The Global Food Crisis and the Need for Population Control

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Ridgerunner said:
This is obviously a win-win situation.

Those who believe the world is coming to an end and, therefore, don’t want to have children who will be present at the event, shouldn’t have children. Then they won’t have to worry about it.

Those who don’t believe the world is coming to an end should have as many children as they can afford to raise and educate. Their issue will, then, fall heir to the world the former group has evacuated.
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Course that is assuming the world will even be a decent place to inherit which I donlt think it even is now.
 
Calliso said:
Course that is assuming the world will even be a decent place to inherit which I donlt think it even is now.
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I’m old enough to remember having no running water, no indoor toilet, cutting tree sprouts with a hand axe to clear fields, weeding multi-acre commercial tomato patches by hand and picking strawberries for six cents/quart. I remember nearly dying from polio before the Salk vaccine was developed, nearly dying of Scarlat Fever and getting Hepatitis A because of an impure water supply.I remember when people I knew ended up in iron lungs, and I marveled at my luck in not ending up in one myself. I remember when every diagnosis of cancer was a death sentence, and when a diagnosis of juvenile diabetes was one too. I remember tires on cars so weak that they could blow just from driving on a gravel road, and cars so unstable a blowout could throw them off that road, and gas tanks so vulnerable being thrown off the road likely meant dying in a fireball. I remember farmers trying to eke out a living planting corn on hillsides so steep they had to use mules to plow. I remember farmers filling up 55 gallon drums from a creek so they could water their cattle during dry weather when the shallow hand-dug wells went dry. I remember waking up every winter morning in a cold house and splitting wood with a sledge hammer and wedge as a ten year old. I started driving when I was twelve, which was deemed old enough to feed cattle in the dark on school mornings from a pickup truck. I remember hauling water uphill from a spring for drinking. After a hard rain, it was murky, but we drank it anyway.

I remember wondering how in the world anyone would survive in a basement long enough not to get poisoned by radiation when the Russian A-bombs might get dropped. I remember, as a kid, listening to reports of the awful casualties in Korea which, of course, followed closely on the even more awful casualties of World War II. I remember my mother making clothing for us out of printed feed sacks, and making bedspreads and curtains out of WWII surplus parachutes.

And you don’t think the world we have now is worth inheriting?
 
Even thought the U.S. does let a lot of food rot in storage yearly, that still doesn’t change the fact that yields are beginning to fall because of problems that technology won’t fix----falling water tables, warming climates, eroding soils, permanently higher fuel prices and (name removed by moderator)uts shortages…

The world is not richer than ever before-------the middle classes in India and China are copying the American consume and shop till you drop model which is definitely not sustainable…

Vern Humphrey----your condemnation of the government for not drilling oil or digging up what’s left of our badly depleted coal reserves is very misguided… do you want the water pollution from the mercury and arsenic posioning of water downstream from the coal mine? do you want oil drilling and refining to blacken the air? do you want catastrophic climate change causing biblical droughts and floods yearly as grain crops wither in the heat?

We had better start thinking a little more clearly about some of these issues… Spouting off this cornucopian, Julian Simon nonsense that the Earth has no carrying capacity or saying that we can dig up every last bit of Earth to find dirty fossil fuels (what would that do to God’s creation to whom we owe the responsibility of being faithful and responsible stewards?
 
NYQuestioning83 said:
Even thought the U.S. does let a lot of food rot in storage yearly, that still doesn’t change the fact that yields are beginning to fall because of problems that technology won’t fix----falling water tables, warming climates, eroding soils, permanently higher fuel prices and (name removed by moderator)uts shortages…

The world is not richer than ever before-------the middle classes in India and China are copying the American consume and shop till you drop model which is definitely not sustainable…

Vern Humphrey----your condemnation of the government for not drilling oil or digging up what’s left of our badly depleted coal reserves is very misguided… do you want the water pollution from the mercury and arsenic posioning of water downstream from the coal mine? do you want oil drilling and refining to blacken the air? do you want catastrophic climate change causing biblical droughts and floods yearly as grain crops wither in the heat?

We had better start thinking a little more clearly about some of these issues… Spouting off this cornucopian, Julian Simon nonsense that the Earth has no carrying capacity or saying that we can dig up every last bit of Earth to find dirty fossil fuels (what would that do to God’s creation to whom we owe the responsibility of being faithful and responsible stewards?
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Do you read the Oil Drum? I do realize the peak oil is a threat to social justice as it prevents us from utilizing poverty reduction strategies.
 
