That people would be on the whole less healthy had glyphosate not been on the market, because other herbicides, all of which were and are in common use, are worse.
No, mass starvation would not ensue from having to fight weeds using mechanical means. It would take more work and more fuel, but it is eminently doable if the need is there. Especially if the change would be gradual.
Making do without artificial fertilizer would be a lot harder.
Perhaps if herbicides weren't viable, more work would've gone into developing the mechanical alternatives and we'd have had solar-powered machines removing weeds from fields.
Increased work and fuel means increased costs, increased costs means increased prices, increased prices means less food available for purchase by those on the margins, less food means starvation.
No, not regardless of magnitude. But anything that have a large impact on food prices will decrease the ability of poor people to pay for it. It’s not rocket science.
We have resources for plenty of nonessential expenditures that could be diverted if avoiding starvation was our collective goal. I’m not always sure it would be, but the constraint isn’t a death sentence on its own.
I don't think that is the only alternative. If the end goal is to preserve life for humans, completely nuking the soil into a wasteland, treating it with carcinogens and then allowing a company to genetically modify seeds and copyright them is a pretty bad and short sighted strategy.
Allowing a known carcinogen to make crops "easier to harvest" has to do with profit margin not food supply. People literally use this to kill dandelions in their yards. I have known many people who have died from cancer. I have eaten dandelions, while bitter, are actually healthy. A good start would be to work with nature instead of trying to out engineer it.
If roundup is your alternative to starvation you're probably just delaying the inevitable.
> If roundup is your alternative to starvation you're probably just delaying the inevitable.
Yes. That is literally exactly what we're doing. You can't sustain the current human population without fertilizers and pesticides made from fossil fuels. Half the people on the planet would die.
If we don't want half the planet to die, we need pesticides. So do you choose a pesticide that's more harmful, or less? If you said "less", then you want glyphosate.
You both have premises that are too far apart to debate productively; what you're really debating is naturalism vs. technology, scale vs. degrowth, humanism vs. environmentalism. All worthwhile philosophical debates, but you won't get anywhere sniping at each other about them.
It's not a complicated argument.