another environmental topic
| Author | Topic: another environmental topic |
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Infiltrator
Member # 5410
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written Monday, December 11 2006 10:51
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Anyone read The Economist? this is an interesting article: Economist For those where the above is too long there are three points being addressed: 1. Organic farming is environmentally not everything it is cracked up to be - intensive farming practices free up land for things like the rainforest, and actually uses less energy per tonne of food produced because it eliminates/reduces the need for certain practices like ploughing to control weeds. 2. "Fair Trade" food in the long run negatively affects the poor because it introduces trade distorting mechanisms in the market that encourage farmers to overproduce and further depress prices (negative feedback loop). In addition, you pay a premium for the product but only a small portion of that premium is returned to the producer. 3. Buy local produce. This eliminates food miles (the distance travelled by food from production to your plate). But not all food miles are equal. Tonnes of product packed into a semi is efficiently moved vs. local product carried on small vehicles and in any event most food miles are from your home to store and back. The total energy use in producing a food product and getting it to your table is what is relevant. Comments? [ Monday, December 11, 2006 11:25: Message edited by: chasm of Sar ] -------------------- "Dikiyoba ... is demon ... drives people mad and ... do all sorts of strange things." "You Spiderwebbians are mad, mad, mad as March hares." Posts: 687 | Registered: Wednesday, January 19 2005 08:00 |
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Warrior
Member # 7638
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written Monday, December 11 2006 12:52
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quote:Sure, save the rainforests, but poison humanity along the way. When you treat what you eat with 13 syllable chemical compounds, I doubt it is good for you. With conventional farming you have runoff from the herbicides and pesticides you used, so you are not really saving the enviorment. My solution is every thing needs to be grown in Alaska in the Northern Summer (to take advantage of the 23 hour day) and the surplus crop will be spread out along the rest of the year. We also need to eat what we buy. Go downtown, anytown. Look in a dumpster. If we actually ate all that food, there would be less land needed for agricultural purposes and we could save the rainforest. [ Monday, December 11, 2006 12:52: Message edited by: Leftover Sauerkraut ] -------------------- "640K ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates, 1981 "But what ... is it good for?" --Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip. Posts: 152 | Registered: Monday, November 6 2006 08:00 |
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Agent
Member # 2210
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written Monday, December 11 2006 13:05
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Ultimately it will come down to high rise agriculture in closed building where they don't need to use a lot of chemicals. Essentially you will have an integrated organic multistory farm. Basically a skyscraper greenhouse powered by a generator, solar panels, wind generators, and various energy saving technologies. People will become so packed together that farmland will be increasingly needed for living space. There is no effort at population control. Plus land will get used up or be designated as environmental holdings. This 1) eliminates the use of huge amounts of pesticide. 2) makes the crops more locally produced because they are in an urban environment. 3) frees up more land for homes. -------------------- Wasting your time and mine looking for a good laugh. Star Bright, Star Light, Oh I Wish I May, I Wish Might, Wish For One Star Tonight. Posts: 1084 | Registered: Thursday, November 7 2002 08:00 |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, December 11 2006 13:20
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1 and 3 sound plausible, so are probably worth thinking about, but the arguments given are not conclusive, just 'hey, what about ...'. 2 I have thought about some already. There seem to be two main issues: the Fairtrade idea itself, and the efficiency of the implementation. The second issue is kind of a detail; if the basic idea is good, we can find companies that don't skim off too much of the premium. So is the basic idea good? From what I have read about the history of the coffee business over the past 200 years or so, it looks awfully risky. Previous schemes to stabilize coffee prices with guarantees — and their have been a few — have worked well for up to 10 years or so, then imploded, as encouraged overproduction made the market price drop so low, the guaranteed prices became unsustainable. There are probably ways to avoid such problems. A lot of agriculture in rich countries has a rigid quota system, for instance. My cousin the Canadian dairy farmer owns a valuable herd of cattle, and an almost equally valuable amount of milk quota. He can sell that much milk to the provincial Dairy Board at full price, but if he overproduces, he gets paid substantially less. If he wants to expand his operation profitably, he has to buy more quota, and it isn't cheap. Moreover, the