The question raised in my mind today is how natural selection of our food crops is going to occur if we have a monoculture managed by Monsanto. If all grains are the same patented variety, or one of a few patented varieties, then how is natural selection going to take place? What if these are all terminator varieties, ones that don’t grow viable seeds. It means our way of intensive farming increases the risk there will be no corps capable of delivering enough food when temperatures start to rise in earnest.
“The success of agriculture has been astounding,” said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a researcher at NASA who helped
pioneer the study of climate change and agriculture. “But I think there’s starting to be premonitions that it may not continue forever.” (source)
well someone more intimate with the actual food production methods was a lot less optimistic a lot earlier..We are talking the CEO of Monsanto Robert Shapiro
“In agriculture the starting point I think has to be the recognition that the commercial industrial technologies that are used in agriculture today to feed the world, those technologies are not inherently sustainable and they have not worked well to promote either self sufficiency or food security in developing countries and no-one would argue that bio-technology alone is the solution to issues of sustainability in agriculture or food security for the world” (source)
Still the blindness continues:
"These experts say that in coming decades, farmers need to withstand whatever climate shocks
"come their way while roughly doubling the amount of food they produce to meet rising demand. " (source)
No of course not. The doubling of the demand is because of doubling of the populaton and doubling of oil consumption which will not happen. The projections are made based on acceptable oil prices, but in order to have a full thorttle economy with people stuck to their ipods you need to have a lot of excess oil and the fight is already on for that. The map below is a more reliable expectation of trouble, although one would rather not have any trouble. It seems India is being killed off more or less. How are they going to cope with their problems.
(bron)