FTA “ improvements in crop yields, agricultural productivity, and dietary choices are so important.”
and the biggest one imo is dietary choices. Our meat consumption has lead to pasteurization of forest land to raise and feed the huge amount of livestocks needed to satisfy our meat craving.
In the US, at least, we could keep our meat consumption quite high while still grazing lots of cattle. There are around 90 million cows in the US right now, and pre-1800s there were around 60 million bison in the US. Land and pasture management is important, but it can be done well. Check out Alexander Family Farm in CA for a great example.
We're not going to turn marginal grasslands into crops for human consumption, but using cattle to turn inedible grass into calories for human consumption is possible while maintaining that land as it was when bison roamed through it.
I also don't think that the US, for example, has to manage its land the same ways as other countries. If the US can effectively manage pasture and raise lots of cattle to eat, then we should be able to do that, and if other countries can't, then they should manage their land in a way that is optimal for their country. The US has a lot of grass pasture land that evolved over time to support the massive number of ruminants that roamed the US in the not too distant past.
Maybe the US should stop exports of beef and dairy and just focus on feeding its own people from well-managed land. But that would not be very popular, especially with our cattle industry.
While the many types of forests (deciduous, coniferous, rain, etc) dominate a lot of land on earth, there is still many types of plains, chaparral/savannah, deserts, mountain, tundras, etc.
> The source of his worry is a huge trade deal being negotiated by the European Union and the four Mercosur members Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay — an accord whose signature seems closer than ever.
> The new imports would represent just one percent of Europe's total beef production, and 4.5 percent of France's output.
So the deal hasn't been signed and wouldn't represent much.
> Issues à près de 92 % de l’Union européenne, les importations de viande bovine chutent de 16,8 % sur un an, pour atteindre près de 283 milliers de tec en 2020
Which rougly translates to "92% of beef imports are coming from the UE. They fell by 16.8% to 283k tec in 2020".
There's a total in "tableau 2", page 3. 28.4% of the total meat is imported, 18.9% for the beef. The total non EU beef is thus 8% (100% of total beef imported - 92% of UE beef) * 18.9% (percentage of imported beef). Rounded up, it's 1.6%. I would hardly call that "outsourcing their diets and problems" and "pulling a lot of their beef from South America". More than 80% of the cattle eaten is localy raised, less than 2% comes from outside the EU.
South American beef is not a thing in France. We surely have plenty of other issues, but South American beef is not one of them.
Imports exist, and France is a major importer of meat. Meat production has become less land intensive compared to 200 years ago, but it is by far the worst way of producing food if you compare calory intake to land use.
> Meat production has become less land intensive compared to 200 years ago, but it is by far the worst way of producing food if you compare calory intake to land use.
Most meat, at least in France, is raised on land that couldn't support other kind of agriculture. The calorie intake of that land, without cows grazing on it, would be 0.
I doubt so, farmers in my village in France never take their cows out of the barn. They feed them with dry grass and fermented corn (ensilage) they grow.
Cow grazing is a thing of the past unless you do milk for AOP cheese or premium meat. By the way cheap beef in supermarket is actually old milk cow
No European country does really. Nor do Australia and New Zealand to my knowledge. That’s why the beef tastes so much better. Cattle that are grass fed taste very different.
Yes. You asked about feedlots. Europe pretty much doesn’t have them, as I said. Note that beef cattle are 80% grass fed according to the document. Dairy that are eventually eaten eat less grass, 2/3.
I was talking about more than feedlots, I was talking about grass-fed cattle vs. not grass-fed cattle. Do you really think it matters if a cow eats grain in a "feedlot" instead of on a "farm"? I sure don't.
The lifecycle is more complex than this. Slash and burn agriculture is used to squeeze a few cash soybean crops out, this requires specific GMO soy, and these are 90% sold to China to fatten pigs.
When the land is only suitable for grass, it's grazed for awhile, after which it's basically desert.
South America also has some of the richest cattle land in the world in the Pampas, which has sustained beef production for hundreds of years on land which is otherwise unsuitable to food production.
Pressure on one company could stop the conversion of rainforest into soybeans. This doesn't solve the problem in a single stroke, nothing can, but it would help, and it doesn't require influence over the government of Brazil.
