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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.
1000s Warcraft Gold while you sleep
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.
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.