Slashdot Mirror
How To Feed The World
Dr. Norman Borlaug, who helped create wheat strains in the 1960s that increased the production of farms throughout the world by ten fold, turned 90 last week. This "food hacker", and his fellow agricultural researchers, by launching the "Green Revolution", have done more to feed the world than anyone else before or since. He recently published an essay on the future of the world food supply entitled
We can feed the world. Here's how.
Sorry, I just had to say it.
True warriors use the Klingon Google
make 10 times more food and you'll have 10 times more people. Personally I think there is no moral obligation to turn every acre of land over to food production.
The food shortages in the world today have very little to do an overall lack of food.
It is commonly known that we are nowhere near running out of space on earth. That is not what overpopulation is about. Heck everyone can fit in Texas. The so called problem of overpopulation is that we can't feed everybody. This is also complete bullshit. If we wanted to we could produce enough foodstuffs every year to make "filling rations" (as oregon trail would put it) for every man womand and child on earth. The reason people are starving is two fold.
1) Things like farm subsidies where the US government pays farmers to make less food.
2) Poor distribution of food.
By poor distribution means two things. First it means that food isn't doled out in proportion to where it is needed. Some places are difficult to send food to. Other places it is not economical to send food to. The food just isn't brought to where it needs to be. In conjunction with that some people eat more than their fair share. I'm no commy, in fact quite the opposite, but all these fat disgusting americans eating McDonalds two to three times a day is just sick. Eat when you are hungry and don't eat when you're not hungry. Eating is not an activity, that flabby gut of yours could be someone's atrophied muscle.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Did he ever really answer the question?
All he seems to be doing in this essay is advocating that farmers use modern farming techniques (i.e. synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, mostly). So fine. That's not all that controversial is it? But how does that ensure that the food actually gets to people? How does that ensure efficient use of resources?
Where's the sensible criticism of the bizarre government involvement in the U.S. food supply? Why does he not take issue with price supports and all the other nonsense that makes a gallon of milk cost more here in the heart of dairyland than any two gallons of gas? Why does he not mention vegetarianism, which is far more energy efficient than processing vegetable matter through cows and chickens and pigs? Why does he not talk about the problems that foreign aid and the drug trade produce in many countries, where farmers find it more profitable to be on the dole or to grow drug crops than they do to grow food crops that could feed their coutnrymen?
If the answer were as simple as "use synthetic fertilizer and pesticides", don't you think we would have solved all of this by now?
I do not have a signature
...how come sub-Saharan Africa is almost a desert in terms of people per square mile yet we still talk about over-population? Its because uneducated people need a lot more space to feed themselves than weducated people.
The article addresses one part of a bigger problem. A man who who can't read is unlikely to be a productive farmer, let alone care about the environment. So the West ends up making grants and loans to make up for entire countries of uneducated folk in Africa.
Most of Africa's problem could be eased by education. An educated farmer goes out looking for good seed - you have to stop him from being productive. Its a proven fact that female literacy is THE most effective form of birth control in poor countries. I wish we could see grants towards rural schools in Africa instead of dealing with the symptoms of a poorly educated society, namely low productivity, high birth rates and high environmental degradation.
1000s Warcraft Gold while you sleep
What about the high cost of advanced pesticides and genetically engineered seeds (especially the ones which produce sterile plants, or for which it is illegal to reuse the seeds from)? Are poor nations supposed to magically get money to pay for this advanced agriculture, or are they supposed to take further loans, or rely on charity? If we really want to help out the third world I think we should exempt them from enforcement of pharmaceutical, pesticide, and bioengineering patents, so they don't have to mortgage decade after decade of their future not to starve now simply to meet some international patent treaty. Is this really a technological problem?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Here's the thing. By feeding the world without also putting major birth control measures in place you generate population surplus faster than you generate sustainable food production. I once heard a talk by a green revolution scientist who mourned the fact that decades later, because of population growth, there were now more people starving than ever before.
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
One trip in a Tokyo subway convinced me that Japan is crowded!
