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Malthus sighting reported, airport lounge, talking to Elvis. 1) Food shortages currently have much more to do with barriers to transportation, including wars and corrupt governments, as well as breakdowns of markets - inability to trade profitably for various reasons. 2) Land availability isn't really a problem - efficiency in agriculture, including genetically modified plants improves crop yield and sustainability, while there are still vast areas of land open to cultivation. Water supply is a more pressing problem, however, as is the oil required to take care of growing these plants. Where the race is for improving land and desert reclamation, water desalinization, faster growing crops, ocean-based crops, etc. I would guess that we'll manage the race on this front, aside from the oil issue. 3) As a vegetarian, I can complain that all these crops go to feed a cow as the "middle man" on the way to a steak dinner - as inefficient as growing crops for a tank of gas. However, we have to be a little historic - nature was converting crops and biomatter into oil for millions of years just for our spoiled little selves to exhaust, so just because we now get to see the process accelerated doesn't make it less moral. After all, a number of now extinct dinosaurs could have used those veggie burgers if they hadn't been turned into our oil. 4) While I'm not impressed with ethanol as a fuel replacement, it does 2 important things. First, it focuses us on vastly improving agricultural efficiency, which means as a side-effect we're liable to get some cheaper foods where cost of food really is a problem (okay, it also exacerbates water problems. Sigh). Secondly, it's at least a step towards getting us away from the oil-only paradigm, and hopefully that means other steps will follow. This includes moving past the Middle East-dominated energy cartel as a political issue, as well as opening up the positive Pandora's Box of once you start taking alternative fuels as serious, economically sound options, versus the ridiculous naysaying of the 2000 election, then there's less market resistance to actually deploying these solutions. So I guess I feel at this point that any movement is better than none, and that it's peripheral to the starvation issue despite seeming closely related. Cheers, Bill Douglas Roberts wrote: At some point in time it will be possible to divide all the the bodies in the world by all the food in the world, and discover that there is not enough to go around, political boundaries notwithstanding. I don't know when that particular point in time will arrive, but I am convinced that in the absence a large population die-off (as compared to the current exponential global population growth that we are witnessing), arriving sooner or later at that point in time is a certainty. |
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