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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.
Sorry, I just had to say it.
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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.
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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?
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...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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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?
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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.
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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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.)