What they [anti-GMO advocates] are really after, many
will tell you, is the “food system” itself –– globalization, Monsanto,
corporate agriculture, pesticides, synthetic fertilizer, monoculture, and the
rest.
GMO advocates have been less clear about this. Outside
the corridors of Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland, there hasn’t been a lot
of stomach for defending industrial agriculture. As I will argue to you today,
this is a problem. For at the bottom of contemporary debates about food and
agriculture lay a series of fundamental misconceptions about agriculture that
have become an obstacle to improving our food system.
Agriculture involves harvesting some portion of the
earth’s primary productivity, the processes though which energy is converted
into organic material via photosynthesis in order to sustain us. Early human
populations began to find ways to do this more efficiently and at greater
scales long before the invention of agriculture, mostly by burning forests to
create open meadows and grasslands that were better for hunting and supported
larger mammal populations and hence more protein on each hectare of land.....To Read More.....
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