Look at the population of the oil producing states. I believe this population is unsustainably high, tied to the wealth from continued production of oil (end of oil = end of food.)
Now that I've mentioned oil, I guess that applies to all of us: No oil for synthetic fertilizers food production goes down...
So sure it's a good idea to increase food production, but what is point if this production is not sustainable?
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
We do not need more food. We need more cheap, sustainable, easy-on-the-land, crops that can grow in relatively infertile areas. Third world nations have plenty of space to grow crops such as these. If they used these to not only feed their populations but also to export and finally get a positive GDP, they might work back up the rungs in the world
You obvisouly did not read the artical and know nothing about how it works in reality. It may stand to reason that increasing food supply increases popultion (less people die from malnutrition), but in the real world a better food supply makes most people have less kids, by enough to not only compensate, but over compenstate. As the artical shows, the grains introduced in the 1960s to parts of Africa have already worked to greatly slow the population growth over there.
Yes, Japan is crowded. However a look at statistics will show that they have a age imbalance. There are more old people than young people. In other words the population is shrinking. Modern education, and toys mean there is plenty to do other than reproduce, and people know the effects of kids on their life style, so many choose not to have kids. On a macro scale Japan's population is set to drop.
Can't the world feed itself?
The real problem with poverty and starvation can't be solved by sending a starving family your leftovers. Sending food their way is just going to alleviate hunger for a few days. This is a band-aid solution that simply isn't sustainable.
The real problem is infrastructure. When a country is constantly in a state of war, when its government is controlled by a dictator who doesn't give a damn about his people, there obviously isn't going to be enough food. People can sustain themselves if they are left alone: people can easily be self-sufficient. But when they are exploited and oppressed in the name of greed and lust for power, when the knowledge of how to be self-sufficient is obliterated, people starve.
We can't feed the world, but we can free the world to feed itself.
I don't know much about Japan's social care policy but the ones in the US and EU scream "Ponzi Scheme!"
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
(obvisouly? popultion? compenstate? artical?)
First world intervention in the third world, even something which seems to be as purely good as increasing the food supply, is a complex and controversial topic, and you should not restrict your opinion to, for example, the article mentioned in the original post. I was just trying to balance the somewhat Pollyanna-ish tone of the Slashdot summary.
A quick search on Green Revolution in Google brings up plenty of conflicting informed opinion.
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
The way to feed the people of the world is to free them.
Were you aware that the unemployment rate in Iraq right now is half of what it was under Saddam Huseein?
----
We have hunger and want in the world because evil men use the vehicle of government to deprive men of that liberty which they need to produce abundantly.
-Ezra Taft Benson
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Mexico, much of South America, and much of Africa are seeing more and more land cleared for farms because they do not have modern food production. The US and other high-yield countries can continue sending food to these countries, or we can give them the means to use their own farmland to produce more food of their own.
Well, and why do you think they don't have modern food production methods? Do you think they don't know how to?
No, it's because they can't afford to. US agriculture is energy intensive, consumes lots of non-renewable raw materials, and generates lots of pollution. If a country is willing and able to pay that price, it's not surprising that they can get enormous yields per acre. But third world nations don't have the money to engage in that kind of agriculture. The US can only afford to do it because its agricultural sector is subsidized, both explicitly and implicitly by piggybacking on other infrastructure.
It's not as much a question of "modern" vs. "outdated", it's a question of how much you are willing to spend and accept in other costs in order to increase yields. And as the costs of non-renewable resources and pollution keep increasing, there is a good chance that it is US-style agriculture that will start failing.
You're right, we could get food to everybody. But the problems we face are on the output side: sewerage, garbage, industrial toxins, internal combustion.
People in the United States among the best environmental policy -no wonder environmentalists don't want to see it downgraded. Hell, many countries in South America still allow leaded gasoline! Raw, untreated sewage is spilled directly into Sao Paulo's rivers, which run through the city down to the beach! Imagine if that were the case in the U.S.?
