The Global Food Crisis and the Need for Population Control

[NYQuestioning83]

I plan on not having children! Considering how bad the ecological crisis is, I think it is wrong to bring children into the world where I am not at all confident that they will have access to food with falling water tables, a warming climate, continuing soil erosion, spreading deserts and skyrocketing fuel prices/energy shortages sure to reduce world grain supplies that much more in coming years…

I’m not sure that I will be able to have access to food myself considering the state of the world’s supply in as soon as a decade…

I think it’s wrong to bring life into the world to suffer needlessly----I don’t think a Loving God would recommend such a course of action.

 

[Holly3278]

Because “population control” and “family planning” are intrinsically evil unless it is natural family planning. And even then, natural family planning can only be used in certain circumstances. I’m pretty sure that a booming population does not fall under those circumstances. Don’t worry! Jesus will come back to get us before things get too bad I am sure. Things will get worse but I don’t think Jesus is going to literally let us go extinct or something.

 

[markomalley]

I plan on not having children! Considering how bad the ecological crisis is, I think it is wrong to bring children into the world where I am not at all confident that they will have access to food with falling water tables, a warming climate, continuing soil erosion, spreading deserts and skyrocketing fuel prices/energy shortages sure to reduce world grain supplies that much more in coming years…

I’m not sure that I will be able to have access to food myself considering the state of the world’s supply in as soon as a decade…

I think it’s wrong to bring life into the world to suffer needlessly----I don’t think a Loving God would recommend such a course of action.

If you choose to do so via celibacy vice contraception (with a backup plan of abortion), then that is purely a personal choice.

 

[Newbie2]

You have to understand, I deal with a lot of purile people. Some of them don’t even have jobs!

I guess that means yes, Ribo.

To the OP, I would turn the quesion on it’s side and posit that it’s more a matter of “Food control” than population control. In the US, millions of tons of food go to waste by:

1. Crops that rot in storage.
2. Crops that the Government pays farmers ***not ***to plant.
3. Lack of “Portion control” by the population in general.
4. Etc.

The world could feed itself if we were committed to making it happen as a global community. Sadly, global politics, etc. will assure that it will never happen.

 

[vern_humphrey]

I guess that means yes, Ribo.

To the OP, I would turn the quesion on it’s side and posit that it’s more a matter of “Food control” than population control. In the US, millions of tons of food go to waste by:

1. Crops that rot in storage.
2. Crops that the Government pays farmers ***not ***to plant.
3. Lack of “Portion control” by the population in general.
4. Etc.

The world could feed itself if we were committed to making it happen as a global community. Sadly, global politics, etc. will assure that it will never happen.

Despite waste and the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) there is still plenty of food. The problem is dictators and tribal chiefs who use starvation as a weapon.

Myanmar is not the only country that either refuses help, or blocks food convoys.

 

[Newbie2]

Despite waste and the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) there is still plenty of food. The problem is dictators and tribal chiefs who use starvation as a weapon.

Myanmar is not the only country that either refuses help, or blocks food convoys.

I agree. Politics has the biggest role, methinks, in the unwillingness and inability to feed the hungry.

 

[vern_humphrey]

I agree. Politics has the biggest role, methinks, in the unwillingness and inability to feed the hungry.

Absolutely. If anyone is to blame, it is not the unborn child, it is the brutal, corrupt governments and tribal leaders.

 

[bilop]

I plan on not having children! Considering how bad the ecological crisis is, I think it is wrong to bring children into the world where I am not at all confident that they will have access to food with falling water tables, a warming climate, continuing soil erosion, spreading deserts and skyrocketing fuel prices/energy shortages sure to reduce world grain supplies that much more in coming years…

I’m not sure that I will be able to have access to food myself considering the state of the world’s supply in as soon as a decade…

I think it’s wrong to bring life into the world to suffer needlessly----I don’t think a Loving God would recommend such a course of action.

There is **NO RESOURCE CRISIS **in the world.

The world is richer than ever in history. Hundreds of millions of people in Asia have joined the middle class in the last 10 years. Child mortality continue to fall and life expectancy rise.

We can generate all the energy the world needs through nuclear power which is VERY CLEAN.

Water is renewable, unless you badly pollute it.

