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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.
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.
...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.
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Politics are the prime reason that proper levels of food don't get produced. If a government wishes to maintain control over its people by keeping them too weak and dependent to overturn the government (either via ballot or gun), it controls the food distribution, and if much of the food comes from outside of the country and is delivered to the government for distribution, then they have a much easier time of it.
They can also go the other way and damage the ability to produce local food, as was done in Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe kicked many of the white farm owners off of their land, turning them over to local blacks who had little or no idea of how to run a farm (including many prime farms that ended up in the hands of relatives and cronies), under the guise of a fair "redistribution" of the land. He has since demanded that the white farmers (many of whom lost virtually everything) assist in the transition, but many of them have basically flipped him the bird and moved to Britain to live with families of their own. Zimbabwe was a food exporter only a few years ago; now millions depend on food handouts because the farmlands lie poorly maintained (if they're used at all), and many are afraid of voting against Mugabe (ignoring the probably rigged elections) for fear of him punishing their regions.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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.
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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 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.