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david lee
Milwaukee, CA
Recent Activity
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david signed the petition | -
david commented on the article |Robert, I'm hurt - I don't get a "cheers"?
I didn't know the chemical actions of glyphosate. As you seem to be such an expert, can you tell me why the US Geological Service has found it in ground water in the Midwest or why the World Health Organization thinks its a health hazard? Or why in some studies, it causes necrosis and apoptosis and necrosis in human embryonic cells (there's a headline for you, glyphosate is a baby killer!)?
Look, I could play this game for hours but you're obviously a biotech guy so we should just agree to disagree.
As a food systems guy, I'll just say that food production is not the problem. We grow enough food to feed the world twice over, so why are there 1 billion people starving, a number that continues to grow? Because systemic issues like poverty, market inequities, nation-state instability and other problems associated with the globalized, industrial food system. These are just not problems that a biotech crop can solve.
But we're getting away from the point of the post, which is a conversation I'm frankly more interested in.
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david commented on the article |
The farmers I know hate Monsanto but still plant their seeds. Why? Because the cost of changing is high. I'll do you one better on the analogy, Greg - it's like being in a long term relationship that you know you must break off but then you think about all the stuff you'd have to do - get a new apartment, separate your belongings, find a new mate, etc. - and you decide it's just not worth it to you because your mate has one good quality in the shadow of many bad ones. People have a great propensity for living with cognitive dissonance.
This is why it's so important that biotech firms don't get their hands in the developing world as S.384 proposes since it will be increasingly difficult to extricate them from it later.
When you can spray a field of soybeans with Round Up and then go do something else because it will kill everything other than the soybeans, that's pretty cool from a technological standpoint but horrifying from a natural one, since we eat it.
Let's not forget that 50 years ago, we thought that smoking was good for us. Or more recently, when rBGH, another Monsanto goodie, was all the rage.
We're obviously enamored with technology but this continuing belief that we can outsmart nature, a systems that has had 4.5 billion years to evolve, seems to me to be arrogant. Technology has a place, to be sure, but it's place is subservient to nature, not to control it.
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david commented on the article |It's important to note that ending hunger in America is possible, it just requires the necessary political will. In the 60's and 70's, we cut poverty in America by half through government programs (19%-11%). We didn't lose the war on poverty, we just decided that 12-15% poverty was acceptable. It won't come cheap - Joel Berg notes it's around $30 billion a year - but compared to the hidden costs of hunger (increased health care costs, higher costs to state and local governments), it's a price we must find the political will to pay.