The U.S. alone could probably produce enough food for the entire world. As others have said, we pay farmers NOT to grow food. Remember, in the 19th century New York and Pennsylvania were the breadbasket of America. In the 18th century, Massachusetts and Connecticut were major farming areas. All that land could be put back in production if needed.

Don’t believe the alarmists. We went from ice age warnings in the 1970s to global warming paranoia today.

**Declining and aging **populations are a much bigger threat than overpopulation.

God Bless

 

[Al_Masetti]

When governments run agriculture and food distribution, the result is mismanagement and starvation.

Recently, Zimbabwe has been experiencing famine owing to gross cronyism and mismanagement and corruption. It used to be a very productive agricultural area.

Starvation in North Korea is totally manufactured by the Communist government to subjugate the people.

Libya was once the breadbasket of Europe. So we know that wheat and olive trees will grow there. Leptis Magna, now a ghost town, was once a large seaport city from which the grain and olive oil were shipped to Rome. Nothing to do with global warming. More to do with natural climate change. But there have been numerous proposals to let the sun work with the salt water of the Mediterranean to restore agriculture.

Right next to Libya in Egypt, there is the Qattara Depression … a large low area that could receive water from the Med allowing the sun to evaporate the water.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression

There have been similar proposals to bring salt water to the Dead Sea which is drying up.

A lot of rain water runoff is wasted all over the world when it rushes to the sea; that water could be stored in appropriate reservoirs.

Friends who have worked in some of the poorest countries say that everything grows there. BUT, the people lack property rights, so there is no point to growing anything because the government or government-sponsored thugs will steal whatever they grow.

Whatever global food crisis that exists is artificial and man-made. It’s a political issue; not a structural issue.

 

[vern_humphrey]

**Declining and aging **populations are a much bigger threat than overpopulation.

As every nation that has tried “population control” has found out.

 

[estesbob]

I will reply to these posts in more detail later…

But, a few brief comments to begin… I agree that the bottled water industry is a major problem----just another move by a corporation using the “free market” to fill consumer “needs” without concern for the environmental costs of such actions.

To mmyers—

I appreciate the comments----the posting from the Cato Institute is riddled with errors. I would highly recommend avoiding them in searching for useful data and viewpoints. They have a God, and that God is the “free market”—a concept which has never existed in the history of economies. I think the only time you can have a free market is if everyone is selling the same commodity to each other in a state of perfect competition so that consumer choice is truly sovereign. Ie, everyone selling lemonade on their front porches or driveways and the best lemonade and customer service wins…

America has never been a free market country, however. It has always been an oligarchy like every other great empire. The culture, and not the political economy, is democratic in that everyone can think what they will while they somnambulistically consume stuff that corporations make by plundering the Earth and using Third World slave labor. As in the days when Americans were killing the Indians and enslaving the Africans, a landowning class of plantation owners and an Anglophilic collection of Eastern U.S. merchants controlled the fate of the country. In the Civil War, these merchants and soon to be industrialists defeated the chattel slave economy run by the Southern oligarchy. In turn, we got the Industrial Revolution and the untold misery of Gilded Age capitalism run by robber barrons like Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Warburg, and Rockefeller. If not for the Progressive Movement and the New Deal, America would easily have become totalitarian (Google Smedley Butler for information on America’s near fascist coup in the mid 1930s)----you see, the rich owners own everything… No free market here at all-----read the 1905 Lochner decision with Oliver Wendell Holmes dissent where he blasts the free market ideology where the baking factory justifies that it can exploit workers because they are “freely” offering their labor according to the dictates of market rationality.

Ask anyone working at Wal-Mart if they “freely” give their labor to receive substandard wages from a corporation whose original owning family is now worth well over $100 billion…

mmyers—I will rebut each of those ten points later, but I first must say that any article which quotes Julian Simon simply doesn’t cut it with me… Simon was a total nut----his book the Ultimate Resource which is probably his defining academic achievement cannot even stand up to the mildest of scrutiny
-------Anyone who says resources are infinite is simply a nut…

I get it!

Shut down Wal-Mart and limit the number of brown, black and yellow Babies born and all will be well. !

And of course we must igniore any data that refutes your simplisitc worldview as it comes form untrustworthy sources. And how do we know its untrustworthy? Why becuase you disagree with it, of course!

 

[Al_Masetti]

Got timed out.

