-------- Forwarded message -------- Date: Sun, 10 Dec 2000 17:20:15 +0000 From: kathryn marsh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (jeff owens) Subject: Re: Pesticides >I just finished scanning a new book on berry >growing (Berry Grower's Companion, Barbara Bowling) >and got lost in the section on pesticides. The >author presented her bias along with the supportive >arguments. She thought her views were moderate and >reasonable. To me they looked unsupportable (i'm against >all use of pesticides). Here are the arguments: > >Pesticides have provided us >with an abundance of food. We >could not feed ourselves without >pesticides. > The type of arguments she seems to be using totally ignore the fact that all the research has gone into agro-chemicals in the past so that the companies paying for the research could make money out of it. If a fraction of the money had been spent on organics we would be seeing higher yields. Anyway we can feed ourselves - the current problem is not one of food supply but of food distribution. I am prepared to bet that most of the people on this list could produce a lot more food from a very small area of land (say a back yard) than most of the proponents of chemical farming. Some people on this list could probably go a long way towards feeding themselves with no land at all if you gave them the tools to build a lighting system. Pesticides are only needed by monoculture. This woman's thinking is dictated by pesticide producers who want to force their poisons down the throats of the rest of the world to make more money kathryn