Yes, let's blame the consumer. First of all, the consumer has no idea how their specific spending habits contribute to an issue. For instance, an educated consumer (many consumers are not educated btw) might understand that eating meat causes deforestation, but they have no way of knowing if their specific purchase is contributing to that. Second, blaming the consumer makes any solution almost impossible because organizing a very large group of disinterested people is very hard. It would be much more effective to regulate the relatively small number of meat producers that are perpetuating deforestation and let the market work out decreasing consumption through increased costs.
Yes, let's. I don't think an argument can be held against this. As a meat eater, I understand I'm the driving force of this issue. It's an inconvenient truth, but it is the truth nonetheless. I'm rooting for alternatives like lab-grown meat to thrive, but no amount of wishful thinking allows me to skirt the fact that eating less meat would probably be not only good for the planet, but specifically for my own health.
> the consumer has no idea how their specific spending habits contribute to an issue
Let me point it out: in the developed world it's almost 100% guaranteed that it contributes significantly. You have to go to pretty far edge cases to find really sustainably produced meat. A case can be made that not all industrial farms contribute to deforestation per se, but they are all part of a system that has a high cost for our environment. Deforestation is bad, but it's not –and should not be– the only issue.
> As a meat eater, I understand I'm the driving force of this issue.
How did you come to that understanding? Did you dedicate your free time to studying the impact of meat eating, or was it part of your legally mandated education? A lot of people scrape by, barely able to make ends meet. They have children that require attention, or problems that require immediate action. They may have debts to pay, and no social safety net to help. At a fundamental level, they may have poor critical thinking skills. It's not realistic to expect every consumer to take the time to understand the consequences of every purchasing decision.
> A case can be made that not all industrial farms contribute to deforestation per se, but they are all part of a system that has a high cost for our environment.
But the package says it was humanely raised by family farms? Your trips to the grocery store are going to take a very long time if you need to do a supply chain analysis of every purchase.
If a person cuts down a tree for profit, and the removal of that tree is problematic, then that person is to blame. It doesn't make sense to blame someone many steps removed from the crime just because they, in a very indirect way, provided a very small incentive to commit the crime. The impact of the individual's consumption on the entirety of the industrial farming system is so small that, even if the individual consumer were to blame, they would be guilty of nothing more than the tiniest infraction. The issue with industrial farming arrises from the collective sum of demand, and thus requires a collective solution, i.e. centralized regulation.
But the parent commenter has an important point that should not be dismissed. It is far more effective to regulate/improve centrally at the producer side rather than "wait" for the goodwill of consumers.
You can't flood the world with cheap unsustainable meat (or other products), next put a far more expensive sustainable option next to it and think all of this will just magically play out.
Ideally, there should be no unsustainable goods being offered at all. The very word unsustainable pretty strongly suggests that ending the practice is a must.
Right now it is hard to look at our kids faces and not feel the impact of this tragedy. I don’t know about everyone but for most people their kids lives are way more important than their right to bear military grade guns. If there is no perfect solution we have to live with a less than perfect solution. If the solution is to legally make it harder for people to access such guns then so be it.
As tragic as these events may be, the probability of your kids dying to a school shooting is still incredibly low, and a few orders of magnitude less than car accidents.
Doing some quick math, it seems like it's around 100 to 1000 times more likely that some kid dies to some accident than a mass shooting. But people don't seem to worry 1000 times more about these accidents than school shootings. And it would actually be much easier to reduce the accident number than the shooting number.
Perhaps this is approximately true if you focus exclusively on mass shootings at schools. But shootings overall are one of the leading causes of deaths for children in the US.
See for instance the CDC's visualizations on causes of death per age group [1]. In 2020, 476 children aged 10-14 died in traffic accidents involving motor vehicles. 218 children aged 10-14 were killed in homicides by firearms.
Those two numbers are very much in the same order of magnitude. This is also the case in prior, non-Covid years.
Any stats on legal vs illegal guns killing children?
Curious as to whether criminals being unable to purchase firearms legally has done anything to stop them from getting ahold of firearms and committing shootings.
> the probability of your kids dying to a school shooting is still incredibly low
It's only about 50000% higher than in any other place of the world. Is this what you say to you children? That they don't get to get unlucky????????
School should be one of the safest places of the world. People are discussing what COVID will do to the future of their kids. I wonder what living in fear will do instead, which has a much much much bigger impact than 2 years of missed school.
