Not even the most ardent supporter of conventional/chemical/poisonous agriculture can claim that the chart below (60% increase in the use of poisons over 30 years) represents progress.
What is even more scary is that over this period of time global cropland has decreased by approximately 1 million square kilometres.
Despite this increased use of pesticides etc we lose 20 – 40% of crops to pests and disease.
Most pesticides damage a broad spectrum of beneficial insets and microorganisms, not just the target pest. This disrupts the biological controls that are essential in keeping pets and diseases in check. Without biological controls, crops suffer, and many growers respond with more and stronger chemical interventions.
This is known as the chemical treadmill which many farmers are stuck on.
These poisons have saturated our food, our water and our air. Glyphosate, which is most of the chart above (practically all of the blue) was found in more than 80% of US urine samples. I have written about this poison here.
If we had a government that cared about it’s people it would outright ban these poisons. I wrote about that here.
Look no further than Shanna Swan whose book Countdown explains the precipitous decline in human fertility over the last few decades. These poisons are designed to kill and that it exactly what they are doing.
The solution is to go back and embrace regenerative agriculture. This chemical based agriculture is a modern aberration which really took hold post World War 1 and has since then captured academia and media to the extent that it is deemed conventional agriculture. I wrote a piece here on how South Africa can be fed regeneratively.
Angus
4 March 2024.
P.S. Thanks to Sam Knowlton from Soilsymbiotics for finding this on the Our World in Data website.
