No, mass starvation would not ensue from having to fight weeds using mechanical means. It would take more work and more fuel, but it is eminently doable if the need is there. Especially if the change would be gradual.

Making do without artificial fertilizer would be a lot harder.

Increased fuel means a lot more CO2. That is a very significant factor you cannot ignore.

Perhaps if herbicides weren't viable, more work would've gone into developing the mechanical alternatives and we'd have had solar-powered machines removing weeds from fields.

Soil resistance is worse than air resistance, but similar concept. It needs a lot of energy to overcome.

More CO2 compared to what tractors use today, yes. But that is not a lot compared to the rest of the human civilization spend on transportation.

So no, it is not a very significant factor.

Increased work and fuel means increased costs, increased costs means increased prices, increased prices means less food available for purchase by those on the margins, less food means starvation.

So anything that effects food prices, regardless of magnitude, causes mass starvation?

No, not regardless of magnitude. But anything that have a large impact on food prices will decrease the ability of poor people to pay for it. It’s not rocket science.

Then it's a discussion about magnitude and jumping to starvation is unfounded.

Price increases due to disruption of Ukrainian grain shipments from the war substantially threatened African food stability.

Despite their being plenty of capacity elsewhere because the smaller redirects of trucking into the European markets crashed prices enough that it led to protests in Poland and discontent elsewhere (though probably with significant Russian psyops involvement).

People are already starving in the world. With higher prices the amount of people starving would be more. It's gonna be ten thousand more or a million more? That's up for debate.

Anything that causes food prices to rise a lot causes starvation yea, when prices go up people consume less.

I don't think that is the only alternative. If the end goal is to preserve life for humans, completely nuking the soil into a wasteland, treating it with carcinogens and then allowing a company to genetically modify seeds and copyright them is a pretty bad and short sighted strategy.

Allowing a known carcinogen to make crops "easier to harvest" has to do with profit margin not food supply. People literally use this to kill dandelions in their yards. I have known many people who have died from cancer. I have eaten dandelions, while bitter, are actually healthy. A good start would be to work with nature instead of trying to out engineer it.

If roundup is your alternative to starvation you're probably just delaying the inevitable.

> If roundup is your alternative to starvation you're probably just delaying the inevitable.

Yes. That is literally exactly what we're doing. You can't sustain the current human population without fertilizers and pesticides made from fossil fuels. Half the people on the planet would die.

If we don't want half the planet to die, we need pesticides. So do you choose a pesticide that's more harmful, or less? If you said "less", then you want glyphosate.

I think you meant to write herbicide rather than pesticide.

Ah you're right, glyphosate is the herbicide. We also need the pesticides to keep the yields up.

You both have premises that are too far apart to debate productively; what you're really debating is naturalism vs. technology, scale vs. degrowth, humanism vs. environmentalism. All worthwhile philosophical debates, but you won't get anywhere sniping at each other about them.