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Ah, not this stupid argument again. It's really easy to talk about decreasing genetic diversity when you have never known hunger. In India alone, the work of N
by Tuna-Fish 13y ago
Ah, not this stupid argument again.
It's really easy to talk about decreasing genetic diversity when you have never known hunger. In India alone, the work of Norman Borlaug and his co-workers saved at least a hundred million lives. Before his intervention, large-scale famine and starvation in India was widely considered inevitable. Those are real people, whose lives you seem to weigh very little when you consider them against the still theoretical disadvantages of modern selective breeding.
- holri 13y agoThis is not theoretical. Ground water is contaminated due to pesticides. Small farmers are loosing there farms and income because of the economics of scale and competition from food industries. Farmers are getting dependent on foreign companies and policies. Organic food tastes much better. The number of known varieties is decreasing and with it change and healthy diversity. The soil is exhausted. Rain forest is cleared.
- anologwintermut 13y agoMillions upon Millions of people starved before this stuff existed, and you point out that "organic food tastes much better." Honestly, wtf. Are you trying to get beheaded in the next French Revolution? The rest of your points are reasonable concerns, but need to be followed up by a very important question: are there alternatives that produce similar quantities of food for similar costs? Because until/unless there are, fixing the issues you raised means starving people to death.
- holri 13y agoIs there a reason you only pickup up one point?
- anologwintermut 13y agoIs there a reason you didn't read the rest of my comment? >The rest of your points are reasonable concerns, but need to be followed up by a very important question: are there alternatives that produce similar quantities of food for similar costs? Because until/unless there are, fixing the issues you raised means starving people to death.
- holri 13y ago> fixing the issues you raised means starving people to death. No not everywhere.
- hga 13y agoI'm rather older than the average HNer, and it's hard to express how profound the worldview shift was when I read in 1983 that India was sending food to relieve the Ethiopian famine. I grew up in the period when parents trying to get their children to finish a meal said "Think of the starving children in India." The meme was pervasive because it was true.
- harrytuttle 13y agoAs you all pour your half eaten dinners into the bin... I grew up in the same period for reference and the logic was slightly painful.
- hga 13y agoExcept I don't, nor does any member of my nuclear family. We do our best to make sure it doesn't go to waste, one way or another. An additional factor is that my parents were born during the Great Depression and experienced the privations of WWII on the home front. So they taught by example ... still do, in fact.
- harrytuttle 13y agoSave a million. Kill a billion. Sounds harsh but saving those lives also makes the problem worse i.e. the population's dependency and consumption grows meaning that if (when) the theoretical disadvantages start to become a reality, it's going to be truly horrific. Unpopular opinion: these people need to stop fucking if they are going hungry.