Because of the political limitations imposed, I doubt that food (like wealth) will ever be equally distributed. Even under old-skool communist and socialist systems, distribution wasn't that great (although food distribution was generally better than capitalism, as it was treated as more of a basic right), but then again you probably lived under a dictatorship in which your life was consider just a resource for the system.
If we have twice as many people as we have now (as is predicted for 2040), all consuming and outputting at similar levels to today, imagine the big problems our ecosystems will face.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
That reasoning is OK, then the overpopulated species is fish, or birds or aligators or rabbits, but when the species is humans, then that sort of reasoning begs the question: "Who's we?"
Who is the 'we' that is outside nature looking in, that is well fed, and confident enough to be OK with social darwinism? When people are dying, you would be arrogant and wrong to suppose that it couldn't be you.
Unless, by strong, you mean well financed. Maybe you feel secure in the knowlege that you are already wealthy and need do nothing but invest prudently and with small risk to maintain yourself in a position where you and your progeny can be indefinately certain of their next meal. You can observe the nature outside where people must strive and sometimes die, aloof and godlike.
But the only power you have to keep your position atop wealth is the interest shared by all in respecting the rules of property that push wealth upward toward wealth. That, and whatever power your personal army may represent. If you do not personally employ a military, then you likely depend on one funded by a state that you are part of. As long as a majority of the *power* in your state agrees that you should be wealthy, i.e. that rules of property should be respected, then you will remain wealthy if the state survives.
But should the need in your country become so great that the needy hold sway then you will be plundered by them. Was it 'strong' social-darwinistically to be an aristocrat during the French revolution? No. It was better to be an average Jaques. And the French revolutionaries weren't even starving AFAIK.
Of course, as neediness within a country increases the pressure to alleviate suffering through war or other less than palatable means becomes greater. It may be that power centers like states or even corporations fall prey to one another until a critical point is reached when the wealth, the means to live, is so concentrated that the raw intelligence, need, and desperation of the populace is too much to contain. The society of oppressors becomes irrelevant. Property is plundered, existing iniquities dissolve to make way for chaos and new iniquities. If the old societal structure was efficient ( as under capitalism ) then it's breakup leads to less efficiency and so less resources ( food ) to go around. Starvation and cannibalism result. If the old society was inneficient ( North Korea ) then a period of prosperity occurrs until population grows to the point where resources are tapped.
The general observation that there is sufficient food to feed the current population, if only we could find a equitable way of distributing it, is one thing. But you need to factor in the impact of better food production on future demands too.
Recently there was a TV documentary in the UK to commemorate 20 years since the 'Band Aid' / 'Live Aid' events triggered by famines in Ethiopia. This insightful program (Ethiopia: A Journey with Michael Buerk) by the original reporter who broke news of the famine observed that prior to the famine, the country was able to feed itself (provided the rains came). Twenty years of food aid and the ensuing population explosion later, Ethiopia remains the largest receipient of food aid in Africa, and no longer can produce enough to feed itself even in a year with good rains. There is also apparently an increasing problem with fresh water supplies in the country.
So more food may be part of the answer, but simply providing more food to hungry people does not appear to be the solution. As always, it seems to be much more complex than that.
Maybe we have the available land/labor/technology to *feed* everyone, but what about the resources we spend on Yachts, BMWs, SUVs, Game Consoles, TVs etc? Without spending on these things there would be none of the rewards that give people the incentive to work. Everyone would just sit there and recieve their food dole until it was gone. You very well may be able to take the Gross World Product and divide it by the number of People and come out with acceptable 'rations'. But ask yourself if this kind of efficiency is even possible. And if it were, that would seem to reduce humans to a penicillin-like growth sucking nutrients from the surface of a blue orange orbiting a yellow star in a quiet section of the milky way.
Eat at Joe's.
The only problem was that those starving were either disfavored ethnic minorities/races or innocent civilians living in territory occupied by anti-government guerilla. Food was a weapon, nothing more. The same story continues today.
Borlaug helped create more food, which can be used for feeding people. Which part of that are you opposed to - the feeding, or the people, or the feeding people? Whichever one it is, perhaps you could help "solve" the "problem" by starving yourself to death. You can begin now!