total amount of quota available is regulated by consumer demand, not by what farmers might want. So the farmers have a decent price pretty much guaranteed, but have strong disincentives to overproduce. Why can't that sort of thing work for coffee? In principle I don't see any reason why not. In practice I suspect this kind of thing might be a lot more workable in a rich country than a poor one, where giving more dirt-poor folks a shot at reasonable prosperity is bound to seem better than locking in the privileges of the few commodity kulaks who can afford quota. But if you try to spread quota more evenly, you end up either setting your quotas too high to sustain prices, or you give everyone so little quota that nobody is really helped. Certainly rich people can afford to pay a decent price for the coffee they love. And maybe there is enough coffee demand in the world to make Fairtrade coffee a major development tool. But maybe not; maybe a workable version of Fairtrade coffee is just never going to benefit sustainably more than a relatively small number of coffee growers. Sure, better to benefit some poor people than none. But then the necessary quota system really would mean boosting a few poor (or not-so-poor) people over the wall into prosperity, and locking out their neighbors. And unless and until their neighbors can all find some route to prosperity other than coffee-growing, this is what is probably a hard sell. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
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written Tuesday, December 12 2006 23:18
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quote:Conditionally agree. Some industrial farming processes are either cruel or dangerous to human beings. (I am unconcerned about trees' feelings, which I guess disambiguates me from a lot of environmentalists.) quote:Ah, lovely: the old trick of disregarding the point of the exercise. Practices like 'fair trade' do indeed lead to economic inefficiency, which means overproduction and low prices, but they're aiming for allocative efficiency, which means everyone getting what they want. Food being too plentiful or too cheap is the kind of problem that only exists for economists; in the real world it means people don't starve who would otherwise. Economic efficiency ain't pretty. quote:I don't know how strenuous their reasoning is, but I'm not on board with the local produce movement. This is partially because it seems like a ridiculous gesture of imperial arrogance in a world wracked with hunger to declare that the problem is that you're not eating food produced locally. Uh, yeah, tell that to your average Malien and see what they have to say. ---- quote:'13 syllable chemical compounds' aren't basically dangerous. This is what I call the Environmentalist's Naturalist Fallacy: the belief that natural is good and synthetic is bad. As far as the body is concerned, 13-syllable compounds are identical whether they come from 'nature' or the laboratory. DE ox Y ri BO nu CLE ic A cid - only 10, but surely pretty awful for you because of all the syllables, right? Don't form fetishistic attachments to concepts like 'synthetic chemicals'; they often lead you into preposterous fallacies like this one, and that's awful. quote:You realize that there's a reason very little in the way of crops actually grow in Alaska, right? Crops require a longer growing season than a few months, and a long, cold summer is unhealthy for them. quote:My problem is with people starving more than damage to the environment, which sucks but isn't killing people here and now. Producing just what we need would be fine and good, except countries like Mali and Chad can't swing that, what with the advancing inhospitable desert. Your heart's in the right place (oppose fatman, who seems to be little more than a reactionary provocateur), but it'd be a lot better if you actually knew the problems we're facing instead of operating on broad, sweepingly inaccurate generalizations like 'synthetic chemicals are unhealthy', 'we need to be less wasteful', and even 'plants need sunlight to grow'. I don't intend this as an insult, because like I said, your heart's in the right place. But you really might want to read up on environmental issues, and at all costs DO NOT READ UP ON IT WITH ENVIRONMENTALIST LITERATURE. At its best the movement assumes you already know the basics; at its worst the movement doesn't know the basics either and its proponents make ridiculous, mysical claims about the nature of the environment. The scientific literature on agriculture, deforestation, and food ethics is pretty dry, but ultimately very rewarding. Look into it. ---- quote:Won't work. Hydroponic farming (the only way to accomplish a 'skyscraper farm', which could not have soil) is fairly resource-intensive and the technology involved is in its embryonic stages. Further, it's a lot less efficient in terms of cost than just planting crops in the ground, which is less of a problem than you seem to think (on which more later.) quote:Not really. A hermetic, climate-controlled greenhouse on the scale of a major farm would be even more of a hassle than the one I was assuming before; pesticides would still be used on a fairly large scale. (Remember, bugs aren't the only parasites out there.) quote:Wouldn't work too well in an urban environment: water is generally at a premium there (especially in the developing world!), which would make hydroponic skyscraper farming even more economically impractical. If you're talking about something