insects aren't the same, most of your produce is pollinated by insects; they're also the base for a very complex food chain that would collapse without insects
this is a weird take to have which shuns all nuance and objectivity
High yields for a wide variety of crops in a wide variety of places. If a lower variety was maintained locally with plants that were more robust in that setting the use of pesticides could be reduced, supply maintained (but choice reduced).
This is the right answer. Crop growth needs to be distributed locally and become more integrated with architecture in big cities. These large-scale industrial farms make communities less self sufficient in many ways.
You'd be surrendering colossal economies of scale were you to do that, causing much higher food prices. Most people in big cities don't care to grow food, and most people who grow food don't care to live in big cities. The parent with whom you're agreeing also mentioned a lower local diversity of things grown, which means that to get a decent variety of stuff, that actually increases reliance. I think if anything, we're going to see a desire to become less reliant on others (especially internationally) which will drive people to grow a larger variety of crops locally.
Keep in mind pesticide research is a multi-billion dollareuro business, and that a pesticide 20 years ago has little to do with a pesticide now. Recent techniques such as seed coating also have had big changes.
Nobody contests the use of pesticides and pesticide research, but we should also not underestimate the role and pervasiveness of these stuffs on much of our planets acreage and soil.
The chemical implicated in bees demise, neonicotinoids, sounds like it actually may have something to do with tobacco production though!
One of the driving forces behind the neonicotinoids theory is a toxicologist called Henk Tennekes, who used to work as a consultant for Solvay, Roche, Monsanto en Sandoz (now known as Syngenta). Basically he claims that the toxicity was underestimated as it grows with time, the damage to the nerve system in insects is irreversible.
The pesticides also go into the surface water, where they found a link between higher surface-water concentrations of imidacloprid - a specific neonicotinoid - and a decline of birds that feed on insects.
Perhaps a better source in English, the EU policy advisory report from the European Academies Science Advisory Council from 2015 on Ecosystem services, agriculture and neonicotinoids.
I am also a bit afraid for the future. The way we're going, harvests will fail more frequently, meaning some areas of the world will have to have overproduction to feed the rest, and which areas that are will be hard to predict. So it's safer to have some overproduction everywhere, at least of basics.
The current method of monoculture and cash crops makes that even worse since that means an area is susceptible to the same kind of weather problems, eg dry summers. If we planted more varied crops some of them can profit even if others fail.
This. You can can’t relocate certain products just because there’s more elsewhere. This does not work with all kinds of produce (it does for some but quality and taste go down fast).
In other cases you can technically do that, but it’s not sustainable cost-wise.
Indeed, I see plenty of criticism of industrial farming practices, but it's what's feeding the world population and without alternatives that are as efficient as current practices, the suggestion to give up pesticides is akin to saying that it's OK for people to die of hunger, as long as it ain't you.
On the other hand denying a problem delays working on a solution.
Something like 70% of farming is growing crops to feed animals which we then eat. Meat is an incredibly inefficient way to turn sunlight and water into calories. If we all switched away from meat and ate mostly plants instead we’d have more than enough without needing such intensive farming methods. More seriously than that though, current methods are actively destructive to the soil - the longer we farm so intensively the less viable farmland we will have. Does that sound sustainable?
Around here land of good quality is used to grow crops for human consumption, and land of marginal or poor quality can't grow many crops so is used as grazing land.
Is it "70% of farming" by area of land? That doesn't sound so bad because most farmed land isn't all that great. Can we really say that 70% of the yield of high quality farming land is going to feed animals?
In some parts of the world, marginal quality land is used for monocropping of animal feedstock using intensive exogenous inputs (fertiliser and pesticide).
Raising animals for meat on meadowland, depending on the level of intervention used on that land, can actually be good for biodiversity although if those animal are excreting larvicides everywhere they go, it's not so good.
In the English context, the richest habitat with the best biodiversity is a complex mix between meadows, hedgerows, and woodland. The exact historical balance, especially between meadows and woods is hotly contested and an open research topic.
