If push comes to shove...?

Rummer

I am reading my way through a number of books at the moment and they are helping me to look at my garden in a completely different way and I am finding more ways to sneak veggies in. I think it is going to be an ongoing process to maximize food yield over the next few years but I feel more and more that this is becoming essential. Food is getting more and more expensive and I find that I am already changing my families pattern of eating as a lot of the fruits and veg that we enjoy are becoming impractically expensive. Plus I love being able to potter about the garden and to pick what I want to eat that day and to eat it fresh.

RAS

rhiwfield wrote: »

RAS, I agree with much in the report, but for the UK I believe that families will begin to suffer from affordability of food rather than shortages, in fact I think that is already happening.

rhiwfield

For most of us, I agree.

But I know there are people in my city who are already struggling to put the calories on the table now. Last year, one woman was working out the calories per penny before every purchase, just to ensure that she and her three children ate sufficient. Never mind whether it was crap or good. BOGOFs on Mars Bar multipacks were a lot better option in her mind than fruit just because of calories.

Locally we may be trying to increase people's access to soft and hard fruits in the areas where these are rare, but it will take time to get this in place.

Part of my aims is not just to make better use of the fruit I already grow but to get more and more fruit (particularly, as you can see from the graphs in that report) growing in the yards and gardens belonging to people whose incomes are low/very low. And one of the groups I work with are getting some autumn fruits distributed via community organisations in some of those areas as well.

cootambear

RAS wrote: »

Yep

Exactly as you said "Although the use of herbicide tolerant crops remain controversial, because of the need to spray herbicides, it is clear that the use of these crops has promoted a shift to less toxic herbicides."

Since those herbicides will no longer be available or will cost a fortune (and I mean a fortune), GE varieties are not sustainable.

Why do you think so many new cotton farmers in India committed suicide? Because they could not afford the chemicals needed to grow their new miracle GE cotton plants well enough to earn more than they did before they converted to the new "miracle" seeds.

GM crops do ot work ona miraculous basis, they take genes from nature.

Human beings look for simple solutions for complex problems based on predudice. thus the disater in haiti - caused by it lying on a geological fault line, underdevelopment as a colonial coutry, lack of resources, affluence and infrastructure, and many other fctors, was simplified by pat robertson.

haitians, he said had entered a pact with the devil to get rid of slavely and were now being punished.

When farmer suicides first happened, prejudiced greens blamed gm cotton. subsequent studies found this explanation worthless.

take this report from an indian pysciatric journal last year

http://www.indianjpsychiatry.org/article.asp?issn=0019-5545;year=2008;volume=50;issue=2;spage=124;epage=127;aulast=Behere


As discussed earlier, some of the important contributing factors for farmers' suicide in this region are:

absence of adequate social support infrastructure at the level of the village and district,
uncertainty of agricultural enterprise in the region,
indebtedness of farmers,
rising costs of cultivation,
plummeting prices of farm commodities,
lack of credit availability for small farmers,
relative absence of irrigation facilities,
repeated crop failures,
dependence on rainfall for farming,
rural living and easy access to poisons, and
lack of political will and insight in the region.

and

NGO named Green Earth Social Development Consulting [10] brought out a report after doing an audit of the state and central government relief packages in Vidarbha.

The report's conclusions were:

Farmers' demands were not taken into count while preparing the relief package. Neither were civil society organizations, local government bodies, panchayats, etc. consulted.
The relief packages were mostly amalgamations of exiting schemes. Apart from the farmer helpline and the direct financial assistance, there was scarcely any thing new being offered. Pumping extra funds into additional schemes shows that no new idea was applied to solve a situation where existing measures have obviously failed.
The farmer helpline did not give any substantial help to farmers.
The basis for selection of beneficiaries under the assistance scheme was not well defined. Also, type of assistance to be given led to problems like a farmer needing a pair of bullocks getting a pump set and vice versa (or a farmer who has no access to water sources being given pump sets).



as I can hope you can see, the problem is complex, and even the `green`report does not implicate gm.

I would like to stress a few points. India, like all former colonies seeking to overcome colonialism, faces the problem of combined and uneven development, that is the boom in manufacturing and urban centres zooms ahead faster than the countryside.

The reports implicate the problems of rural India as a lack of affluece, that is a lack of cheap credit from banks, roads, hospitals, water, electricity. I guess you will point to use of poisons. I would suggest again that this is a infrastructal problem caused by the use of complex materials being used by uneducated peasants (i do not mean this in a perjorative sense, rather this is the literal truth. School infrastructure and education campaigns are needed.

I would also add that the effect of the disgraceful US government susidy of its own cotton farmers to the tune of $4b, combined with falling monetary support to indian farmers has magnifed the problem.

As I said earlier, the problems are multifold and complex, but measures to increase afffluence in the counntryside would go a log way to address the problem.support.

I wonder why so may neo malthusians argue that growing populations will cause a food crisis, while they oppose gm which has the potential to dramatically increase yields. I think it is because they are, not only blinkered by their notion of fixed limits and ignorance of innovation; they are determined to see human beigs as verminous rather than trancesdent.

I do not think that gm crops are magic. like any new technology there needs to be a rational debate about cost/benefits/drawbacks.

rhiwfield

RAS wrote: »

rhiwfield

For most of us, I agree.

But I know there are people in my city who are already struggling to put the calories on the table now. Last year, one woman was working out the calories per penny before every purchase, just to ensure that she and her three children ate sufficient. Never mind whether it was crap or good. BOGOFs on Mars Bar multipacks were a lot better option in her mind than fruit just because of calories.

Locally we may be trying to increase people's access to soft and hard fruits in the areas where these are rare, but it will take time to get this in place.

