Luna del'Corvo

I didn't say that you supported organic pesticides, I said that a lot of anti-GMO/organic advocates do. That's one of the reasons why I'm wary of them, along with the fact that they don't seem to get that most organic food is produced by the same Big Agricultural firms that non-organic food is and that organic food is currently a multi-billion dollar industry, so one should be as skeptical as their claims as they are of Monsanto.

There are already limits in most industralised countries on what types of pesticides can be used and how much. Knowledge about the dangers of overuse of pesticides has been around since the 1960s and so, there have been laws passed to regulate it. When I worked retail, there were a whole bunch of rules we had to obey about how to dispose of caustic chemicals and pesticides: namely, we couldn't throw them away in the regular garbage; we had to store them and let them be collected by an EPA-approved agency.

Using compost is a great idea, but there's nowhere near enough high-quality compost available to make enough crops to feed everyone in the United States, let alone the world. And the truth is that organic compost contains the same ingredients as the chemical stuff: nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, all of which are naturally-occurring elements.

It's possible that in some years, the issue of pesticides may be irrelevant: scientists are currently trying to produce crops that won't need pesticides at all (or will need less), because they'll be genetically modified to make them more resistant to insects and disease. But hardline anti-GMO/organic types, often oppose that, too. As I said before, the issue with the hardline anti-GMO/organic movement is that what it preaches is often less sustainable than GMOs and this goes back to practical concerns as well: organic food requires more land to produce, which means that more trees will have to be cut down to make more room for farms and that has a very definite negative impact on the environment.