Pesticides are killing the world's soils

Legislation to shut down subsidies for non sustainably grown produce would transform the industry in a hurry because most of it is also not sustainable from an economic point of view and very dependent on subsidies. That's the tool to use to fix this.

E.g. US corn subsidies are an anomaly. The world does not need so much corn and biofuels are a particularly lousy excuse to grow that much corn. Corn syrup is not an ingredient that is either common or high in demand outside the US. It's a market that only exists because of corn subsidies. In the same way, we're subsidizing soy, which gets exported from Brazil and from freshly burned down rain forest. The US is a close second for this stuff. Again subsidies combined with mostly very unsustainable styles of farming. Both industries depend on large scale use of pesticides and a few other unsustainable practices and exports to countries that look the other way.

If you are a vegetarian and want to save the planet, stop eating unsustainably grown soy. If you are a meat eater, stop eating unsustainably grown meat where the animals grew up eating unsustainably grown corn and soy. At a macro level it's multiple layers of unsustainable practices that we subsidize so we can have some artificially cheap food that probably isn't that good for you. It's not cheap at all. You just pay for it via your taxes. And we're leaving the damage cleanup for future generations. We're just really good at allowing people to dodge the real cost of things.

The Netherlands has a nice ongoing debate about reducing nitrogen emissions from mostly cattle and traffic. The reasoning goes as follows: high nox concentrations are bad for health (fact), therefore building close to where the concentrations are high is no longer allowed (because it kills people). This simple ruling basically shut down construction next to highways, which is where a lot of prime real estate is in the Netherlands. That is causing a lot of farmers to adapt their behavior because the communities they operate in are not cool with the high nox concentrations any more. They even reduced maximum speeds on the highways from 130 km/h to 100 km/h to cut down on the emissions and thus allow construction projects to resume.

That basically happens when you put numbers on the damage, change the incentives, and put some simple rulings in place. This btw. happened under a mostly conservative right leaning government too. Headed by the party that not so long ago championed the raising of the speed limit to 130 km/h (VVD). The current government is more or less the polar opposite of tree hugging hippies. Highway loving VVD and farmer friendly CDA are two of the coalition parties. And they got this done.

We should do the same with pesticides. There's plenty of good reasons to stop killing our environment like that. The least we can do is stop subsidizing that.

Small scale items in large scale industrial agriculture sounds like something that wouldn't work too great. And might cause even more issues.

Makes me actually think how practical and ecological micro-drones would actually be? Have hundreds or thousands of these little things made out of plastic, with electronics and batteries in them. How do you track those and be sure each and everyone is responsibly recycled? It feels to me like something that would actually cause more issues than solve...

Yes, we have been breeding plants and animals for a long time, long before Mendel. But the difference between breeding and GM is not only a difference in magnitude, it is also a difference in kind. We are not only breeding faster and better aimed, but we are not only ingesting genes from completely different species, but from different kingdoms!

"Well, people have been killing each other with spears forever. Nukes are just more of the same."

I'm also on the EU, and the EU has also many rules for "traditional" agriculture, it is also regulated and controlled.

The problem I have with the Bio label is that these extra rules are counter productive.

    - no use of artificial pesticides (but still allow "natural" ones) 
    - no use of mineral fertilizer
    - no use of GMO
    - no use of artificial food colouring or aromas or conservative.

The thing is that there is little evidence that any of this is better for health or for the environment.