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Comment by japanuspus | Hacker News Reader

The reason this makes sense is that without glyphosate, farmers (and private gardeners) would start using something else, and the likelihood that whatever new compound they find will be worse than glyphosate is very low.

Yes, there are indications that you can get toxic effects if you massively overdose glyphosate, but overall it is a miracle that a generic weed killer which decomposes as easily even exists.

For context: no-till farming is a candidate technology for binding massive amounts of carbon in farmland. In intensive farming, no-till is completely reliant on glyphosate.

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> the likelihood that whatever new compound they find will be worse than glyphosate is very low

Judging from the next sentence, this isn't what you meant to write.

Yep, I agree. Long term the way to go is to encourage more no-till small scale local farming (A.k.a. the "Ridgdale" model) of vegetables and meat.

This won't feed the world, but at least in the less sparse and semi-fertile areas this would be doable.

> This won't feed the world

I'm tbh pretty sick of this sentence. The world could easily feed itself. The reason why half of Africa depends on grain donations and cheap grain from Ukraine and Russia is not climate change... it is because local farming can't compete in price with donations and Western excess, and due to utter incompetence and mismanagement. Simbabwe is the most dire example - it used to feed a lot of people, and then in the early '00s everything got wrecked by Mugabe.

Other countries have economic/criminal realities... say Afghanistan where it's more "productive" to plant poppy or Southern America with cocaine.

> due to utter incompetence and mismanagement

I take offense to that one.

Modern farming need equipment, if you have no capital and can't access loans, because western banks won't lend you money, then your ability to farm is limited. The reality of financy in undeveloped economies is that interest might be 20% and if you fail to repay they might come aftwr your family.

The biggest irony is US appmying pressurr on african countries not to take loans from China while providing no alternative.

Similar thing goes for poppies and cocaine, if we legalised or regulated these drugs adequately, we would not be paying billuons to cartels. Cartels in South America would not exist without the US market.

Sorry, often enough it is incompetence and malice. Just look how much all the various dictators of "officially" piss poor third world countries have looted away. Robert Mugabe, who wrecked Zimbabwe, is suspected to have looted over a billion dollars [1], and he's just a small fish compared to what other dictators have looted [2]. Libya is one of the world's top oil reserve holders, and yet the country is in shambles, with war lords not caring about anything. Venezuela just the same, tons of oil but mismanagement has worn down everything so massively that they depend on foreign imports of refined oil products, not to mention food.

Were it not for utter incompetence, these places would be swimming in money - enough money to restart local agricultural production and provide wealth to all citizens to a degree that would let Europeans look at them like when they do at a transit in Dubai.

Fun fact: a lot of this wealth is safely guarded here in Europe. We could seize it any day we wanted.

> Similar thing goes for poppies and cocaine, if we legalised or regulated these drugs adequately, we would not be paying billuons to cartels. Cartels in South America would not exist without the US market.

Fully agree with you on that. The "war on drugs" has brought nothing but suffering for the people and nature, and probably hundreds of billions of dollars for cartels.

[1] https://money.com/robert-mugabe-zimbabwe-net-worth-assets/

[2] https://lists.ng/13-richest-african-dictators/

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