Ending World Hunger - Page 5

On October 29 2009 02:37 Roffles wrote:
Give a starving person a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime.

Ending World Hunger is nice, but thinking about population control and how the population could just skyrocket in the future is quite scary.

On October 29 2009 10:53 integral wrote:
Next you'll be telling me humans aren't bound by the same laws of ecology that other species are because we have foresight and the ability to choose whether to reproduce or not based on economic factors. If you were to look at the behavior of individuals and not that of the entire species, you might be able to make this argument. But as a species, humans follow the same exact pattern every single other species follows. We live, we consume, we reproduce, we die. If we don't have enough food, we starve to death. If we exceed long-term carrying capacity, we die-off. Humans are not exempt from any of the biological constraints that other species are, though we're certainly a bit more creative in pushing those limits as far as we can. We have a composite carrying capacity almost to the scale of the entire earth, but it's been completely supported by nonrenewable resources, and that's called overshoot, and populations die when they go into overshoot.

If you want to "fix" overshoot, you'd do well to understand the basic ecology involved, because then and only then you could apply economics to the task.

On October 29 2009 10:41 TanGeng wrote:


So what seems to be the problem? It's either partially subsidized food that out competes the local agricultural industry or it's the completely subsidized food (free foreign aid!) that out competes the local agricultural industry.

What can you do about that? You can either stop subsidizing food or you can a huge amount of money forbidding international trade of food. That means a far smaller variety in diet and possible starvation in some nations where the population is larger than the food production capacity.

Is it really logical to point to the trade and call that the problem!?

On October 29 2009 10:48 integral wrote:
The reason I don't talk about the socioeconomic factors involved in world hunger is that people talk about the starvation as if it were a problem that can be fixed by feeding people, rather than an outgrowth of resource drawdown and overshoot. If we were living within our means and there were still hungry people, I would of course be talking about trade and the distribution of resources -- the problem, and its solution, would be sociological.

But if you were to address the sociological factors involved, and "solve" world hunger, you would merely exacerbate the real underlying problem of overpopulation by enabling continuing reproduction. This is why it's so important to understand the actual ecology of population, and not talk about human population as if it had no ecological basis.

On October 29 2009 04:28 Krikkitone wrote:
First fact

we currently produce enough food for everyone on earth

Current "World" Hunger =/= Global Food shortage
"World" hunger is a strictly local problem... or even more specifically and individual problem... the problem is that people are too poor to buy food.

Basically its an economic issue, the development of countries, and allowing individuals to have economic opportunities. Which means places like many African nations with severe political problems would still have hunger even if the price of bread in the West fell to a penny for a loaf... (actually hunger might even get worse in Africa because the farmers couldn't make enough money)


The Malthusian issue is not a problem because population growth rates have been falling world wide and hunger has been falling worldwide.

The "west" is not growing except through immigration (US is one of a few exceptions and the non-immigration growthrate is very low) and the "nondeveloped world" has decreasing growthrates.

so, population will top out at maybe 10 billion, and there will still be world hunger.... for probably centuries after that, even as food production continues to grow... bcause the problem isn't food production, but distribution.

On October 29 2009 08:57 WhiteNights wrote:
I've been making the point that the carrying capacity of the earth depends on capital and technology level. Theoretically, considering a situation where the entirety of the Gobi Desert has been turned into a massive solar power plant designed to power millions of hydroponic farms, one can *imagine* a long-term carrying capacity of a hundred billion.

The competing factors are:

Increasing human population above long-term carrying capacity.
Decreasing non-renewable resources means short-term carrying capacity cannot be sustained.
Increasing technology and capital level increasing Earth's long-term carrying capacity.

Nonrenewable resource drawdown doesn't need to result in die-off in one of the two following scenarios:
1.) Long-term carrying capacity is increased from below the current population to above the current population, and population control measures are implemented before we hit the absolute limit.
2.) Humanity adjusts consumption patterns in order to sustain more people off of less resources rather than continuing current consumption patterns and allowing people to die off.

Notice that neither of these apply to an ecology where the population in question is unintelligent. Standard ecological theory stating "draw-down implies overshoot inevitably leads to die-off" is predicated on the assumption that renewable long-term carrying capacity is constant, which is true when dealing with creatures which are not humans, and it is this assumption which I am objecting to.

Also, I did post about carrying capacity with respect to living standards and you ignored my previous post.

"any population which consumes resources faster than they replenish is in overshoot," that would mean that humanity was in overshoot the first time humanity extracted metal from the earth.

Carrying Capacity and Liebig's Law

To ... [understand,] we need to step outside the usual economic or political frames of thought, go back two-thirds of a century before the 1929 crash, and reexamine for its profound human relevance a principle of agricultural chemistry formulated in 1863 by a German scientist, Justus von Liebig. [2] That principle set forth with great clarity the concept of the "limiting factor" briefly mentioned in Chapter 8. Carrying capacity is, as we saw there, limited not just by food supply, but potentially by any substance or circumstance that is indispensable but inadequate. The fundamental principle is this: whatever necessity is least abundantly available (relative to per capita requirements) sets an environment's carrying capacity.

