Hasn't all the growing already been done? Is it to avoid bringing in bugs with the harvest?
USA
corn
production 333 000 000 tons
glyphosate use 69 000 000 lb
wheat
production 58 000 000 tons
glyphosate use 17 000 000 lb
Thats news to me.
But you probably mean "alternatives" for producing dirt cheap. Then yes, there are much worse substances around. Doesn't make it good, though.
"Organic" is a marketing term, not a descriptor of the production process.
I generally agree with this, but with the caveat that tomatoes are an exception as I understand it.
It's nothing to do with being GMO or pesticides used, but rather the fact that conventionally grown tomatoes are generally harvested significantly pre-ripening, and then gassed with ethylene to promote them turning red.
My understanding -- and if I'm wrong about this someone please do chime in -- is that ethylene gassing isn't acceptable for tomatoes that are labeled organic (but is for some "organic" fruits like bananas). It's possible it's all placebo, but tomatoes are the one fruit/vegetable I tend toward actually using organic as result.
So things are different in the US then? Or also for europe? sources please.
They aren't representative of the bulk of organic food production. Overall, organic food production is, like non-organic food production, dominated by large, industrial agriculture concerns that do use pesticides.
https://risk-monger.com/2016/04/13/the-risk-mongers-dirty-do...
Organic food is, itself, generally food which is treated with various chemicals to kill living things. The choice of chemicals involved, and the choice of actual food crop, is limited by concerns that are chosen on bases which are not well adapted to either maximizing safety of the food or minimizing environmental impact of the food growing process.
> Basic substances allowed in organic agriculture comply with two criteria: i) they are of vegetable or animal origin ii) they are considered to be "foodstuff"
It's also discarding the real suffering of all the people that were affected by the 3 major nuclear accidents. I have a friend of mine who his medicated for life because of Chernobyl.
Black and white are rarely the winning colors.
The ocean already has about 4.5 billion tons of naturally-occurring uranium in it, as well as many other radioactive substances. Fukushima wouldn't have made a significant difference in that figure if they'd ground up the entire reactor to a powder and dumped every single bit of it in the ocean. You could perhaps produce localized contamination by doing that, but not on the scale of the oceans as a whole.
For that matter, the Soviet Union used to dump their scrap submarine reactors straight into the ocean. They did that with a bunch of them.
Intensity and locality are important factors. You can eat a spoonfull of sugar everyday for a year and be ok, but eating 365 in one day is going to be a different story.
Because ocean are very complex an interactive system, and local intense event can then have a domino effect on the rest.
Now as I said, we don't know the effects yet. I'm not pretending I know if it's bad either. That's the meaning of "we don't know".
But given we have only one planet and we kinda sitting on it, it seems very silly to me to state "nah, we'll be fine" and discard risks. That's how teenagers react.
Nuclear is a term burdened with ambiguity - most people mean nuclear fission, some people mean nuclear fusion. As far as filters for scientific understanding, it's probably better than 'GMO is bad'.
Unfortunately, a huge issue is that it's almost impossible to be in the control group anymore. Or if it is, it demands huge efforts and is very hard to check the success of it.
I understand the scientists defending the GMO. But quite often, they assume people in charge are making decisions the same way they do. However, the people in charge often make decisions according to economical factors, science being just a tool toward that goal.
So if you don't trust Monsanto for most things, you will especially not trust it to tell you the truth about the safety of its products nor about the completeness of their tests to ensure said safety.
It's adamant about the safety of its GMO lines and (in the case of Roundup Ready) the pesticide products that are complementary to them.
It's, OTOH, also a big producer of non-GMO seed and actively markets products to the organic food industry.
When it can't do that, it sues farmers that harvest, plan and grow the seed it wants to protect.
This includes Monsanto's crops contaminating other crops like in the Vernon Hugh Bowman case.
It also promoted (at least in France) round up as biodegradable but we eventually found out it didn't, and went to contaminate the drinking water.
Which is a problem, given that glyphosate based products are currently in the process of being banned in Europe.
The answer from Monsanto to that has been ghostwriting reports and pretend they didn't come from them.
I really doubt your statement.
The primary issue with Monsanto specifically would then be that they actively try to prevent farmers from using non-hybrid seeds. Also, one would be surprised how well grains grow without pesticides, if the land is properly cared for. There was a time before pesticides were as widely available, and they did not have the time to weed the whole field by hand ;)
Farmers aren't stupid. Monsanto has no way to prevent them from using non-hybrid seeds. Farmers will plant whichever seeds they expect to deliver the highest ROI.
Grain production before pesticides was far lower. Back then famines were common rather than something that only happened during wartime. Don't ask us to return to the dark ages.
People believe GMO is bad because they believe that large corporations would do anything for a buck regardless of long term consequences.
Alien abduction, anti-vaxers, 9/11 inside job and other conspiracy theories are just ways for people to express their distrust of government.
Global warming deniers don't trust the liberal media.
The pattern is: I don't trust X. What is the worst thing I could believe about X.
At one point in time I thought GMO was a necessary evil, in order to feed the world better. Simplot used to pride their GMO potato that has much better yields then anyone else on the planet. But climate changes proves no breed is best for all time. In the mean time, a few European companies ; failing to combat the GMO production yield and had comparatively worse climate to grown potatoes, manage to outrun any US companies potato yield with machine learning. This is of course an over simplify version of it, but the story proves we don't need GMO to feed the world.
Not actually being familiar with the science in a particular domain and not understanding as science are very different things.