"The global network of agricultural research centres warns that famines lie
ahead unless new crop strains adapted to a warmer future are
developed." Richard Black from "New crops needed to avoid famines" BBC
Website (3 December 2006)
At first sight, it seems ridiculous that the warmer climate of the past few
decades should be curtailing food production. After all, the extra heat and
the extra man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere should encourage
photosynthesis, growth and production of plant life.
And so they have done -- within the natural ecosystem. But not in the
agricultural regions in which food crops have become tailor-made to suit
slightly lower temperature regimes. Also, the customised breeds of grain,
fruit and roots have needed water above and beyond easily accessible
supplies -- as well as copious quantities of man-made nitrogenous
fertiliser and phosphates and other minerals, sometimes transported from
thousands of miles away.
In short, while large portions of the world's natural ecosystem are
burgeoning -- particularly the broad band of taiga conifers across EurAsia
and North America -- the more specialised food plants which depend on much
narrower-compass, artificial ecosystems are wilting. The overall result of
all this is that deserts are expanding in many agricultural regions of the
world, and seed suppliers are becoming increasingly desperate to breed new
strains with even more specialised genetic make-ups which may make them
slightly more efficient in the reduced circumstances.
The most crucial shortage of all is, of course, water -- without which even
the most primitive life cannot survive. Over all the unnatural,
food-growing regions of the world, rivers large and small are being
increasingly drained and huge underground aquifers are being emptied.
Precious top soil is being lost by deforestation in habitable regions,
succeeded by either mud-slides or dust storms whatever extremes of wet or
dry weather occur.
When times are hard -- as it always has been in peasant-agricultural
countries -- parents naturally produce large families so that they have
more child labour available and also that at least some of their children
will survive into adulthood and support them in old age. Before Western man
brought medical benefits to the Third World and saved more lives,
particularly in child-birth, populations in agricultural regions had
stabilised to large, but just about sustainable populations. But now we
have a world-wide population oversurge, far more than can be fed by the
available water. (And the cost of nitrogenous fertiliser -- made tonne for
tonne from fossil fuels --- will only increase as the latter becomes more
competitively priced.)
This world over-population will be culled by a variety of means, temporary
and permanent. The temporary ones include the present massive migration of
agricultural populations into the cities of the Third World and the Western
developed countries. As far as the Western world is concerned, this
migration will be unstoppable for a while until the cost of secret
long-distance transportation and false passports and identity papers as
charged by criminal gangs become too much for all those (usually young
people) who would otherwise continue to migrate for decades to come. In
addition to starvation, epidemic diseases of all sorts, and perhaps quite
new ones -- the usual scourge of too dense populations -- will pass through
us. Malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS and several other diseases are already on
the increase. Killer-flu -- according to all epidemiologists -- will
inevitably trim millions, perhaps billions, of surplus people from the
planet in the next two or three decades.
What can be done about all this? Nothing much. Lots of valiant things will
be attempted -- and quite rightly, too -- and middle-class politicians in
comfortable circumstances in the developed world will have a field day
telling us what to do in the minutest detail. But our species has a
particular set of genes which has led us into our present quandary and we
are thus no different from any other species which has also been tempted
into over-population by temporary largesse -- but always followed by
large-scale culling. We are a clever species, but a natural one
nevertheless, as our present circumstances already bears witness.
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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