Foods / Tuesday, 09-Sep-2025

Viewpoint: The agroecology movement is turning against technology in agriculture, and the poor suffer

Viewpoint: The agroecology movement is turning against technology in agriculture, and the poor suffer

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The World Economic Forum says the world faces a new crisis, “One-third of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions come from food production.” With the world’s population expected to reach 10 billion people by 2050, it is there fore “urgent” that we launch a “radical” and “comprehensive” transformation of the global food system – from “reinventing” farming to “reimagining” how food is produced, processed, distributed, consumed and disposed of.

Reinforcing this message, Stop Ecocide Now founder Jojo Mehta expanded on Greta Thunberg’s incendiary 2020 rant that “our house is on fire and you’re fueling the flames.” Farming is a “serious crime,” equal to “genocide,” Ms. Mehta told elites at the 2024 WEF meeting in Davos.

Their grasp of agriculture is epitomized by Michael Bloomberg’s suggestion that anybody can be a farmer: “You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, you add water, up comes the corn.”

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Their hatred of biotech crops is intense and well-documented. But many also despise hybrid seeds. They want modern herbicides and insecticides banned, in favor of “natural” alternatives – which are often toxic to bees, fish, other animals and people and have not been tested for long-term harm to humans.

These agricultural anarchists also demand “natural” fertilizers, which typically provide a fraction of the nutrients that modern synthetic fertilizers do. At the very least, they want global organic farming, which would mean much lower crop yields per acre than conventional farming, and plowing many millions of additional acres of wildlife habitat and scenic land, to get the same amounts of food.

They say people in Africa, Asia and Latin America should practice subsistence farming – which they prefer to call “traditional” farming, Agro-Ecology, “food sovereignty,” or the “right to choose” “culturally appropriate” food produced through “ecologically sound and sustainable methods,” based on “indigenous agricultural knowledge and practices.”

In plain English, Agro-Ecology is rabidly opposed to biotechnology, monoculture farming, non-organic fertilizers, chemical pesticides, and even mechanized equipment and hybrid seeds.

You can imagine how Agro-Ecologists would react if African farmers wanted to assert their food sovereignty, self-determination and right to choose by planting biotech corn (Bt-corn), to get higher yields, reduce pesticide use, enjoy better living standards and send their kids to school. The agro-anarchists would vilify them as vile supporters of violence against women, land-grabbing corporations, mass expropriation of indigenous rights, genocide and other “crimes against humanity.”

They also promote “alternative protein.” They say Africa would be “the perfect laboratory” for testing new foods – such as “crackers, muffins, meat loaves and sausages” made from lake flies. In fact, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Popular Science magazine and many other outfits extol the virtues of “entomophagy” – the clever progressive term for eating bug burgers, instead of hamburgers.

Who are these guys – these agriculture and nutrition anarchists and revolutionaries? Stay tuned.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here

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