While there is no way to repeal this principle, which is known as "the law of the minimum," or Liebig's law, there is a way to make its application less restrictive. People living in an environment where carrying capacity is limited by a shortage of one essential resource can develop exchange relationships with residents of another area that happens to be blessed with a surplus of that resource but happens to lack some other resource that is plentiful where the first one was scarce.

Trade does not repeal Liebig's law. Only by knowing Liebig's law, however, can we see clearly what trade does do, in ecological terms. Trade enlarges the scope of application of the law of the minimum. The composite carrying capacity of two or more areas with different resource configurations can be greater than the sum of their separate carrying capacities. Call this the principle of scope enlargement; it can be expressed in mathematical notation as follows:

CC (A + B) > CCA + CCB

The combined environment (A + B) still has finite carrying capacity, and that carrying capacity is still set by the necessary resource available in least (composite) abundance. But if the two environments are truly joined, by trade, then scarcities that are local to A or B no longer have to be limiting.

A good many of the events of human history need to be seen as efforts to implement the principle of scope enlargement. Most such events came about as results of decisions and activities by men who never heard of Liebig or his law of the minimum. Now, however, knowing the law, and understanding also the scope-enlargement principle, we can see important processes of history in a new light. Progress in transport technology, together with advancements in the organization of commerce, often achieved only after conquest or political consolidation, have had the effect of enlarging the world's human carrying capacity by enabling more and more local populations (or their lifestyles) to be limited not by local scarcity, but by abundance at a distance.

...

Unfortunately, modern transport systems, and some aspects of modern organization, are based very heavily upon exhaustible resource exploitation. Insofar as this is true, they must eventually founder upon the rocks of resource exhaustion. But even before they might succumb to such physical disaster, the trade arrangements upon which the earth's extended carrying capacity for Homo colossus has come to depend can be torn apart by social catastrophe. [3] It is important to recognize at last that that is what happened in 1929-32. In fact, some of it began happening during, or as a repercussion of the Great War of 1914-18.

On October 29 2009 02:29 Biochemist wrote:
education and birth control

On October 29 2009 11:37 TanGeng wrote:


The your entire premise is that humans can't identify or predict how scarce food is in the world or that human beings once identified how scarce food is in the world will won't change their reproductive behavior in account for the scarcity. Or perhaps you are just really pessimistic about the human race and wonder if all people will figure out that at a certain point it isn't such a good idea to reproduce. Or maybe it's just pessimism that the technological growth of human race will not find a substitute source of resources with energy being the key to just about everything.

Aren't there plenty good examples of people choosing not to reproduce? There are people limiting their reproduction based on how expensive it is to raise children. I'm sure not even half of them have understood this ecological argument of carrying capacity and overshoot. If energy becomes expensive or if food becomes expensive then the incentive to conserve and not reproduce will become ever larger (or there can be wars as populations bump into one another and that will kill off the population). And if need be humans will squeeze ever last bit of fossil fuel out of the shale and then spread to the stars and get energy by farming the sun in space.

On October 29 2009 12:36 chillos wrote:
Despite having no opinion on this matter I decided to post anyway because I didn't like another poster's tone

On October 29 2009 11:23 Adeeler wrote:
We can produce food far more efficient and with greater yeilds with improved technology & farming techniques. Even in 1st world countries the best farming techniques & technology isn't being used so production is simply a fraction of what it could be. If we produce food with the best methods across the globe we'd be able to sustain a population far higher then what we have now.

If we reduced the wasted food we'd also reduce our use of food dramatically.

If need be we could always switch to hydroponics which yield far more then normal farming techniques. This is what we would do if we ever travel into space for extended times.

On October 29 2009 13:37 YianKutKu wrote:
Why doesn't the US or some country just bomb the entire African continent to end hunger on the continent. The productivity of that continent is extremely low with rampant diseases and poverty. Then, more educated people from the US can utilize the resources in Africa and make the entire continent more productive.

On October 29 2009 12:37 integral wrote:


The only one of these statements I agree with is the last one. Food being scarce isn't an issue, it's hardly a problem in my opinion -- it's the natural consequence of overpopulation and a precursor to die-off. Desperately attempting to avoid the inevitable consequences of overshooting long-term carrying capacity IS a problem, and should be noted as such.



Maybe then God and Zeus could have a breakdance competition and magical unicorns will frolic in our new colonized star system. As long as we're writing fiction, I mean.

Isolated examples of people choosing not to reproduce has had and will have no impact on the biological imperative of members of our species to reproduce causing our population to reproduce to its carrying capacity, whether that capacity is short-term or long-term.

On October 29 2009 11:37 TanGeng wrote:
Aren't there plenty good examples of people choosing not to reproduce?

And if need be humans will ... spread to the stars and get energy by farming the sun in space.

On October 29 2009 13:37 YianKutKu wrote:
Why doesn't the US or some country just bomb the entire African continent to end hunger on the continent. The productivity of that continent is extremely low with rampant diseases and poverty. Then, more educated people from the US can utilize the resources in Africa and make the entire continent more productive.