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OT but a welcome bit of brightness
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"David Hare-Scott" wrote: On Tue, 9 Apr 2013 08:17:30 +1000, "David Hare-Scott" wrote: I would really like to see a credible estimate of two things: - The cost efficiency of wide scale permaculture, that is what would food cost compared to conventional agriculture a) on the market today b) taking into account long term costs of pollution etc, which almost never figure in our 'costs'. - Whether it can really be sustainable in a closed system. The best examples that I have seen still use considerable external inputs. The answer is to this is in part tied up with how you define the system's boundaries but the dedicated are claiming that boundary is and ought to be at the property boundary - in which case I wonder if it is possible. David Rick wrote: here is a synopsis of a recent study. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0425140114.htm There are, of course, others out there. Bottom line from my reading is that organic and permaculture methods fall behind on grain production, but do better with other crops. It seems likely that for the forseeable future many farming methods will be required to sustain a growing population at affordable prices while minimizing damage to the eco system. It's a shame that the paper is paywalled. To me the core question is not the relative yields but the productivity in relation to inputs and wider costs, the review doesn't mention whether this is covered in the paper. The measurement of yield by itself is not that useful, one can have very high yields that are quite unsustainable. One critic wailed that for the underfed of the world a drop in yield as described would be catastrophic. This is such a simplified and narrow view that conveniently dismisses the issue in one sweep. If the chance of catastrophe is to be a major evaluation criterion then there are many other possible catastrophes, such as soil destruction or conventional fertiliser becoming prohibitively expensive, that need to be considered when choosing a long term system of food production. And of course there are many non-catastrophe consequences and issues to consider. To collapse the evaluation down to only yield is inadequate to say the least. The desire to simplify the world and the future into neat sound bites (that miss the point or tell half-truths) is very powerful in some quarters. David Last night, I was listening to William Moseley, a development and human-environment geographer with particular expertise in political ecology, tropical agriculture, environment and development policy, livelihood security, and West Africa and Southern Africa. http://archives.kpfa.org/data/20130408-Mon1900.mp3 http://www.macalester.edu/academics/.../billmoseley/a rticles/ One of his observations was that the food riots in Africa in 2008 weren't caused by lack of food, but by the price of the food. Local farmers get pushed off the land, and then the land is leased to countries like China who come in farm the land, and then send the crop back to China to feed Chinese. The other whammy that farmers around the world have to live with is government subsidized crops. Many of our crops in the U.S. are tax-payer subsidized (so much for "free markets") and sold on the world market at below the cost of production. This in turn ruins corn farmers in Mexico, rice growers in Haiti, and wheat farmers in Africa, and the result is a dependency on the food producing countries. In any event, IMHO, this is the path that Monsanto and others are taking us down, i.e. they will control the seed. -- Remember Rachel Corrie http://www.rachelcorrie.org/ Welcome to the New America. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA736oK9FPg |
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