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Thanksgiving Bits
An anonymous reader writes "Whatis.com has a holiday themed tech quiz, Thanksgiving: Do you speak Geek?. Bit stuffing, anyone?" And reader Punboy writes with some hope of building a better turkey: "Apparently the biotech guys are at it again, this time with our poultry! They're mapping the turkey genome in hopes of providing better breeding techniques, and remove the 'guesswork'." And while food is on your mind, here's a story about the challenges of feeding a hungry planet.
These kinds of scary FUD stories come up again and again, but the problem is not world production, it is a distribution problem. So while US farmers are payed to produce too much food and while thousands of tonnes of food go to rot in Canada, African's are left to starve.
The real obstacle to the world's food issues have far more to do with economics, politics and popular will rather than the production capacity of the planet. Perhaps this won't be a big deal anyway, the UN forcasts that the earth's population will begin to decline in our lifetimes
Is it just me or is it just some writer under a deadline attempting poorly to write something related to Thanksgiving? I mean, table? That's not something I'd associate Thanksgiving with. And "binary digits"? WTF?
read the bunni comic
Sorry but maybe I have missed something. Turkeys are prolific, we can already grow as many as we want to. The only limitation is what the market will bear. So how does making freaky genetically modified turkey change that.
Thankyou for highighting the real cause of world hunger. I thought I was going to have to write a post myself. Well I will expand on what you said anyway.
it has been shown time and time again that the cause of world hunger isnt the lack of production, but in fact the lack of distribution due to corruption, civil unrest and war, and high levels of subsidies in both the US and Europe that make it impossible for countries out side these areas to compete and hence develop their own agriculture.
Being forced to open their markets to subsidied produce from Europe and the US via pressure from the world bank, local farmers are thus unable to sell their own cash crops at a fair price. This has happened with nut growers, coffee, corn and many others. You thought the war on terror is expensive? The US will spend $180 Billion over 10 years from 2002.
Infact, GM products increase the likelyhood of starvation in the third world, because now the farmers are forced to buy expensive seed stocks and breeding animals from the owners of the GM patents (usually Monsanto) instead of being able to resow part of last year's crop, or if they try to continue in the traditional manner, they face competition in a heavily subsidies market. Farming only becomes ecconomically viable for "big agriculture".
More here