In my area of the US, a good percentage of the majority crop (corn) goes to produce alcohol to burn as fuel. So we pour poisons and fertilizer on the land and burn huge amounts of petroleum to produce a seriously inefficient crop to supplement an energy source that doesn't need supplementing. Just to give farmers something to do and to keep the CEOs of the chemical companies in yachts and private jets.
This kind of reminds me of the Soviet whaling program that almost wiped out entire species of whales for no reason other than the 5 year plan said that they needed to continue whaling.
For the record, I just found a reference that states that ~40% of corn grown in the US gets turned into ethanol. 40%. We consume somewhere between a half a gallon and a full gallon of petroleum (between fuel for the machines, production of chemicals, etc.) for every gallon of ethanol we get out of the process. There is no justification for this other than make-work for farmers, chemical companies and the whole ethanol-industrial complex.
Ethanol is such a disaster. Is there any legitimate reason for ethanol production to be a thing outside of subsidizing mega farmers? Can we just cut them checks instead?
If you peel back all of the propaganda, no, there's no legitimate reason to produce ethanol. It's just a way to continue to feed money into the farming-industrial complex (farmers, chemical companies, implement companies, seed companies, ethanol manufacturers, etc.) Even if the crop that was grown to make ethanol was less stupid (sugar beets for example), it still wouldn't make much sense.
Where do you think the energy and the nutrients from plants come from? It comes from the sun and the soil. So if plants are a middleman, we might as well eat dirt and stay in the sun all day.
We are biologically herbivores, and we are built to process plants (jaw moves side to side and we have long intestinal tracts, the exact opposite case applies to carnivores). We don't "eat dirt" because we are built to eat plants. Your argument on that is a silly one.
You're running anywhere from 5-12x the amount of plant calories (depending on the animal) through animals (that need to be fed water in addition to plants), to produce fractions of calories on the other end. It's highly inefficient and that by itself is a terrific argument for stopping the consumption of animal products. Not to mention all of the potent affects on climate change, and the water usage associated with producing meat. We're paving the rainforests to plant more crops to feed back to animals, despite having millions starving to death.
Go search for `animal agriculture inefficient` and read the metric ton of studies if you don't believe me. I can't fathom how you could think that spending 12,000,000 calories of plants to get 1,000,000 calories of beef is worth it "for the nutrients".
I'm curious as to what nutrients you think are so critical here, because literally every vital nutrient can be obtained from plants, and in the cases of Vitamin D and B12, they are both supplemented into animal feed as it is, and can easily be taken in pill form.
Our intestinal tracts are smaller than that of herbivores. As a matter of fact our intestinal tract has the length ratio similar to that of other omnivores, similar to that of pigs or dogs for example.
We don't have the teeth of carnivores, but we don't have the teeth of herbivores either. That's because we evolved to use tools and fire, which meant we could predigest our food, which also allowed us btw to eat tubers. Thus comparisons with other animals is silly.
We aren't like cows, we cannot synthesize essential amino acids from grass, we don't have the gut or the gut flora for it and we don't stay around all day chewing leaves like gorillas. Our big brain evolved with foods high in calories and in paleolithic this meant animal fat and starch.
Yes, you can live on a whole plants based diet, with the proper supplements. Whether that's optimal or not is another question entirely and there are plenty of studies available from African countries showing that children could really benefit from more meat and dairy in their diet.
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> "We're paving the rainforests to plant more crops to feed back to animals, despite having millions starving to death."
References please.
While in the 19th century most of the human population lived in extreme poverty and suffered from malnutrition, the percent of people living in poverty and suffering from malnutrition has dropped to a historically low in 2015, afaik less than 10% of the world population. We are living in the best times of humanity, from all points of view, literally.
Therefore bringing starvation into this discussion, despite the absolutely amazing progress we've made since 1960 (which is around the time when meat consumption went up btw), shows ignorance.
I'm not denying that meat should be more expensive and reflect its actual cost to the environment, but really, stop it with the quackery.
