b'RECKONING ON FARMING AND FOODLets take stock of F2Fs argument. The novel coronavirus may seem like a once-in-a-century disaster, but food and farm crises regularly roil the world. Currently, East Africa along with parts of the Middle East and India are being ravaged by a Biblical scale locust plague. It threatens 22 million people in Africa with starvation. Only the widespread deployment of insecticides have been able to get it under control.Thats one of many scourges. Myriad plant pests and viral, bacterial and fungal crop diseases, including the destructive fall armyworm, which jumped across the Atlantic to Africa, threaten. The Varroa parasite that sickens honeybees is an invasive species that arrived in Europe in the 1960s before spreading to the U.S. in the 1980s. Add the fact that climate change is altering growing conditions, increasing drought and other destructive weather patterns, and Black Swan events, like COVID, are inevitable. Consider these threats in light of our need to increase foodEast Africa is being ravaged by a Biblical scale locust plague, threateningproduction 70-100% by 2050. We face two challenges: fast-grow- 22 million people with starvation. Source: FAO via the Genetic Literacy Projecting populations and rising demand for more and higher caloric food for people in developing countries who now subsist on 1,000 calories a day, and wont be satisfied with meagre bowls of rice. Food activists line up against claims that we dont grow enough food to meet demand. 88 million tons of food is wastedOrganic farmers use many annually in Europe alone, they note. All we need to do is, snap, end food waste. Laudable, but unworkable. Perhaps we couldapproved synthetic chemicals we assign food monitors to every home, farm and restaurant to collect scraps after we ate our calorie allotment. And then pre- and hundreds of natural serve those scraps, shipping them at carbon-gulping expense to distant corners of the developing world.chemicals, some highly Certainly, we should cut waste, but even if we work the mar-gins, its not game changing. Which brings us back to F2F. Thecarcinogenic.broad goal is to reduce the environmental and climate footprint of the EU food system in the face of climate change and biodiver-sity loss to cement Europes reputation as an alternative farming region that relies on fewer harmful chemicals. But Europes reputation is a myth of gargantuan proportions.Netherlands (24), Belgium (28), Ireland (29), Italy (31), Portugal (36), Switzerland (41) Germany (44) and France (47)indeed, almost every country in Europeuse far more toxic pesticides per hectare of available cropland than the United States, demonized in Europe as an agrochemical junkie. The U.S. ranks 59th. Those statistics are shocking, as they challenge widespread misconceptions that Europe is on the cutting edge of sustainabil-ity because of the growth of organic farming when the opposite is sometimes the case. GM BT CROPS USE LITTLE SYNTHETIC PESTICIDESThere are calls in F2F to cut conventional pesticide use by 50%, regardless of effectiveness or toxicity. Why? Thats never addressed scientifically. Science has come a long way since high-ly-toxic synthetic chemicals were introduced in mid-last century. Newer ones are designed to prevent specific plant diseases, kill weeds and repel harmful insects without harming beneficial ones. Overwhelmingly, they do that.Per acre toxicity levels on U.S. farms began declining in the 1960s and dropped again with the introduction of GM crops in the 1990s. While yields soared, more than five times in corn alone, the volume of chemical usage stayed about the same Using Bt technology developed by the Bangladesh government, brinjal primarily because of the introduction of low toxic pesticides,(eggplant) farmers cut insecticide use by 26% and income per acre such as glyphosate. increased 6-fold.EUROPEAN-SEED.COMIEUROPEAN SEED I 15'