About demographics...
Tom,
Most of your post makes a lot of sense. I was planning to answer Milton but you did
it better than I could. Nevertheless, I have to defend MY point of view on a couple of
issues:
>More food does mean more people, Julien, unless it is fed to some other
>species or it rots in the fields. (Or fed to a couple of really fat guys in
>Paris)
Or it rots in the thrashcans. Or it is processed to make weird stuff like "light" food
or
dogs. There is a non-negligible amount of waste. Also, if you eat lots of meat, you
eat more food through it than if you did eat cereals. And there's your parenthesis...
You don't systematically become fat when you eat too much. How much more do
we eat in affluent countries than what is needed to live? If Nestor is there, maybe he
can tell us what's the minimum of food necessary to live in China.
>If I am a farmer in Idaho (god forbid!) and I grow excess wheat, Idaho is
>not suddenly going to experience a population boom. ADM will sell the excess
>wheat and the population boom will be in India or Botswana or some place
>(Chandler, Texas?).
Right... Unless the food is destroyed because of WTO regulations on dumping and
of the non-competitiveness of the the price.
Anyway, you're right. I was too simplistic. With relatively free markets food is
traded
so that the supply is virtually unlimited if you can pay for it. The point is that
food is
cheap in your country. How many hamburgers can you buy with one hour of
minimum wage? Compare this with other countries... That's not bioregions, that's
economic regions. And that's what determines who will be fed or not.
Sure, globally there is a relation between the amount of food produced an
population. But if it's not food availability (in terms of price to revenues) which
determines fertility, you could well say that enough food is grown to feed the
population and not the reverse. It makes sense: If there's too much food on the
market, farmers stop producing as much or go out of business.
Julien
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