[livestockboy]

Use of pesticides in plant agriculture is mostly driven by huge demand of meat/dairy industry for feed. GMOs also aren't exactly necessary if you don't have 90 billion mouths to feed every day.

There are some vegetables that are easily grown in unsuitable areas with GM, and some people do use pesticides and GMOs to "defeat" the market but if international logistics weren't so hard it would be easier to just import the stuff.

Similar industry, completely plant driven, is cotton agriculture for clothes - to ensure proper demand you need GMO or pesticides.

When it comes to beans, lentils, soybean for humans (although most of it is for fish farms, poultry and livestock), wheat, corn, rice, all sorts of fruits, pesticides come in hand, but there's more than enough if space was taken from dairy/meat and given to those.

91% of Amazon is cut for animal agriculture. http://www-wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSContentServer/WDSP/I...

It's just 7 billion people, while you have to raise 50 billion chickens, 1 billion cows, -- about 150 billion animals yearly just to get them from baby form to somewhat of an adult form. That requires a lot of food, way more than 7 billion avg. 150 pound humans.

https://xkcd.com/1338/

edit: realistically, this problem is unsolvable, just like US and China and others won't really struggle lowering their CO2 footprint, so will not Brazil, USA, India, Australia, Denmark and others when it comes to reduction of their meat/dairy output. If we were some nice unified Humanity maybe things would be different.

[pmoriarty]

I would not be so pessimistic. Lots of things that many people thought certain would never happen or would take a very long time have happened in relatively short order.

Things like the fall of the Soviet Union, desegregation in the US, man on the moon, etc. Even things that required great international cooperation have happened. Like the eradication of smallpox and polio, the creation of the United Nations, etc.

But the reduction of meat consumption and reliance on factory farming need not be done on a global level to be worthwhile. It can happen one country at a time. Even one person or one animal at a time will be helpful, even if it won't solve everything. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.