NYQuestioning83 said:
Even thought the U.S. does let a lot of food rot in storage yearly, that still doesn’t change the fact that yields are beginning to fall because of problems that technology won’t fix----falling water tables, warming climates, eroding soils, permanently higher fuel prices and (name removed by moderator)uts shortages…

The world is not richer than ever before-------the middle classes in India and China are copying the American consume and shop till you drop model which is definitely not sustainable…

Vern Humphrey----your condemnation of the government for not drilling oil or digging up what’s left of our badly depleted coal reserves is very misguided… do you want the water pollution from the mercury and arsenic posioning of water downstream from the coal mine? do you want oil drilling and refining to blacken the air? do you want catastrophic climate change causing biblical droughts and floods yearly as grain crops wither in the heat?

We had better start thinking a little more clearly about some of these issues… Spouting off this cornucopian, Julian Simon nonsense that the Earth has no carrying capacity or saying that we can dig up every last bit of Earth to find dirty fossil fuels (what would that do to God’s creation to whom we owe the responsibility of being faithful and responsible stewards?
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Yeah, one thing that scares the bejeebers out of me, and is also not receiving much medica coverage/general attention, is desertification.

IMO, that’s a bigger problem than anything else popping up on CNN or in my daily newspaper.

I was really disappointed to see National Geographic attribute one heading and one photo to the issue of it in China.

🤷
 
NYQuestioning83 said:
Vern Humphrey----your condemnation of the government for not drilling oil or digging up what’s left of our badly depleted coal reserves is very misguided… do you want the water pollution from the mercury and arsenic posioning of water downstream from the coal mine? do you want oil drilling and refining to blacken the air? do you want catastrophic climate change causing biblical droughts and floods yearly as grain crops wither in the heat?
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Get the fire extinguisher! We’ve got a guy running around with his hair on fire!:rotfl:
 
I’ve taken up Development Economics so I have some idea about this.

The premise that population is going to deplete resources is an old error that dates back to Malthus (1766-1834). In a nutshell, he theorized that the world will suffer massive famine due to increasing population and constant food supply. This has long been debunked because we had since passed that doomsday point and we’re still here.

The main fault with the theory is that it did not consider man’s resourcefulness and the ability to advance technology.

In truth, the planet might have limited resources that we know of, but man is capable of making and finding more resources. The deeper problem lies in social inequality and lack of solidarity.

Forcing population control is not going to solve the problem. If you do that (and it’s happening already), you will end up with an aging population and a weaker workforce to take care of that aging population. Hence, the so-called “developed” countries are experiencing a population crisis, not too much, but too little people because they are not reproducing at replacement rates. That is 2.1 babies per woman in developed countries, and can be as high as 2.5 to 3.0 in developing countries. Anything below that, and the population will age.

Population “control” is not the solution at all. The solution is more ideal, and hence, more difficult. Nations must be in solidarity with one another, and this is the Church’s position. Enforcing population control is not only an attack on the individual’s dignity, but is also horribly dangerous to the demographic as well.
 
Possibly some previous poster has said it, but I am curious as to how many people the population reductionists want to see in the U.S. A hundred million? A million? What?

Misgovernment afflicts a good part of the world, making it difficult to know much about how many could be supported in many places if governance was even minimally competent, e.g., Zimbabwe.

So, let’s talk about the U.S. alone. How many do you have in mind?
 
Ridgerunner said:
I’m old enough to remember having no running water, no indoor toilet, cutting tree sprouts with a hand axe to clear fields, weeding multi-acre commercial tomato patches by hand and picking strawberries for six cents/quart. I remember nearly dying from polio before the Salk vaccine was developed, nearly dying of Scarlat Fever and getting Hepatitis A because of an impure water supply.I remember when people I knew ended up in iron lungs, and I marveled at my luck in not ending up in one myself. I remember when every diagnosis of cancer was a death sentence, and when a diagnosis of juvenile diabetes was one too. I remember tires on cars so weak that they could blow just from driving on a gravel road, and cars so unstable a blowout could throw them off that road, and gas tanks so vulnerable being thrown off the road likely meant dying in a fireball. I remember farmers trying to eke out a living planting corn on hillsides so steep they had to use mules to plow. I remember farmers filling up 55 gallon drums from a creek so they could water their cattle during dry weather when the shallow hand-dug wells went dry. I remember waking up every winter morning in a cold house and splitting wood with a sledge hammer and wedge as a ten year old. I started driving when I was twelve, which was deemed old enough to feed cattle in the dark on school mornings from a pickup truck. I remember hauling water uphill from a spring for drinking. After a hard rain, it was murky, but we drank it anyway.

I remember wondering how in the world anyone would survive in a basement long enough not to get poisoned by radiation when the Russian A-bombs might get dropped. I remember, as a kid, listening to reports of the awful casualties in Korea which, of course, followed closely on the even more awful casualties of World War II. I remember my mother making clothing for us out of printed feed sacks, and making bedspreads and curtains out of WWII surplus parachutes.

