Re: From the site Soil Not Oil, of which Shiva is one of the organisers,... Archived Message
Posted by Ian M on March 4, 2019, 2:43 pm, in reply to " From the site Soil Not Oil, of which Shiva is one of the organisers,..."
Thanks Garry, enjoyed the interview, she has a good way of connecting lots of different issues together in an accessible way. Good also to get an update on the situation in India for farmers and the legal loss of Monsanto/Bayer over the legal definition of plant patents. Some of her solutions seem too good to be true, but at least it's not of the 'have our cake and eat it' variety with her call for more people to go back to direct food production and an end to fossil fuel use and financial parasitism. Will have to look more closely at what she's saying... For now I'll make my usual quibble with this part: 'We find we can feed two times India’s population—two times India’s population—by conserving biodiversity, providing more nutrition per acre, the more biodiverse the system, and organic systems produce more nutrition. Farmers earn 10 times more by not spending precious money on chemicals and big machines.' which, while remarkable if true, appears to be answering the question of 'how are we going to feed our growing population', saying this can be done organically, but not recognising the link between food production and population growth - ie: if you produce enough food for 10bn people soon there will +be+ 10bn people. For me it's the wrong question and we should really be asking how to reduce the human population and scale back the impacts that agriculture and industry are having on the rest of the living planet. The methods she describes could well be part of that process, but if latched to the dominant culture's preferred narrative of growthforever (h/t Rhis) they might prove disastrous. Oh, and on that last part, don't organic farmers earn more precisely because they're selling to upmarket consumers with more buying power? What happens when the social justice revolution erases that disparity?? cheers, Ian
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