[onoway]

The thing was not only was everyone relying on potatoes but they were relying on the same variety of potatoes, so it was a double whammy.

There used to be a saying, it isn't a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket, and monocropping huge acreages with one variety of crop, or even various varieties of the same crop which share most of the same genetic material, is simply a disaster waiting to happen.

There was a thirty+ percent failure in the corn crop in South Africa, not even because of pests or disease, but a failure to provide sufficient fertilizer. The price of fertilizers has climbed every year..some are double what they were about 5 years ago. What happens when a farmer cannot AFFORD to put on the amount of fertilizer that the crop demands? We know what happens.. India has shown us, with thousands of farmer suicides (frequently done by drinking the pesticides designated for use on the crops.Ah yes, how healthy this food is for human consumption!)

Even so, that isn't the major problem, the companies can simply walk in and buy the land - which is apparently useless to anyone who cannot afford the chemical support for the crops, because the soil is now sterilized by the chemicals to one degree or another. So now you frequently not only have a suicide you have a dispossessed family, often with no means to support themselves, as the value of the land is only a fraction of what it had been years before, when it was still fertile.

[mike777]

onoway you raise many important points but this last post sounds crazy:


killing off the land and killing your customers is not good for profit but you seem to think this is the goal of profit seekers..

I think you confuse those who seek long term profit and those who seek to kill or make slaves.

excellent examples are those from WW11....the govt set up all sorts of stuff to kill not to create profit.

I guess the point of the English was to kill off the Irish....not seek profit.

In any event I don't get why the Irish don't fish.

[Vampyr]

onoway, on 2014-February-27, 21:09, said:

There was a thirty+ percent failure in the corn crop in South Africa, not even because of pests or disease, but a failure to provide sufficient fertilizer. The price of fertilizers has climbed every year.

Maybe this can answer Mike777's question as to why organic farming is better. Rotate crops rather than create a monoculture, use fertilizer produced on your own farm by your own animals -- this is sustainable. But there is still too much money in using chemicals to supplement depleted soil, monocultures are more "efficient" in the short term, poisoning the water carries no penalty...by the time people realise what is necessary for long-term sustainability it may be too late. I am not concerned, really, because I regard the survival of the human race as irrelevant.

[mike777]

Gals if you think capitalists only care about short term profits the next 10 months and don't care that the human race dies off...ok


granted no one else points this out.

[onoway]

mike777, on 2014-February-28, 00:59, said:

Gals if you think capitalists only care about short term profits the next 10 months and don't care that the human race dies off...ok


granted no one else points this out.

I very much doubt they think the human race is going to die out, nor am I suggesting that. I am saying that we are headed for a massive disaster and it will likely cause a great deal of suffering and indeed deaths on possibly a global scale. In any case, it likely won't affect them so why should they care?

Mollison tells a story about a conversation he had with a man who told him that in a few years there'd be very little real meat, milk, etc, everything would be made with soybeans. When Mollison asked why he would want that, the guy laughed and told him, "oh I won't be eating soybeans but you and everyone else will."

The host of a BBC investigative series on GMOs interviewed soybean farmers in Brazil who were raising GMO soybeans. The health issues were frightening but nothing was being done to mitigate the causes, rather, anyone who complained lost their contracts and were left to deal with the health issues as well as everything else with no income. It's exactly the same thing that used to happen to coal miners in Cape Breton who developed black lung disease and were unable to work. Unless a son would take his place in the mine, the family was literally thrown out on the streets, kicked out of the company houses and left to fend for themselves.

Big and small companies have both historically often (NOT always!!or even usually!) been abusive to their workers but the bigger the corporation, the more likely it seems to be that people who work for it are considered as no more important than the car. If it starts developing problems, get rid of it, there will always be another.

I'm not suggesting that this is the case here, BUT...there is no reason in the world to think that people with the yen for power of a Ghenghis Khan or Hitler no longer exist in the world, nor that if such people did exist that they would automatically gravitate to politics. Economic power is so much tidier and simpler...bribe a few folk here,buy that company over there, manipulate public opinion where it will be effective, encouraging people's fears and offering them your solution as the only possible one....once you control the food supply, you have power that most governments can only dream of. Think of Stalin and the Ukraine.

These companies already control something like 95% of the food supply globally, right from the fertilizer and seed companies through the companies which buy and sell food commoditities, to the companies such as Kraft who manufacture or process and distribute it.

I am still waiting to think of or learn the reason Monsanto bought a company of mercenaries.

There are plenty of examples throughout history right up to today in places like Syria that it would seem as though people are hurting or killing a whole lot of people in the process of trying to get or keep power, sometimes even possibly acting in ways contrary to their own best interests.

Quite a lot of people are matter of fact about their belief there are already too many people in the world anyway. It's a whole lot easier to feed the world if there are a whole lot fewer to feed. Actually I don't think this is part of any deliberate scenario but it could be.


I'm not at all sure that the people running these companies don't believe their own press releases. Again, I'm not suggesting this is the case, but just because someone runs a giant and successful corporation doesn't guarrantee they are NOT a psychopath. As someone was once supposed to have said of Howard Hughes, insanity is a term that only applies to people not rich or powerful enough to create their own reality.

The point of the exercise is that none of those possibilities matter, what matters is protecting our soils and water and food supply and these companies, for good reasons or otherwise, are actively pursuing policies which mandate against those things.