Scientific fraud here feels like a reaction to people not understanding the bargain we have to make given the needs of the world's population. It should be punished, but I can't help but feel there's a point that doesn't get discussed.
The thing that sucks about this is, past a certain point, herbicide/pesticide safety doesn't matter.
We use this stuff, at least industrially, to grow food. Humans need food to live. More food, generally speaking, means healthier humans, Western processed food trends notwithstanding. There's the consumer market that uses glyphosate to make yards pretty in North America, but that's not the real reason we invent herbicides, and yards themselves are problematic, so we'll ignore that for now.
It's not an accident that global starvation deaths have decreased since the 1960s[0]. We started applying chemistry and automation to agriculture. Food security and yields went up. Some of these chemicals we use are, over the long term with chronic low-level exposure, hazardous to human health.
However, they're still less immediately hazardous to the general public than malnutrition and starvation, so the question becomes this: Do you want millions to die of malnutrition now, or do you want an unknown number of people to die of various health issues (particularly cancer, though there are others) caused by chemical exposure at an unknown point in the future, and gamble that medicine will, some day, be able to treat or cure the health issues?
“It is a myth,” said Hilal Elver, the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to food. “Using more pesticides is nothing to do with getting rid of hunger. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), we are able to feed 9 billion people today. Production is definitely increasing, but the problem is poverty, inequality and distribution.” [0]
It also exposes how far the pesticide industry has gone to suppress information about negative impacts on the environment and public health while spreading the totally false myth that rampant growth in pesticide use is needed to feed the world’s population.”
The problem now is poverty, inequality, and distribution.
That wasn't the problem in 1950. The problem then was "this pest/plant/fungus made my crop inedible" across entire regions and that kept there from being enough food.
If there wasn't a good reason to use these chemicals, we wouldn't use them. Farming is a notoriously risky way to earn a living, and if farmers could cut thousands of dollars of chemicals and gear out of their expenses, they almost certainly would, especially if that meant sending those hacks at Bayer less money for seeds that the farmers are restricted from doing certain things with.
I wasn't talking about 1950 and neither were you previously, so let's not shift focus.
If there wasn't a good reason to use these chemicals, we wouldn't use them. Farming is a notoriously risky way to earn a living, and if farmers could cut thousands of dollars of chemicals and gear out of their expenses, they almost certainly would... "
They do and will reduce it by 50%. Well, in Europe they will. It takes some time to break the hold of the chemical industry giants, but it is doable without catastrophic losses, see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10516746/. Not sure why you are so apologetic there.
> I wasn't talking about 1950 and neither were you previously, so let's not shift focus.
I actually was. I said that hunger has decreased since the 1960s, and that was due to things like automation and chemistry - which means things like pesticides - so the 1950s would have been what things looked like before these changes were made, and when the UN official says
>“Using more pesticides is nothing to do with getting rid of hunger. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), we are able to feed 9 billion people today. Production is definitely increasing, but the problem is poverty, inequality and distribution.”
He's talking about using more pesticides than now.
> They do and will reduce it by 50%
Good. No reason to use chemicals that aren't necessary. The problem is, many people across the world have a fundamental lack of understanding on whether pesticides are necessary at all. There are people who think that you can do that, and if you don't show that to not be the case, they'll try it, and people will literally starve.
... which goes back to the point that I made earlier about the lack of the understanding on the bargain we make with these things.
The thing that sucks about this is, past a certain point, herbicide/pesticide safety doesn't matter.
We use this stuff, at least industrially, to grow food. Humans need food to live. More food, generally speaking, means healthier humans, Western processed food trends notwithstanding. There's the consumer market that uses glyphosate to make yards pretty in North America, but that's not the real reason we invent herbicides, and yards themselves are problematic, so we'll ignore that for now.
It's not an accident that global starvation deaths have decreased since the 1960s[0]. We started applying chemistry and automation to agriculture. Food security and yields went up. Some of these chemicals we use are, over the long term with chronic low-level exposure, hazardous to human health.
However, they're still less immediately hazardous to the general public than malnutrition and starvation, so the question becomes this: Do you want millions to die of malnutrition now, or do you want an unknown number of people to die of various health issues (particularly cancer, though there are others) caused by chemical exposure at an unknown point in the future, and gamble that medicine will, some day, be able to treat or cure the health issues?
[0]https://ourworldindata.org/famines