The witch hunt against Roundup started with the environmental Luddites who are opposed in principle to large scale, technology intensive production agriculture -- and a lot of that came originally from the Europeans who were desperately seeking non-tariff trade barriers to allow European microfarms to stay in business vs. modern agriculture in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, and the Ukraine.
Buy a clue. You don't lease a new $400,000 combine every three years to farm 20 acres. So how does the 20 acre gardener stay in business and earn a decent living against modern production agriculture? Answer: the same way a home woodworking enthusiast who makes furniture, or the people who enjoy hand weaving on old fashioned looms, or mechanically minded tinkerers who would like to build cars in a machine shed in back might stay in business: suppression of the competition and massive subsidies, if anyone were fool enough to arrange an entire economy that way. (Ooooh, just think of all the jobs! Bernie Sanders is sold.) Let's hear it for artisanal production!!!!
The WTO limited trade distorting tariffs on agricultural products. But France, the UK, etc. don't have production agriculture as we understand it. They have landscape gardening programs that produce food on the side. They can get reasonably high yields because farmers can intensively cultivate their little 20-40 acre truck gardens, but they can't live on that. They live on government subsidies under the EU's common agricultural program in which they are paid for providing "social benefits" such as scenic hedgerows, stone walls dividing tiny plots, lots of weed and insect habitat, etc.
Try restructuring Iowa and Nebraska around 20-40 acre hobby farms. Yes, that would provide lots of employment as we restored a premodern peasant class. But then we would have to pay them massive social benefits welfare benefits to give them a middle class life. You can't have cute Swiss cows grazing on picturesque Swiss mountainsides if Swiss farmers had to compete with Wisconsin and Iowa. So: how could they keep the evil Americans out?
The solution: for a start, turn Roundup into a boogeyman and demonize Monsanto. The first wave of GMO crops were grains genetically modified to be Roundup tolerant. Farmers could shift to low-till and no-till farming systems (which reduce passes over the field, slash fuel consumption, help prevent soil erosion, and improve moisture retention). Plant the GMO corn and soybeans. When plants started to emerge, spray the field with Roundup, which kills all the weeds while the corn and soybeans thrive. That also eliminates a lot of insect habitat. It boosts productivity all around. Farmers in the U.S. aren't paid for providing insect habitat. Farmers in the EU are. Everything flows from that. The radical, anti-modern agriculture enviros ate that up because almost no environmental activists have ever done a lick of real work (let alone spend all day every day doing drudge labor in the fields), and they have consistently lied through their teeth about every imaginary hobgoblin they can conjure up. They get away with it because the press is incompetent, corrupt, ideologically driven, and lazy.
And then the lawyers step in to monetize the lies. That's lawfare.
What are you, a poison pusher by profession?
Most of the developed world manages to feed itself with significantly less poisoning and distortion of its food supply.
We’ve gone way overboard and do need to pull back significantly from the chemical monoculture approach that has so degraded our farmland—and our people.
Thanks.
L
The average size of a French farm is 170 acres, less than half the U.S. average of 464 acres. That size is comparable to those of farms in Ohio (171 acres) or Virginia (187 acres). French farms are larger than the average for England (123 acres), the Netherlands (79 acres) or Ireland (104 acres). France remains self-sufficient in food production, although the French farmers are plagued by the "green" regulations stemming from Paris and Brussels.