Some of the more fertile grounds in africa have recently seen massive deathrates because of a lack of food. The primary threat to foodsupply in Africa is the political instability in some african countries, not the crop yields.
While genetically manipulated vegetables and grain have higher yields when you grow them, there's a catch: using them creates a financial dependency on the companies that produce the seeds (gene technology is of course patented). Typically, the genetically modified seeds will work as advertised only you can't use the result for planting a new crop: you have to buy new seeds each year. And guess what, these are mostly US companies and these companies are lobbying very actively for African countries to adopt their products. Genetically modified seeds are a major export product for the US.
This at first sight very reasonable story on how to save the world from hunger is IMHO not primarily motivated from charity (though many may misguidedly believe they are doing a good thing). This is just a semi scientific piece of advertisement material, carefully designed to push African goverments and charity organizations to support the point of view that genetically modified food is good for them.
To understand how damaging this is, you have to understand how the local African economy works. Typically an African peasant saves some seeds each year from his crop to sow next year, of the rest he sells (either for consumption or new crops) a small percentage on the local market (typically the only form of income) and he depends on the rest to have enough to eat throughout the year. If you introduce genetically modified seeds on these local markets, then the richer peasants can get higher yields and sell more at the local market: at the cost of the poor peasant who cannot afford to buy genetically modified seeds and who will be outcompeted and lose his only source of income. The net result will be that this poor peasant now has even less of an income and totally depends on his own crop.
At first this may work out well, until after a few years non genetically modified seeds are getting more rare. By then there will be a few farmers who are doing well and can afford to buy the seeds each year and a lot of farmers who cannot afford it and don't have access to the non genetically modified seeds anymore. No income and they now have to buy their food instead of being able to grow their own. This horror scenario is the long term strategy of the gene lobby: total dependence on US supplied genetically modified seeds.
I'm not saying genetically modified food is evil but I am saying that this whole thing is motivated by greed rather than charity. What would really help African farmers is if the EU and the US would stop dumping their subsidized milk and grain on the african market. That would allow african economies to export more food. Even a modest growth of export would help most african economies a lot.
Jilles
Were you aware that the unemployment rate in Iraq right now is half of what it was under Saddam Huseein?
Hmmm. Would that be because the US taxpayers are paying their salaries? Lots of socialism creates lots of jobs as long as the taxpayers are willing to keep shelling out the dough. Think we could work out that kind of deal here at home? Taxpayer money for everyone!! Wooo Hoo!! Oh, wait. Tax cut? You mean it's all being financed with new debt our children will have to pay? Uh-Oh. What time do the chickens come home?
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
The problem with industrial agriculture is that it is reliant on petrochemicals to provide the synthetic fertilizer. It's energy and resource intensive. The fuel is not going to last forever, and the creation of the fertilizer is causing direct harm to the biosphere, which will prevent crop growth no matter how much fertilizer you put on it.
Actually, the french revolutionaries *were* starving. Bread had become unaffordable for most families in the late 1780s What led to that situation was the hoarding of grain, by speculators, against which king Louis XVI did nothing. Marie-Antoinette's apocryphous words, "let them eat cake", were coined to describe that situation. What happened, though, is that the sans-culottes threw over royalty, seen as an ineffective government, instead of the speculating merchants who were directly causing the situation. It wasn't until Marx's theories that the cause of nationwide shortages was linked directly to capitalists and not only to the government. Look at what happened in Russia in the beginning of the XXth century. Same reasons (hoarding of food and land by the rich), different outcome (communist collectivisation, instead of a republic led by the very merchants who caused starvation in the first place.)
The tag line for the article is:
from the in-perfect-harmony dept.
So I assume Hemos was remembering the 1980s Band Aid concerts (warning: auto-playing MIDI crap). The song "Do they know it's Christmas?" hit the top of the UK charts in November 1984, and was at the top of the US charts soon after. The touching refrain was this:
Feed the world
Let them know it's Christmas time
Feed the world
Do they know it's Christmas time at all?