Please explain how it is efficient to feed anywhere from 5-12 units of calories to an animal, to get out 1 unit of calories. Running plant food through an animal does nothing to increase it's value, and all you're adding to it is a) saturated animal fat, which raises your cholesterol, c) trans fats, and b) cholesterol itself, which yes, does affect your serum cholesterol levels, albeit less so if you already have a high intake of animal products.
And to address your initial comment, human-created wildfires have been on the rise to make room for grazing cattle and soy growth - to feed back to the cattle. A 3 second search will show you that. How else do you think animals are being fed?
Be honest - you want to eat meat because you like it. I understand, meat tastes good, but it doesn't justify this. A whole foods plant based diet is the only diet proven to reverse heart disease and chronic illness, period. Furthermore, it's bad for the planet and is the direct cause of these pandemics that have plaguing humans for ages, but particularly in the past 20 years.
Feel free to elaborate. Why is it that carnivores have short intestines, teeth for gripping into and tearing flesh, and don't die of colon cancer?
We have long intestines for lengthier breakdown of plant fibers. Not so dead animals can rot in it.
EDIT: Let me elaborate on this more, actually. Humans are omnivores in the sense that they can consume and not die from eating meat, but you will be void of fiber and other nutrients. Everything is not found in meat, no matter how much HN's god Shawn Baker says so.
You can absolutely thrive on a whole foods plant based diet, not destroy the planet, and not pay to support torturing animals, and that is where the fact that we "adapted to be omnivores" becomes irrelevant. We simply don't have to artificially breed billions of animals and feed them all the water and plants, just to survive. We can easily survive on plants alone, and would be much better off for it.
Or we can keep enslaving animals and breeding disease and stay quarantined forever. Whatever gives you five minutes of pleasure though, right?
I don't know where you're from, but where I grew up meat was an occasional food.
The diet was mostly vegetables/fruits/grain, with meat from hens/ducks once a month or so, cows and pigs were slaughtered right before winter so there was more meat during winter but still for a family of 5-8 that's like a serving or two a week.
IIRC that's the standard diet for millennia - mostly plants but still occasional meat.
I don't think humans are made for vegan diets, but the current consumption of meat is absurd - we're eating better than kings and nobility used to.
How is it possible that meat can be cheaper than vegetables, it's rather ridiculous. Industrial farms are quite literally animal Auschwitz, yet people don't see the problem with that because they're "just animals"? Funny how that works.
I think slowly raising taxes on meat would gradually lower demand, and soon enough, production. Can't see us getting off meat completely, maybe lab grown will be successful.
I've been vegan for around 6 months now, and haven't dropped dead yet. If anything, I feel the same as I did before - on a vegetarian diet - and before that - on the standard Western diet.
As long as you eat a balanced diet with enough protein, fat, and carbs humans can thrive on a vegan diet just fine.
That's nice, but 6 months is nothing. Yes, I've read about people going vegan for years. I've also read about people going back to eating meat/eggs/dairy and feeling better. Afaik there's some nutrients that are simply missing in a purely vegan diet.
If someone showed you a picture of a morbidly obese person and ask you what you thought they ate, what would your first thought be? I'm fairly sure it wouldn't be 'they need to cut down on the vegetables'.
How many super overweight people do you know who eat all vegetables and whole grains?
There are always outliers but the cliche western 'bad diet' is too much meat, fat, processed carbs and dairy.
I'm a reluctant part-time vegetarian - pizza is my spirit animal. But I cannot ignore the cognitive dissonance I experience with a lot of the 'bargaining' style diets being pushed. My animal brain really wants to believe there is a healthy diet that lets me pile on the bacon and chorizo and still lose weight but the evidence just doesn't support it.
What does that even have to do with this thread? But w/e, the diet you're looking for is keto - zero carbs, which incidentally is mostly from grain, works. Meat and fat alone do not cause obesity, but together with carbs they fatten you up more effectively.
They don't necessarily cause obesity, but they sure don't help. I lost tons of body fat when I stopped eating meat and dairy/eggs. Literally the only thing that changed was I ate more fiber and less fat. And of course removing trans fat and cholesterol from my diet, because they are only found in animal products.
