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[Novum Lux]

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[Novum Lux]

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[Grays Harbor]

Because, what, farmers have been so stupid and incompetent the past few millennia that the WA now needs to micromanage them with one-size-fits-nobody mandates? Recipe For Disaster.

[Arotania]

Why the sudden single use of "organic" in 3 a)?
Organic is generally pretty questionably defined and not congruent with sustainable. The widely allowed use of copper sulphate as a fungicide just being one of the most prominent examples.

[Novum Lux]

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[Araraukar]

*snip*

What, pray tell, are "sustainable agricultural practices", "self-dependent agriculture" and "safe, healthy habitats"?

If an agricultural practice was completely nonsustainable, surely the nation employing such practices had ceased to exist by now. And "self-dependent agriculture" does not necessarily go hand in hand with "adequate nutrition", as you can't grow everything everywhere. Trade is almost certainly a necessity.

As for animals, sometimes efficiency is good for the environment while being bad for the animals' well-being. Would you force nations to choose against sustainability in such cases?

Additionally, I have to wonder why you think that food safety had not already been legislated on, what with GA #64, Food And Drug Standards in the books.

And as for sustainable food production, GA #52, Food Welfare Act addresses that.

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OOC: Other than that, welcome to the GA forum!

[Imperium Anglorum]

If an agricultural practice was completely nonsustainable, surely the nation employing such practices had ceased to exist by now.

It's almost like we've got one of those paper fortune tellers and every few months, new bad arguments are found. Today, we have X is inevitable! I am only addressing the quoted argument. Questions on the proposal's legality are best left to people who actually care about legality and do not also spend their time trying creating fake reasons to make proposals illegal simply to bonus from fixing the problem they caused in the first place.

The inevitability requirement requires a ethical justification for why it is okay to not take action when we can do so, and thereby stop possible future disasters. Unless nations are no longer formed, history has ended, and an actual static world has emerged, there will always be nations and environments recovering over time. This means that you need to justify inaction in nations currently in the process of ecological collapse. Then, because environments recover slowly, and will later be resettled (even in the cases of total technological collapse, humans would probably resettle, at a maximum, of a thousand years, looking at the empirics of human colonisation of true uninhabited territory), you need to justify inaction in the face of new settlements that have not yet started the process of collapse. I don't think inaction is justifiable. Inaction here, when the costs of preventative care are so low and the impacts from inaction so high, imposes huge costs to human well-being with marginal benefits from ... cost savings that could be invested? The benefits are negligible. Not to act would be blatantly immoral.

Second, even if it is inevitable that nations collapse, the transition dynamics during that collapse will lead to significant negative externalities from that nation, in an ecological sense and in population displacements. This creates a clear justification for international attention to the topic that resolves the implicit NatSov burden.

Third, even if it is justifiable to not take action, collapse is not inevitable. Anything approaching a realistic nation will never rely on one single farming practice. This is for eight different reasons. Any reason left unproven is enough to prove diversification of agricultural products.

(1) Farmers have direct incentives to produce multiple goods, because blights can wipe out one plant. Diversification helps the farmers. (2) Farmers will opt into producing multiple goods, because financial firms will require them to diversify before insuring or lending money to them. (3) Farmers will use multiple crops in crop rotation to reintroduce nutrients in the soil and also happen to produce multiple forms of crops. This increases agricultural production as well. (4) Consumers will want multiple choices for food. Eating plain bread with nothing else will quickly become boring. Market forces will create supply to fill that demand. (5) Fishing, hunting, berry-picking, and other harvesting techniques exist, ensuring a minimum carrying capacity without large-scale agriculture. (6) Reductions in the diversity of food markets will create increased prices that lead to biological technology that ensures that crops grown at large volumes now will gain resistance to some plight. (7) Increases in food prices will lead to the entry of farming firms that equilibrate market volumes in the medium run. In the short-run, current producers will expand production. (8) The government will force farmers to diversify quickly, even if all other reasons are false, simply to avert starvation and ensure state stability.

Diversification means that an agricultural practice cannot eliminate large-scale food supplies. The premise of this inevitable collapse is not true.