I was researching Leptis Magna (also known as Lepcis Magna) on the Mediterranean coast of Libya.

Current accounts seem to like to ignore where Leptis Magna got its wealth from and how it managed to survive for 1500 years.

From one source: “During the Roman period, Lepcis was the Mediterranean outlet of a trade route through the Sahara into the interior of Africa. Its economy was based on agriculture, and some of its products, particularly olives, became profitable trade items. Olive cultivation added so much to the town’s prosperity that in 46 bc the Roman ruler Julius Caesar imposed an annual tax of three million pounds of oil on Lepcis.”

Leptis had a population of 70,000 people which is huge for the time period.

Finally, around 500 AD, the city was sacked and destroyed by Vandals and that was the end of it.

worldheritage.heindorffhus.dk/frame-LibyaLeptisMagna.htm

The extensive water works and other architectural projects are described here:

penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/Africa/Libya/_Texts/MATCIS/Leptis_Magna*.html

The so-called “Global Food Crisis” is caused by modern-day Vandals. They loot and they pillage and they contribute nothing. And then they go and blame everybody else for the problems that they caused and created.

 

[ribozyme]

I get it!

Shut down Wal-Mart and limit the number of brown, black and yellow Babies born and all will be well. !

And of course we must igniore any data that refutes your simplisitc worldview as it comes form untrustworthy sources. And how do we know its untrustworthy? Why becuase you disagree with it, of course!

Did you read that comment?? He didn’t say anything about race.

 

[mmyers]

I think this is what Darwin ment by suvival of the fittest. Bad ideas breed themselves out. I don’t mean to be cynical, but this is ulimately what will happen.

 

[Calliso]

I guess that means yes, Ribo.

To the OP, I would turn the quesion on it’s side and posit that it’s more a matter of “Food control” than population control. In the US, millions of tons of food go to waste by:

1. Crops that rot in storage.
2. Crops that the Government pays farmers ***not ***to plant.
3. Lack of “Portion control” by the population in general.
4. Etc.

The world could feed itself if we were committed to making it happen as a global community. Sadly, global politics, etc. will assure that it will never happen.

Yeah pretty much though I could have sworn I read an article not long ago that said we really donlt have the vast stores of food that we once had that it is basically gone. Maybe I will go see if I can find it later ahah.

 

[vern_humphrey]

Yeah pretty much though I could have sworn I read an article not long ago that said we really donlt have the vast stores of food that we once had that it is basically gone. Maybe I will go see if I can find it later ahah.

We had “vast stores of food” because the Government used to buy food and keep it off the market, to keep prices artificially high.

Now they just pay farmers not to grow any.

 

[Calliso]

We had “vast stores of food” because the Government used to buy food and keep it off the market, to keep prices artificially high.

Now they just pay farmers not to grow any.

Ahh yeah I think the article said something about that too. Speaking of high prices… my guess is that not being able to afford food will be a problem much sooner then not having enough food will be. Heck it is already starting to be a problem. Then if we still remain as dependent on oil as we are combined with climate change and all that eventually not actually being able to produce enough food could become a problem.

 

[vern_humphrey]

Ahh yeah I think the article said something about that too. Speaking of high prices… my guess is that not being able to afford food will be a problem much sooner then not having enough food will be. Heck it is already starting to be a problem. Then if we still remain as dependent on oil as we are combined with climate change and all that eventually not actually being able to produce enough food could become a problem.

We have enough oil in the United States – but can’t drill for it. We can’t build nuclear power plants, either. And coal-fired plants are taking a beating.

To paraphrase Pogo Possum, “We have met the enemy and he is our government.”

 

[Contarini]

and a huge contributor to loss of local water supplies is US companies coming in and tapping water for the bottled water market, depriving local inhabitants of water needed not only for sustaining agriculture but for daily life. it takes approx. 1.3 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of bottled water. another case of stealing from the poor to sell at exhorbitant price to the rich, and then calling for genocide against the poor so the rich can accumulate more and more.

the poor consume too much of what I choose to own and waste, lets kill some poor people. that is the sum of population control logic.

But this is surely a straw man. Nothing about population control necessarily leads to the condoning of abortion. And without abortion there is no “killing” involved. Not conceiving does not kill anyone.

Edwin

 

[Ridgerunner]

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.