What I didn't even think about, my senior year, was that the "they" we were congratulating ourselves on feeding, victims of a drought in Ethiopia, may not have known it was Christmas time at all for an entirely different reason. To wit, these stats:
Religions:
Muslim 45%-50%, Ethiopian Orthodox 35%-40%, animist 12%, other 3%-8%
So around 65% of the population would not even *celebrate* Christmas... and those that do, celebrate it on January 7th! And it's not a particularly important date, compared with Epiphany two weeks later.
Since much of the discussion of this topic centers on social questions and not "nerd" issues, I think it might be apropos to consider that one of the most well-known "feed the world" programs of its time based itself around a catchphrase that likely generated laughter and scorn among those it purported to help.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Just today, the U.N. released a report stating that "dead zones" (oxygen-starved areas) in the world's oceans had doubled since 1990, with some as large as 70,000 square kilometers:
The main cause is excess nitrogen run-off from farm fertilizers, sewage and industrial pollutants. The nitrogen triggers blooms of microscopic algae known as phytoplankton. As the algae die and rot, they consume oxygen, thereby suffocating everything from clams and lobsters to oysters and fish.
"Human kind is engaged in a gigantic, global, experiment as a result of inefficient and often overuse of fertilizers, the discharge of untreated sewage and the ever rising emissions from vehicles and factories," UNEP Executive Director Klaus Toepfer said in a statement. "Unless urgent action is taken to tackle the sources of the problem, it is likely to escalate rapidly."
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
Check the links to info on peak oil here for information a bit more current than this guy's belief system is.
I'm perfectly willing to listen to what this guy has to say about plant breeding, but his perspective is a trifle limited to make listening to anything he's got to say about ending world hunger worth the time.
As has been pointed out all over the place here, the price of food is the least important factor with respect to feeding the people of the world.
If you really want to feed everybody in the world adequately, solve the energy problem and the rest will follow. The above URL points to information on how to do that.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Exactly, these "miracle" crops only serve as more profitable product by agricultural supercorporations. All they have managed to do is drive thirld world farmers out of business, making the world hunger situation worse, not better.
It makes the average comfortable first worlder a little more comfortable with a can of beans that costs $.08 less, and some very wealthy persons considerably more wealthy (and powerful)while making the poor very poor and the very poor dead.
What the author proposes can be benefitial to some degree. However, it is NOT going to solve the famines and the starvation that is common throughout the world.
The production of food has NEVER been the problem. Instead, the problem has always been distribution and inequality. There is more than enough food in the world to feed EVERYONE--this has always been true over in the long term. But the food is not distributed evenly. You are not going to fix the problem by producing more.
For example, the author points out Africa and how it is having problems. Unfortunately it seems to have escaped many people's realization that there are many countries where people starve yet they (net) export food? What does this tell you? This basically means that the people are too poor to be able to afford the food. People spend their labour on the farms yet can't afford to buy the food that they help produce. This is not a rarity; rather, it the norm with poor people.
Regardless of how much food is produced, as long as the inequality problem exists, starvation will exist. It's about time people realized that...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
As many posters have mentioned above, clearly simply making more food is not the issue. If a region had never been able to feed its population, the population would have decreased to a level the land could support. These regions did have enough food, more people were born, and perhaps through one bump in a production/distribution chain, there is not enough food right now where it needs to be.
One of the reacurring bumps talked about above is food as a weapon. The "make people free" solution to has been offered, without specifics.
How can we contribute to making, or keeping, a large population "free", or at least free enough that food won't be withheld as a weapon?
One solution is economic (or political?): economic sanctions. Does this work? Has it worked? (I'm not claiming to have answers here).
Another solution is military. Foreign militaries may engender great hostility, such as the US in Somalia. Another option is regional militaries. I heard one exists in North Africa, near Liberia, but there was some hesitation for them to become involved.
Do these work?
There has been a great deal of discussion as to why the article does not reflect a realistic or complete solution. I would like to see some alternatives, and I hope some of the above can be starting points.
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?