like soil importation, that's just ridiculous; it'd be so expensive as to make the enterprise worthless. quote:Land for homes isn't a problem. Overpopulation is a problem only because human beings consume an inordinate amount of resources and enough of them in one place put a strain on the carrying capacity of a region. The reason people are clustered into homes isn't because farms use a vast amount of land; farms use less land than they ever have, especially due to use of pesticides and intensive industrial-style agriculture. The problem of slums, favelas, projects, and the like is an economic one: real estate is a commodity to be bought and sold rather than a human right necessary for the sustenance of man. You don't have the money to buy or rent, you wind up in one of two shacks stacked on top of each other in a filthy, sprawling ghetto. The human population could live comfortably in Texas, but the social engineering necessary to get the human population to live comfortably on Earth is spectacular enough. [ Tuesday, December 12, 2006 23:37: Message edited by: The Worst Man Ever ] Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
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Shaper
Member # 247
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written Tuesday, December 12 2006 23:48
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quote:How about putting the homes where they belong? That is, not on the best land possible. Go build your homes on the mountain there's no need to build down in the valley other than it's easier. From personal experience we are a long long way from the kind of agriculture you described. Withe the exception of vegetables which are already grown in large complexes. The realities of farming just don't allow for what you're proposing, unless the population decreases or everbody grows, or raises their own food. BTW: There is plenty of land for housing. Most of Canada and the U.S. is empty now. We don't all have to live in New York or Toronto. [ Tuesday, December 12, 2006 23:50: Message edited by: VCH ] -------------------- The Knight Between Posts. Posts: 2395 | Registered: Friday, November 2 2001 08:00 |
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Shaper
Member # 7420
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written Wednesday, December 13 2006 07:16
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quote:So, my plan to starve of the weak has flaws, eh? At least I'll still have plenty of people to work in my sweat shops. Sure people won't starve due to lack of food, but they could lose their jobs because of its abundance. The United States grants huge subsidies to its farmers, so huge that they can sell their goods for less than it costs them to produce. So now they go and sell it to any developing country, offering it at prices lower than the local farmers could ever dream of. Since most of the developing world relies on agriculture to form the basis of its economy, these countries are now screwed. Sure, the people won't starve, that is, as long as they find a new market for their labor. At least that means no shortage of sweatshop workers. I suppose this is more of an economic issue than an environmental one, however. -------------------- You lose. Posts: 2156 | Registered: Thursday, August 24 2006 07:00 |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Wednesday, December 13 2006 08:33
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Buying local produce seems irrelevant. When you buy locally, it's either going to be organic or not. You still have to decide which to buy. And that's only if there's local food in the first place. My understanding is that the world doesn't have a food shortage. It has a distribution shortage. Growing more food is not the solution, but moving more food for less effort and money or growing food in more locations could help. —Alorael, who thinks that dragging the Malians into the picture misses the point of the article, which is pretty clearly aimed at the first world. In Mali the problem isn't how to grow food; having any food, no matter what its provenance, is coming out ahead. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
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Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
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written Wednesday, December 13 2006 11:31
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Of course it's missing the point of the article. These things, as always, are debates between provincial goody-two-shoes and self-obsessed sociopaths. The global view is never taken into serious consideration by either side of the 'debate'. :P Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
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Nuke and Pave
Member # 24
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written Wednesday, December 13 2006 13:02
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quote:If I am not mistaken, the problem is more with wealth distribution rather than food distribution. The agricultural products are already shipped all over the world, the only problem is that some people can't afford them. And, paradoxically, making food even more dirt cheap than it already is would hurt those people rather than help them, because many poorest people in the world rely on farming to survive, or have to leave the farms to live in city slums. If they can't sell their products (due to plentiful cheap competition), they can't afford to buy fertilizers, fuel for their eqipment, etc. -------------------- Be careful with a word, as you would with a sword, For it too has the power to kill. However well placed word, unlike a well placed sword, Can also have the power to heal. Posts: 2649 | Registered: Wednesday, October 3 2001 07:00 |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, December 13 2006 13:58
