"Organic" and "Fair Trade" are an unnecessary luxury to most people. Nobody is trying to keep hand crafted automobile assembly plants operating but some how innefecent farming is all the rage.

The current use of automation in car manufacturing does not preclude the future capacity of building more cars by any means.

Your so called "efficient farming" does increase the yield of calories per acre at the cost of killing of the microscopic ecosystems in the topsoil and bankrupting farmers. The only thing those practices are good at is to increase the margins of fertilizer and pesticide producers.

Non-organic food is also far better for the environment as a whole, since it uses land more productively.

It's not that conventional farming is more productive than organic farming, but rather that large-scale commercial farming (which can include using organic methods) is more productive than small-scale farms.

Could you provide some data on the number of farmers that have been bankrupted by the death of microscopic ecosystems as a result of "efficient farming"?

Of course the death of the soil does not bankrupt farmers, this is just a nasty side effect of industrial farming.

What bankrupt the farmers is that industrial farming does increase the yield of a given field at the cost of relying in an ever increasing and more advanced industrial inputs. This has the double effect of increasing both the fixed (machinery) and variable (GMO seeds, pesticides, fertilizers) costs, while at the same time increasing the offer and saturating demand. The farmers find themselves in the predicament to ever increase production just to survive on an ever decreasing margins. And when they can no longer afford the fancy inputs, the soil is already dead so they end up the proud owner of a wasteland and go belly up.

It would be hard to come up with sources for all of these assertions, specially in an informal debate, but for starters look at: http://www.joshuabradley.org/green_revolution/index.html

There will be three jobs in the future: quants, CEOs that employ the quants, and members of Congress. Everyone else will be lazy good for nothing takers for not having a non-existent job and deserve nothing more than to starve in the gutter. At least, that's how it's going to be in the US.

No, just robots. CEOs/politicians who control the robots, and people who do what the robots say and are provided with everything in return.

Quants don't create value, so without a healthy market a quant is powerless. Like a swimmer trying to swim in a dried-out lakebed. Thus the CEOs that employ the quants are also powerless.

I know tons of quants that create value. They just don't work in finance.

Evolution is a bitch.

Well,but that is what "organic" food is at the moment, isn't it? Agricultural technology has developed so far that we can grow plants many times faster than with natural methods. Yet we still decide to do it for various reasons, and food grown organically is a luxury in most places, being 2-3x as expensive as its non-organic equivalent.

Yes absolutely. But we pay for organic food to get a more wholesome product that has (mostly) more nutrients and uses fewer artificial pesticides. I don't know what humans would bring to the table if robots can do their jobs. The human energy should be devoted to better things.

A recent UK study ran by the government(I can find source if you'd like) found absolutely no difference in nutritional value between organic and non-organic food. Organic food might be more tasty,but if you actually look at nutritional values it is identical to non-organic food. Read as: non-organic feeds hungry people just as well.

I am not saying that organic food is pointless - heck, I buy organic onions because they taste better and I buy organic milk and chicken meat because I vaguely care about how these animals are kept. But I do not subscribe to an idea that everyone absolutely has to eat organic food. It is not only non-essential, but I think it might actually be impossible.

Edit: Found the research: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19465692

Thanks for the link, did not know about the non-existent nutritional value difference. Was basing my views on some earlier paper that spelled out which food was worth buying organic and which not.

30% less likely to contain pesticides is a nice positive benefit.

Some people already are willing to pay a lot for hand crafted, not-mass-produced objects.