Thoughts

I have two arguments for the third part of our reading assignment

1. The authors have a general argument for buying locally versus buying globally… if you’re not eating locally you’re wrong. The authors believe that purchasing locally is better, overall, for the environment. It cuts down on extra costs such as shipping and extra fuels being burnt, etc. However, my argument right back at the authors would be: how can be so sure that organic farmers uphold the standards that are posted on the USDA network, not to mention these regulations are very loose? Additionally, although local may seem to be friendly to the environment, it can be quite the opposite when it comes to organic fertilizers. There are over 500 different types of fertilizers; anything from crab meal made from Blue Crabs to Bat guano. However, when people purchase these organic things their actions have a consequence on crab populations and biodiversity. For instance; crab meal is made from crushed up shells that are left over from the crab industries. The way these industries go about harvesting these crabs can be detrimental to their populations. Using the Chesapeake Bay for an example has one third of the nation’s crab population. However, since the 1990s, blue crab catches have significantly dropped by 70%. To break it down even further, between 1968 and 2005, commercial crab harvest from the Chesapeake averaged about 73 million pounds annually. That is a lot of crab. Overharvesting these crab populations can have reprocautions in the food chain. Furthermore, harvesting bat guano is detrimental to the caves in which the guano is collected. Let’s take a cave in Jamaica for example. The destruction of Jamaican caves is due to human visitation through mining the guano. Additionally, rich deposits of bat guano act as food for several invertebrates that dwell at the bottom of these caves.

2. My other argument lies with the misquoted press woman, Lindsay Allen, on page 225. She ran an experiment with Kenyan children given additional-animal based foods. Although she is trying to improve and help their diets, I find that studying these effects on children and using the kids as experimental projects is wrongfully using them and it is a moral issue. I could similarly tie this back to the ‘golden rice’ experiment (pg. 214). Produced decided to lace corn, which is a staple food for nourishment, with beta-corotene. Although this could very well have been a wonderful product for third world countries suffering from a majority of the population being malnourished, I tend to wonder how many patents it had to go through. I still do not think they have reached the final product because I have yet to hear about it on a global scale. Therefore, just as experimenting kids was a moral issue, I believe spending millions of dollars on a useless product is a moral issue as well. The product process is draining to public resourced and distracts us from a sustainable agriculture that can produce real solutions to world hunger and malnutrition.