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People who are actually growing staple foods don't starve for lack of money: they can give themselves credit. But I have read in a book by Amartya Sen that fishermen can go hungry when the price of fish falls. Apparently they don't actually catch enough fish to live on, but in good times they can sell their fish and buy enough rice to live on. I had always thought of fishing as what folks in Newfoundland did, catching great big boatloads of fish that could easily, if perhaps monotonously, feed a family. It's a bit of shock to learn of fishermen who can't afford to eat fish. Either the fishing is bad in India, or people are stuck with such primitive equipment that they don't catch many fish. Then of course there are famines, where crops fail locally. Even there, though, it normally isn't that countries become perfect dustbowls. It is more (again I learn from Sen) that people can't afford to buy food that could be had, for an elevated price. Famine-stricken areas often export food. Sen claims that no functioning democracy has ever suffered a famine, because politics can trump economics over the time scale of a famine, and no-one votes to starve. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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Agent
Member # 2210
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written Wednesday, December 13 2006 14:36
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Overproduction of food is necessary for high economic standards of living. Every single one of the nations with the highest standards of living overproduces basic foodstuffs. They do this to eliminate starvation and takeover of the agricultural sector by foreign powers. When you do not have overproduction and have economic efficiency you have starvation. Staple food stuffs become the most expensive because they are the most needed food crop. Foreign powers come in and encourage the most economically expensive crops to be produced at the expense of staple food crops. You end up with an economy that exports coffee and chocolate and imports rice at a huge expense. This is an example where the "free market" is not that great. The United States, the United Kingdom, Japan and most industrialized countries do not practice the free market here. -------------------- Wasting your time and mine looking for a good laugh. Star Bright, Star Light, Oh I Wish I May, I Wish Might, Wish For One Star Tonight. Posts: 1084 | Registered: Thursday, November 7 2002 08:00 |
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Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
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written Wednesday, December 13 2006 21:10
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quote:No, when you have economic efficiency you have starvation. Economic efficiency dictates you produce as much of the good as the market desires, which results in producing it more expensive than a good number of people can afford it. Allocative efficiency is people getting as much of it as will satisfy their preferences, and it's a horse of a different color from economic efficiency. It's what all developed countries strive for in terms of vital goods. (There's a reason the US heavily subsidizes the agrarian sector.) Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
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Infiltrator
Member # 5410
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written Saturday, December 16 2006 07:36
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I had several problems with the approach as outlined in the article. First, fair trade. The theory that people will overproduce coffee assumes that everyone will be able to sell coffee beans at a higher price, but as I understand it fair trade beans are contracted for and so the market is limited to those with contracts, the contracts are created based on a market to sell, so there is limited ability to participate. It also assumes that fair trade coffee will grow to be more than a niche market, causing prices to fall. That could be dangerous ground, that assumption. With respect to organic farming and buy local, the initial impetus is ethical considerations of how we impact the earth. Part of the motivation for these movements comes from looking at ways to reduce our impact on the planet and reducing the human footprint. The challenge is to live with ethical integrity. It is a start of a process to reevaluate how one interacts with the world and should not be seen in isolation but should also be looked at in relation to how one uses vehicular traffic (production of greenhouse gases, use of a non-renewable resource) overall diet (the production of meat is relatively wasteful as only a small percentage of food value gets converted to meat, more efficient use of food resources to be vegetarian), consumerism (size of home, clothing budget, toys, you know the drill). -------------------- "Dikiyoba ... is demon ... drives people mad and ... do all sorts of strange things." "You Spiderwebbians are mad, mad, mad as March hares." Posts: 687 | Registered: Wednesday, January 19 2005 08:00 |