The Pesticide Industry Now The Climate's Best Friend; Much Discussion Of Sustainability, Little Data

[hatrack]

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Genetic modification plays a significant role in most of the strategies backed by pesticides manufacturers. “For example, planting genetically modified seeds enables farmers to use reduced tillage and no till practices, which has resulted in a substantial reduction in carbon dioxide emissions,” a video by Bayer, the manufacturer of glyphosate-based pesticides like RoundUp, says. “And as these tactics are adopted, farmers can help mitigate climate change and its impacts. That’s not just good for farmers, it’s good for all of us.”

These tactics have some potential to help farms cut their greenhouse gas emissions, but how much is highly debated. At a policy level, critics fear that terms like “climate smart” and “resilient” farming are so vague that they’re vulnerable to greenwashing. “There is no precise definition for ‘climate smart agriculture’ and deliberately so,” the Down to Earth blog reported in 2016, adding that, for example, the Global Alliance for Climate Smart Agriculture “leaves it to its members to determine what ‘climate smart agriculture’ means to them. There are no social or environmental safeguards.”

Critics also argue that the dual “precision” and “regenerative” climate strategies pesticides manufacturers are now pushing could in fact maintain — or even increase — the world’s dependence on fossil-fuel based agricultural products. “They're just trying to sell the same old stuff under different labels,” says Stacy Malkan, co-founder of the food industry watchdog group US Right to Know. “The bottom line is they're chemical companies and they want to sell more chemicals.”

It’s not just campaigners who are concerned. A 2017 report by the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food found that, “it is commonly argued that intensive industrial agriculture, which is heavily reliant on pesticide inputs, is necessary to increase yields to feed a growing world population, particularly in the light of negative climate change impacts and global scarcity of farmlands”. But noting that 200,000 people die of acute pesticides poisoning each year, it added that “reliance on hazardous pesticides is a short-term solution that undermines the rights to adequate food and health for present and future generations.” Beyond sustaining the pesticides-heavy status-quo, there are other problems with these approaches: from pricing out farmers in developing countries, to the technology not actually working, and a paucity of data to actually measure success.

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/11/18/pesticides-industry-climate-change-marketing-pr

[abqtommy]

1. My own personal thought is that I'd rather have honeybees than pesticides.