And you don’t think the world we have now is worth inheriting?
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Meh you do make a good point. I still donlt think this world is a good place but aye one could say things were far worse before in many ways.
 
Calliso said:
Meh you do make a good point. I still donlt think this world is a good place but aye one could say things were far worse before in many ways.
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And we were fortunate, even so, that we did not live in the 19th Century. A difference, I think, between when I was growing up and now, is that back then we did not doubt the gates of Paradise were guarded by an angel with a sword of flame. I think people now do not wish to believe it.
 
NYQuestioning83 said:
THe Telegraph on the Global Food Crisis

telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/06/08/ccration108.xml
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The article seemed a trifle confused to me. Food prices relative to income in Britain are low compared to the continent, the article says, and far lower than they were in the UK in 1963. Domestic production is low, due to lower costs of imported food and bans on using improved strains of what one assumes are grains. The latter is due to environmentalists’ objections. Notwithstanding the Telegraph’s conviction that food production could be better in the UK, and that food riots in the Third World are ominous portents of what may befall Britain, part of the writer’s answer is…import more food from Africa.

There is a bow to global climate change, but it’s never explained how this effects anything negatively, particularly in Britain. Since warming would actually improve food production in Britain, it’s hard to see how this fits except that it’s politically correct to at least mention it.
 
NYQuestioning83 said:
I have been wrestling with my belief in Catholicism for some time, and I must say given all of my recent studies in biology and ecology that the human population has probably tripled the Earth’s carrying capacity for human life----now as deserts spread, the climate warms, and water tables fall everywhere (the US, India, and China all have terminally falling water tables and they are three of the four largest grain/crop producing countries in the world that feed most of the world’s 6.7 billion)----the Earth will not support a population scheduled to exceed 9-9.5 billion by 2050 by UN Predictions.
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Surely, the world’s poor don’t deserve to be condemned to life of starving on the margins of the planetary’s social collapsing ecological and agricultural systems?
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Starvation is a food distribution problem, not a prodictivity problem.

Its not the Church’s job to make a new plan for the world. The Church’s job is to teach the plan already in place.
 
NYQuestioning83 said:
I have been wrestling with my belief in Catholicism for some time, and I must say given all of my recent studies in biology and ecology that the human population has probably tripled the Earth’s carrying capacity for human life----now as deserts spread, the climate warms, and water tables fall everywhere (the US, India, and China all have terminally falling water tables and they are three of the four largest grain/crop producing countries in the world that feed most of the world’s 6.7 billion)----the Earth will not support a population scheduled to exceed 9-9.5 billion by 2050 by UN Predictions. So, why doesn’t the Church support some form of population control and family planning? Surely, the world’s poor don’t deserve to be condemned to life of starving on the margins of the planetary’s social collapsing ecological and agricultural systems? I would love to have a good discussion about this issue to understand the Church’s position a little better. Thanks for your time and consideration in answering this post.
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Can The Entire World Population Fit Within The Boundries of Texas?

LEGEND

1 Acre = 43,560 Square Feet

1 Square Mile = 640 Acres or 27,878,400 Square Feet (640 x 43,560)

——————–

World Population = 6,276,000,000 people

State of Texas = 268,601 Square Miles or 171,904,640 Acres (268,601 x 640) or 7,488,166,118,400 Square Feet (268,601 x 640 x 43,560)

———————-

Average Size 2-Story Home with 3-4 Bedrooms = 1,500 to 2,400 Square Feet (Thus 750 - 1,200 Square Feet is Needed on the Ground Floor).

This home would fit 5-6 people per house comfortably!

Therefore 150-240 (750 to 1,200/ 5 people per household) Square Feet of Ground Space Per Person is needed to fit 5-6 people comfortably in a 2-story home in the state of Texas.

——————–

State of Texas = 7,488,166,118,400 Square Feet/ 6,276,000,000 people in the world = 1,193 Square Feet Per Person is available for the entire world’s population to live in the state of Texas.

As noted above only 150-240 Square Feet of Ground Space is needed per person to fit 5-6 people comfortably in a 2-story home in the state of Texas!!!

——————

You can double check my math!

=============

Remember 1 farmer can feed thousands of people. People = Productivity. The worlds greatest resource are people!
 
mark_a said:
Starvation is a food distribution problem, not a prodictivity problem.
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And to solve the distribution problem, we need to solve the dictator and warlord problem. Myanmar isn’t the only country where people are dying because their government won’t allow them to be helped.
mark_a said:
Its not the Church’s job to make a new plan for the world. The Church’s job is to teach the plan already in place.
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Again, correct – but as I have said before, who would solve the dictator and warlord problem had better be prepared to expend a lot of ammunition.
 
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