Part of my aims is not just to make better use of the fruit I already grow but to get more and more fruit (particularly, as you can see from the graphs in that report) growing in the yards and gardens belonging to people whose incomes are low/very low. And one of the groups I work with are getting some autumn fruits distributed via community organisations in some of those areas as well.

RAS, that was what I meant by affordability, there is no absolute shortage of food in the UK, but some people people wont be able to afford to buy a nutritious and varied diet, and the current increase in food banks is a sign that some families may be going hungry.

And given that 90% of our fruit is imported, I applaud initiatives to increase UK fruit production and distribution of local surpluses

Lotus-eater

I think it was Horizon on BBC2 last night which talked about the loss of belief in science.

It covered for a few brief minutes GM crops and unfortunately although it covered the climate warming debate quite well, the GM coverage was almost insulting and the only reason he gave for people not liking GM, was that they don't like eating foods with genes in it. As I say insulting, but interesting.

You can catch it on iplayer I would guess.

cootambear

Lotus-eater wrote: »

I think it was Horizon on BBC2 last night which talked about the loss of belief in science.

It covered for a few brief minutes GM crops and unfortunately although it covered the climate warming debate quite well, the GM coverage was almost insulting and the only reason he gave for people not liking GM, was that they don't like eating foods with genes in it. As I say insulting, but interesting.

You can catch it on iplayer I would guess.

I agree, It was a pile of crap that paid science a diservice

zarazara

I am really looking forward to getting the allotment [ my veg plot] planted up this spring and summer. I am going to use the mooon phases as a guide ,never done this before, it will be interesting to see if crop yield is noticably different or tastes better than usual.
I live in a very rural area and our major expence is transport ie Diesel,car tax and insurance.

[Deleted User]

I spent a couple of hours on my allotment this morning and by golly it was cold and windy up there, so I knelt down and did a fair bit of hand weeding which was quite pleasurable as the soil is very soft just now. It is very important to keep on top of things, a bit at a time. I bought a roll of environmesh last year and have just spent another hour cutting 3 lengths for two 8 x 4 raised beds and 1 small cage. It is my view that we need to learn how to protect what we grow as it is so disheartening to see leeks, onions and brassicas under mass attack

I am not entering the gm argument. I have always eaten organic and will continue to do so and if anyone else wants to be a guinea pig so monanto can get richer then that is their choice. I am a trained scientist with a degree but science involving chemicals, of any sort, has no place in my plot. That sort of choice should be open to everyone and many more small plots should be made easily available to anyone who wants one

GreyQueen

I've been allotmenteering (is that a word?!) for 5 years now, 2 years on the waiting list sharing someone else's plot and 3 years on my own, hauling it back from dereliction. I don't make a fuss over buying organic veg when I shop as I don't have enough cash to pay a premium price but there's no way that I will use chemicals on my lottie. The place is heaving with amphibians (frogs, toads, common newts) and when you're getting down close and personal with your soil you can see the mini-beasts, the spiders, the worms and the grubs. I'm sure being chemical-free is making a difference. For example, last summer when the runner beans were in flower, I was talking to a neighbour from a couple of plots away. He was lamenting that there were no bees pollinating his beans, that he was having to mist them with the hose to get the flowers to set. I was baffled as my beans were no more than 20 metres from his. We walked down; mine were heaving with bumble bees (several species) and even honey bees, which have just re-appeared after a 2 year gap. Guess which of us was using chemicals?

I don't want to get into the GM argument too deeply because I consider that I am not sufficiently educated on the science to do the debate credit. However, some people may not know that the leading GM manufacturer is Monsanto, formerly famous for producing the defoliant Agent Orange which was dumped on the jungles of south-east asia a few decades ago. I'm sure you can find pictures of the birth defects thus caused on the web. The ecosystems which were sprayed have not recovered to this day.

My own stance is this; we need to look after the planet as best we can, to live as lightly as we can, or homo sapiens as the species at the top of the food chain will be the worst affected.

The world is littered with the remains of cities and countries and even empires whose names are known only to a few historians, if known at all. Behind it all, you will find environmental degradation, silting of harbours, salination of fields, deforestation and the blithe assumption that people could breed as many children as they liked and take, take, take and never pay the bill.

We've only got the one planet and if we trash it through greed, stupidity and carelessness, when we know how to live better, then maybe our own mass extinction will be no more than justice.

So, be of stout heart and true, get down with those veggies, no matter how small scale it is, and keep your soil in good heart. Building the soil is the way to sustainable food supplies.

cootambear

kittie wrote: »

I spent a couple of hours on my allotment this morning and by golly it was cold and windy up there, so I knelt down and did a fair bit of hand weeding which was quite pleasurable as the soil is very soft just now. It is very important to keep on top of things, a bit at a time. I bought a roll of environmesh last year and have just spent another hour cutting 3 lengths for two 8 x 4 raised beds and 1 small cage. It is my view that we need to learn how to protect what we grow as it is so disheartening to see leeks, onions and brassicas under mass attack

I am not entering the gm argument. I have always eaten organic and will continue to do so and if anyone else wants to be a guinea pig so monanto can get richer then that is their choice. I am a trained scientist with a degree but science involving chemicals, of any sort, has no place in my plot. That sort of choice should be open to everyone and many more small plots should be made easily available to anyone who wants one

If you eat food of any description you are eating a 100% chemical concoction. The main ingredient of food is a chemical called h2o.

The very act of adding fertiliser of any sort changes soil chemistry and consequently the chemical make up of the food.

I agree with you about choice. There should be no government regulation of food that is safe to eat, or `nudge` propaganda to alter free wishes.

I fear that the local government cuts may force more councils to hike allotment prices or even sell them off. Nationally they are considering flogging off public woodlands.