On that reasoning, all of the "lockdowns" and "active shooter drills" and all the other bullshit that the US makes its children undertake in school are a complete waste of time.
Are you seriously trying to argue that school shootings don't happen often enough to try to stop them? Or that society can't do two things (reduce accidental deaths and reduce mass murder) at the same time?
The rationalization of an insane gun culture is incessant and foolish. Guns are a tool and the bullshit that somehow the civilian population would "defend" itself against military coups by the US military, or even more ridiculous, against invasion, is an excuse to allow the ongoing fetish of guns.
For 99.99% of the population, guns are dangerous to have, not because someone might attack you, but because guns are dangerous to have in the home. They are misused, mistakenly left unsecured, and accessed by people (children, those with mental illness) that shouldn't.
Hell, you can't even agree on background checks because of some stupidity regarding having a "register" in case the "government" comes after your weapons.
The US is an empire in decline, and your internal division around this "culture" is a large part of the dis/mis-information exercise that has infected the body politic.
The NRA is a lobby group for gun manufacturers that has bought numerous politicians, while lying to its members about its purpose. The fact that so many actually believe the bullshit is a prime example of dis/mis-information.
From what I can tell, Americans that are opposed to gun restrictions generally also think that "active shooter drills" are indeed a waste of time that just traumatize children for no real benefit other than the political gain of people that want to ban guns. So you're probably pushing against an open door with that argument.
The NRA are incredibly divisive, and it looks like help was offered to keep them doing that.
> The rationalization of an insane gun culture is incessant and foolish. Guns are a tool and the bullshit that somehow the civilian population would "defend" itself against military coups by the US military, or even more ridiculous, against invasion, is an excuse to allow the ongoing fetish of guns.
This - the politics of guns and political violence in the US - is arguably a bigger factor than the guns themselves. The gun does not carry out a mass shooting by itself. And very few mass shooters decide purely on their own to do it; there's a radicalization pipeline. That is why the US has a higher mass shooting rate than other countries with lots of guns.
There are (conservatively) hundreds of thousands of defensive gun uses per year. Many just involve presenting or brandishing the gun without having to use it.
Could you look someone in the face who has used a gun to protect themselves or their family and tell them they will need to give up that gun for "public safety"?
> Absolutely. Nowhere else in the civilized world do people rely on having a gun to "protect themselves or their family"
Of course you cannot rely on something you are not allowed to have in the first place. Those individuals are still vulnerable if they were presented with an imminent deadly force threat.
> Perhaps you need to look at why, in your society, there are so many "opportunities" for "defensive gun uses".
Of course! that's a very interesting subject in itself. The widespread ownership of guns is not itself the cause.
First thing that comes to my mind is “What happens if your phone is suddenly dead”? Will this FIDO alliance guarantee alternative means of access or that they will send someone down to your house to identify you positively and restore access to your online mail and documents?
I get that but I think OIDC could be extended to cover that too whereas the Authenticator or iDP is the local face scanner kr other biometric and then the rest ie exchange of token etc stays the same. That way there won’t be two completely separate path and that will defeat the purpose of SSO ie OIDC websites will authenticate with google or Facebook but FIDO enabled websites will work with face recognition. And it looks like there are already some implementation of this OIDC enabled face recognition https://www.bioid.com/facial-recognition-app/
1. You can use OpenID Connect as a protocol to integrate (via federation) with a site that provides authenticator management. This is AFAIK how most deployments work today - even if that OpenID Provider winds up being something you run or you pay to be run for you (AKA a CIAM solution).
2. There is an upcoming specification, Self-Issued OpenID Providers v2, which provides a redirection flow to an agent such as a native app or PWA app. This does look a bit different from traditional OpenID Connect though, as each End-user is effectively its own issuer with its own public key pair.
Since the browser and platform will have integrated support for FIDO/WebAuthn tech, they may still provide a better experience for equivalent scenarios.
Yes I get that but I think OIDC could be extended to cover that too whereas the Authenticator or iDP is the local face scanner kr other biometric and then the rest ie exchange of token etc stays the same. That way there won’t be two completely separate path and that will defeat the purpose of SSO. And it looks like there are already some implementation of this https://www.bioid.com/facial-recognition-app/
and the biggest one imo is dietary choices. Our meat consumption has lead to pasteurization of forest land to raise and feed the huge amount of livestocks needed to satisfy our meat craving.