Re: Unpopular Opinions.
In most cases in the west, yes. But it still helps to develop species that can resist stuff like blight. I don't know how much experience you have with gardening and agriculture, but blight can wipe out your entire crop. I've had it happen with tomatoes during a particularly damp year. You can avoid it by spraying a ton of fungicide on your crops, but wouldn't it be great if we could find a way to naturally avoid blight? I'd rather use a GMO seed that spray chemicals all over my plants.
And I think the issue can be very important in developing countries, which are likely to see harsh effects of climate change in the coming years, including heavy rains, droughts, and things like that. I think it would be far more beneficial to bring resistant plants to these countries than to ship them our overproduction. Aid doesn't empower people; giving them the means to feed themselves does. It's well and good to say that we can do more urban gardening and such here (and I agree...we should. We should also have more co-ops, small farms, community gardens, etc). But in order to bring such projects to the developing world, we need to meet the challenges of growing food in those environments. Building a greenhouse out of an abandoned building can work well in a northern climate like Sweden or Germany, but it won't exactly meet the challenges of a drought in Ethiopia. Obviously, not all countries are created equal and some can grow traditional organic crops with absolutely no problem whatsoever, but other countries face a lot of challenges and the number of regions experiencing said challenges will rise in the next few years.
In most cases in the west, yes. But it still helps to develop species that can resist stuff like blight. I don't know how much experience you have with gardening and agriculture, but blight can wipe out your entire crop. I've had it happen with tomatoes during a particularly damp year. You can avoid it by spraying a ton of fungicide on your crops, but wouldn't it be great if we could find a way to naturally avoid blight? I'd rather use a GMO seed that spray chemicals all over my plants.
And I think the issue can be very important in developing countries, which are likely to see harsh effects of climate change in the coming years, including heavy rains, droughts, and things like that. I think it would be far more beneficial to bring resistant plants to these countries than to ship them our overproduction. Aid doesn't empower people; giving them the means to feed themselves does. It's well and good to say that we can do more urban gardening and such here (and I agree...we should. We should also have more co-ops, small farms, community gardens, etc). But in order to bring such projects to the developing world, we need to meet the challenges of growing food in those environments. Building a greenhouse out of an abandoned building can work well in a northern climate like Sweden or Germany, but it won't exactly meet the challenges of a drought in Ethiopia. Obviously, not all countries are created equal and some can grow traditional organic crops with absolutely no problem whatsoever, but other countries face a lot of challenges and the number of regions experiencing said challenges will rise in the next few years.
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