Too much refined sugars + animal products = fat population.
Vegan for a year and a half and still crushing PRs and feeling incredible. Wife's pregnant and has had zero complications, no sickness, nothing. Also, she probably deadlifts more than more people on this thread.
The only nutrients "missing" are B12 and D, which are easily supplemented and/or found in fortified foods (cereals, plant milks etc). And the funniest bit - they only exist in meat because they are supplemented into cow feed. That's right - you're already supplementing D and B12.
There's a difference between being able to eat meat, and requiring meat. Sure we can eat it and we won't die, but we'll certainly be losing years off our life.
The science doesn't lie - you can thrive for a lifetime on only plants, but you won't get far on a lifetime of only meat.
Everything you said is true, except the other way. Meat is way we thrived and evolved on. Plants was for survival only.
You're right the science doesn't lie. There is no science that shows a lifetime of meat doesn't get you far (there are some that show you excel though). There are questionable questionnaire studies that show association with processed food (and for some reason they put meat in this, further confounding it) has a very small increase correlation with risk of cancer.
Meanwhile all those athletes "thriving" on plans actually saw their performance drop.
If this is all true, I wonder why a kg of pepper/cucumber (or any other vegetable for that matter) costs very close to a kg of chicken/pork etc. Shouldn't the additional complexity/resource intensiveness of meat production be reflected in the consumer price?
You’ve asked a local question globally. In my home country, meat is much more expensive than cucumbers.
In the US, grain production (and actually farming in general) is highly subsidized, such that you can’t infer much about the cost of growing food from the prices you pay for it.
I don’t know where you are, but the answer is probably local to you.
Where I live, per kg, chicken is about 5 times more expensive than cucumber.
But in some countries, fresh fruits and vegetables are considered a luxury item. It is especially apparent in Japan, where you are only able to buy top quality vegetables with a flawless appearance and a matching price. Everything else goes to the food processing industry.
It should but as you deducted yourself, that is not the case. I suspect they force the profit margins of vegetables way up somehow. I'm sure they've done a lot of research and experiments and concluded that:
* People are willing to pay x for a pepper
* People do not consume significantly more peppers if the price is lowered
* People are willing to pay y for a kg of chicken
* People buy significantly less chicken if the price goes up much higher
TL;DR it's about price vs volume vs profit margins, and I'm sure they continuously hover around an optimum for these products.
Meat farmers don't buy cucumbers from the shops to feed to their animals. You'd need to compare farm gate prices of the kinds of low-grade grains used in animal feed.
In any case what you say isn't even true: At my local supermarket cucumbers are £1.80/kg, while chicken starts at £1.95/kg for super-cheap chicken thighs with bone-in, up to nearly £20/kg ("Sainsbury's Norfolk Black Corn Fed Free Range Chicken Fillets" in case you want to know), the average being around £5/kg. There are no pork products at all below £4/kg.
YMMV of course, doesn't mean that what I say is not true, neither I'm saying it's the same for all countries. In my supermarket (central EU) a kg of pepper is 3-4 Eur/kg, chicken breasts without bone are cca 4,50 Eur/kg, whole chicken is 2 - 3 Eur/kg. Not mentioning pepper is supposedly 94% water. I'm definitely going to be fed more times buying 1 kg chicken instead of vegetables.
Fresh vegetables are great but yes, mostly water. Beans, rice, lentils, grains (in dry form) cost less per kg than chicken, don't need refrigeration and will make many more meals.
As somebody who's also from the central EU, it feels like you are low-balling that price there. You would have to look really hard to find chicken breast as such a low kg price because the average is more like 5 €/kg usually higher [0].
Personally I wouldn't even buy such cheap poultry because with a price like that you can be very certain these animals must be farmed in rather "optimized" conditions. Just like with eggs or milk, these are items I'm willing to spend a bit of extra money to support better and more humane practices.
