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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.
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.
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make 10 times more food and you'll have 10 times more people.
However (and as was partially stated in the article), in countries with modern food production (which yeilded the 10-fold increase 50 years ago) population growth has generally levelled off to a sustaining rate, rather than increasing the population 10-fold.
Personally I think there is no moral obligation to turn every acre of land over to food production.
The moral obligation referred to in the article is that of reducing or maintaining the amount of land needed for food production in order to preserve as many acres of land not currently used for this purpose as possible. In other words, there is a moral obligation NOT 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.
You're right, they have little to do with an overall lack of food, but rather with a localized lack of food in third world countries. 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. They also aren't using proper crop rotations, so the land is losing most of its nutrients. In other worlds, areas in which people are already starving are also moving rapidly towards their own equivalent of the US' dust-bowl.
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. As long as they're not paying for the food we ship to them now (which most aren't), the long-term costs of improving their farming methods is significantly lower than sending them food every year. The added benefit is that better farm yields can lead to economic improvements, which lead to more imports of other goods and possibly, eventually, improvements in other areas of production within those countries, pulling them out of third world status.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
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?
Remember a few months ago when a handful of countries were refusing food shipments for fear that some percentage of the crops were genetically engineered? Those are the types of controversies that come from modern farming techniques (though most of what he's talking about is 50+-year old techniques, he does discuss food adapted for the environments). Beyond that, he also points out how much misinformation is widely believed about increasing food production, and the issues with local crops and people wanting to preserve those crops rather than plant higher-yield crops.
But how does that ensure that the food actually gets to people? How does that ensure efficient use of resources?
He is talking specifically about increasing production on land already in use, in third world nations. This gets food to the people specifically by making the production point closer to the people, and by increasing the yields of those local points of production already being used, and depleted, by these people. The efficient use of resources comes from increasing the yields of these farms and decreasing deforestation and other problems (like stripping the nutrients from the soil) that could eventually lead to the farms not producing at all.
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?
Much of that is not needed when you consider that he was addressing part of the reason for the government's involvment in that food supply. If the US weren't supplying food to half the world, we would have little need to have so much involvment in securing that supply. On the other hand, some level of involvment tends to be good to secure our own supply. There's a lot of weird crap going on with that whole system, and pulling the burden off of that system would help with reforms.
Why does he not mention vegetarianism, which is far more energy efficient than processing vegetable matter through cows and chickens and pigs?
Probably because cows, chickens, and pigs are somewhat less likely to be used as large controlled food sources in third world countries, but will instead be used to supplement the diet, being kept by families or communities and allowed much less land than they would be in the US. Vegetarian diets themselves lend problems, as most people that make that choice need to keep a strict eye (at least moreso than someone with a more balanced diet, though it seems most people in the US would be better served seeing a nutritionist regularly) on their own health and diet to prevent malnutrition. Besides, what good is a vegitarian diet in a country where you can not get the vegetables in the first place, even to feed your starving chickens?
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?
I think you might find that most of those farmers choose to grow drug crops because they find it to be the only way they can keep their farms and their lives, rather than because it's more profitable. Dealing with those situations is often a matter of politics, trying to handle not only the politicians in government, but the real power in those countries, which often lies in the hands of men that will kill farmers that grow food crops until the land falls into their hands.
Most of your questions seem to fall into the realm of politics. The point was simply that, despite how simple it seems to "use synthetic fertilizer and pesticieds", there is a sig
-PainKilleR-[CE]
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.
Actually, the growth rates have dramatically declined in the last 20 years, so much so that the likely world population in 2050 is expected to be around 9 billion people, reaching a plateau of about 10 billion people in the late 21st century before beginning a decline.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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.)
We do know about it. It's usually called acidification.
It's actually a loss in cation exchange capacity. Along with the exports of vegetable matter out of the growing area goes a lot of Ca and Mg (useful for plants), thus raising the Al+++:[basic cations] in the ground, and incidentally acidity. This directly leads to lowered fertility and even to aluminium toxicity and lateritisation in extreme cases.
The only way to counteract it is to add lime to the ground, which is disruptive to ground microfauna, hence to soil structure.
There are simple solutions, though, letting cattle graze on site instead of exporting fodder out of the fields. Unfortunately, it's not "productive" enough for the modern farmer. In the meanwhile, soil fertility and overall quality is dropping at an alarming rate, with an ever increased use of lime and fertilizers to keep that bloody productivity high.
To sum up with an ugly buzzword, modern farming isn't sustainable.
You describe a "race to the bottom"? Farmers can't be 10-20% less effective and keep soil quality up because of competition from other farmers?
What competition? Farming is heavily subsidized in the US and Europe. That's the main reason US farmers can use high-yield, intensive methods and still compete internationally. And it's a big problem for developing nations, whose agricultural methods actually would be internationally competitive if only they were allowed to compete on a level playing field.