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>Plus, it reduces the amount of soybean oil being used in food. It reduces the land being used to produce food. http://hungerreport.org/2017/wp-content/upload
by danjoc 9y ago
>Plus, it reduces the amount of soybean oil being used in food.
It reduces the land being used to produce food.
http://hungerreport.org/2017/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/hunger-report-2017-full.pdf http://hungerreport.org/2017/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/hung...
"In 2014, Italian and U.S. researchers, examining a global dataset of large-scale land acquisitions, published a study showing that between 300 million and 550 million people could be fed by crops grown on these acquired lands. The land in these deals was in countries with some of the world’s highest rates of hunger and malnutrition. Govern-ments in fragile states, desperate to attract foreign investment, have proved all too willing to trade land to investors at bargain rates. Agri-businesses typically claim that they will reduce hunger by applying modern technologies to increase productivity on the acquired land. In fact, many of these deals are intended to produce crops for export or to produce biofuels. Reducing hunger and poverty in the host country is not a priority when crops can instead go to paying customers."
- beat 9y agoYou're on the right track, but getting the wrong conclusion. Green revolution agriculture is about a move from subsistence farming to cash farming. Nobody grows soybeans at scale for subsistence; their value is as a cash crop. It's not just for biofuels. The famed Ethiopian famine of the 1980s? That was caused by the introduction of export cattle farming, fencing off "property" and breaking the traditional grazing cycle that protected the land. Public land got overgrazed, and rivers got silted. And the export cattle? They were for the European pet food market. And European financial interests were all too happy to work with Western governments to put compliant Ethiopian governments in place to do it.