Trying to do the same with meat is very expensive, did it recently ordering turkey breast, ended up paying 8€ for 400g, thus I reserve it for special occasions.
In that context, your comparison between peppers and chicken breasts is also not that good. Peppers are a very bad vegetable source of proteins, to replace chicken breast one would eat something protein-rich, like beans and those happen to be dirt cheap pretty much everywhere, particularly when buying them in bulk and dried.
Seems like central EU is a very vague term. I meant Slovakia, you probably meant Germany. I don't really low-ball the price, I checked one of the supermarkets current weekly offer, 1kg Chicken breasts (standard quality, respected manufacturer) this week 4,29 E. [0]. You might argue that this is a special offer, but we have similar offer all the time in one of the different supermarkets around.
Your point with beans etc. is valid though. Just the fresh vegetables are very expensive here and feels almost like a luxury item.
Current practices are marvellously efficient in parts, but only in parts. Go look at how much of the marvellously efficiently grown produce is discarded during distribution, for example.
We grow so many cucumbers that we can afford to throw away the worst-looking half and still have enough.
There are always people from the Union of Bought and Paid-for Scientists that will gladly give up on science for a well-paid gig at some bullshit think tank. Somewhere around 3% if we use climate-change numbers.
> The scientists say there is no smoking gun on insect declines but they find the destruction of natural habitats due to urbanisation, to be key.
Urbanization, i.e. people moving to larger cities? This doesn't seem to make sense and is inconsistent with every other report I read on this topic pointing out habitat loss and pollution from farming. I guess modern intensive farming methods correlate with small farmers moving away in favor of big industrial farmers, but concluding that urbanization kills natural habitats seems like a gross misrepresentation. Industrial farming can and should be reformed to weigh less heavily on nature without reversing urbanization.
I think part of it is also the upper middle class moving out of larger cities, and buying a house with a big garden in the countryside, and then turning the garden into a sterile architectural monument.
What I increasingly observe in europe, is the opposite: diverse gardens with different flowers, bushes and trees.
The sterile garden type still exists, but has gotten very uncommon. And I have seen lots of europe in the last years. So it is really cheap, to target garden owning people, when you have large areas with monoculture and insect poison everywhere.
There are both kinds, some are obsessed with over-pruning/mutilating trees and mowing the garden like a golf green (another heresy), some let the nature develop. For example, France has many extended private areas, with forests
Btw. insects love deadwood. But yeah, most gardeners do not .. which is alright with me to remove, if it is a hazard in a tree, but deadwood lying in a bush could be tolerable.
Those gardens with pretty flowers and bushes are not the natural habitat of the insects. They look diverse but are in fact as sterile as a monoculture field. Insects thrive in the unkempt parcels between fields where man never goes, and those are disappearing, replaced by well kept gardens.
It depends. There exist the diverse looking, but sterile garden type (who do use pesticides and insectizides of all sorts to keep it sterile). But this is increasingly changing. All the garden magazines are full of it, how to make your garden more insect friendly, insect hotels, leave patches of grass uncut, flowers that have nectar for insects and not just pretty flowers. And people follow it, since years, as far as I experienced.
But even the most sterile looking garden with bushes and trees is far more insect friendly, than a dead field. Because tons of insects are living in the bushes and trees alone. A big tree can feed colonies of bees, when blooming, etc.
But I am of course also with you, that the fields need to get more small, with bushes between them and if possible, organic.
Sure, but when you say upper middle class I think - that must be a small portion of the population and thus not likely to be significant to causing a problem of this magnitude.
It is a small proportion of the population (5-10%) but it has a disproportionate effect because they take up the space that previously remained wild because too impractical to farm, and there was not that much of it.
Insect hotels are becoming quite the thing here in Denmark, to the point that my local grocery store carries smaller versions. I think it's a very sweet and compassionate idea that kids can learn from and have fun with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect_hotel
This article says freshwater insects are increasing, but doesn't really specify which ones aside from mayflies. I'm assuming one of them, if not the main group, is mosquitoes.
