Environmental Costs

Modern agriculture imposes “external costs” that are seldom  reflected in the price at the market place. Monocropping and poor water management have lowered water tables to alarming levels all over India, particularly in Punjab.The surface wash off  from conventional fields sprayed with herbacides and synthetic fertilizers have saturated  water ways

with nitrates, salts, pcbs, organochlorines, creosote, and sulfates causing dead water zones, eutrophication and higher levels of cancer  where these have entered the drinking water supply. Monocropping destroys the biodiversity of an area, and thus compromises the natural defenses of  the area against blites and infestations, forces the farmer to use more water, forcing other beneficial inhabitants of the ecosystem to the fringes. The use of genetically modified seeds, is not only dangerous because of a lack of long term testing on broad spectrum public health effects but gm seeds erode the diversity of the public seed supply.

Industrial argriculture uses monocropping, which tends to encourage the purchase of expensive petrol powered machinery that compacts the soil and increases fossil fuel usage and thus carbon pollution.

Overtime over worked, and over nitrogenated soils become arid, dusty, pushing farmers further into forested areas. They has been a cause of deforestation around the globe. The felling of trees contributes to climate change, because trees are the planets primary climate regulator, expiring water, trapping carbon dioxide, and cooling surface temperatures. Tree, their roots and associated vegetation also keeps soil from eroding, and provides habitat for those species fleeing from the ever expanding flat expanse of open toxified fields.

Those people who cannot afford to continue pouring more fertilizers and pesticides on their fields do to rising input costs have no hope for future crop growth and become what the United Nations has termed agricultural refugees. Unless organic, regenerative remediation efforts are started, entire regions begin to desertify.

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