I've seen insects coming back on my shirt while cycling since a few weeks, thanks to lockdown, and an amazing blossoming along roads, where it's usually dead-polluted.
We need periodical lockdowns. The activity, traffic and pollution is way too intense in cities otherwise, not just for insects.
We need to rethink air-traffic too (mainly as individual choices, because I don't see politics going against it), as someone living near an international airport, it's a massive change currently. Almost all if not all flights are unnecessary
I am fortunate enough to live in an area where insects are still pretty common.
Every summer and spring we are visited in our garden house by bees and wasps and butterflies, praying mantis and hovering moths - all variety of other things, beetles and bugs galore. Our kids have learned to keep bees safe and how to safely shepherd a wasp out the window. We delight in the butterflies visiting our noses, and even in the last week witnessed our pear and cherry trees turn from flower to fruit bud with a little help from our friends.
Then there was a time I witnessed a mantis defending my outdoor shoe from my foot, only to discover its egg sac deeply embedded in the shoes depths, which I of course left alone until a thousand critters made their way into our garden.
It's hard to imagine there are places in the world were such delights are not so easily experienced.
I believe the modern world has done us all a disservice by breeding squeamish generations incapable of holding such critters in their hand, in wonder.
If you're a parent, teach yer kids to love bugs - with respect of course, we have not much use for ticks - and encourage experiments which show the world of insects and their life cycles to future generations.
I don't think that this is going to be true. I think it is pretty clear that population is going to fall from mid century on. It may fall very fast at the tail end of this century the current crop of young adults die. It looks like real fertility rates (the actual incidence of people having babies has fallen and continues to fall).
It's going to drop the easy way (fewer children) or the hard way (war or mass starvation). There's only so many people the planet can physically support.
I highly recommend to take a look at the summaries from Our World in Data if you are interested in human development [1]. We have already seen the peak of the global annual population growth rate, so most of the population growth will happen until 2050 with ~ 9.7 billion people worldwide by then. Nevertheless, there are likely to be ~ 11 billion people around in 2100 [2].
Still many countries are >2 but they're falling rapidly too. Its surprising to me to see Bangladesh at 2.1 and India at 2.2.
Places like S Korea 1.1, Italy 1.3, Japan 1.4 you can do the math yourself. (1.3/2)^N means without immigration their populations nearly disappear in 100 years.
Russia 1.6, China 1.6, Thailand 1.5 takes maybe 12 generations to do the same.
I think if what we are discussing is population growth we should talk about the global data not that of individual countries. Whether some countries population is increasing or not is a different question.
I looked at this source https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate which seems to imply that globally the number of children per woman is 2.5 so still much higher than the replacement rate (of course we'd have to talk about more than fertility rate to have a real discussion).
As far as I understand the projections about population stabilization are based on predictions of a reduction of children per woman in countries where this is still very high. It's possible that these predictions are right but they are just that, predictions.
As an aside, I think we should dedicate a bit more effort to try to understand the implications of both possibilities and a bit less to try to assert as certain what is just a prediction.
This is not obviously not only a reply to the parent's point, I just found myself writing a longer reply than expected ;)
Except it has consistently been reducing everywhere- its just that some continents started much higher and will take longer to get down to ~2 or below.
I'm not saying it will not happen, there are certainly clues pointing out in that direction so no need for "except" :). On the other hand there are scenarios compatible with the data you are mentioning that do not lead to population stabilization.
For example. Let's say that while the majority of the population (Population A) is reducing its fertility rate a subpopulation (Population B) keeps it at a higher rate. Let's suppose that both populations maintain this behavior for several generations. In this case we would see an initial reduction in fertility rate not leading to a stabilization of the population
Will this happen?, I don't know. What I'm saying is that I feel in these discussions often people place too much faith on their preferred extrapolations ;)
Humans enjoys flower blooming gardens .. as do insects.
We can exists in parallel. Mostly. Mosquitos etc. we do not want to coexist in the same place. (at least the blood sucking type, most mosquitos actually do not suck blood)
