Quote:
Originally Posted by Duffman
Fact of the matter is the planet is severely overpopulated and these food problems are only going to get worse.
I've found this stir over ethanol lately to be quite interesting. My personal opinion is that it is being driven by those on the extreme left that hate cars and those on the extreme right that love oil, an interesting combination huh? What has drawn me to this conclusion you might ask?
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It's also being driven by people who don't like subsidies.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Duffman
Why is there no movement against coffee bean farming, tobacco farming or land used to grow spices? None of these crops provide any nutritional value and take up land that could be used to grow grains or vegetables. Or land that is used to graze cattle could be converted to crop land and produce many times the calories per acre.
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Because those things are all not novel industries, so tsheir influence on prices is not really even quantifiable. They occupy a minuscule amount of land compared to ethanol production so their influence cannot be very great. Tobacco occupied 673K acres vs 79M for Corn. India is a huge producer of coffee, and uses total 900K acres for it. Spices and the like occupy even less.
The cattle argument has merit, and one reason I limit the amount of meat I eat (still eat lots of fish). Some cattle are raised on land not suitable for farming though. Also cattle, coffee and spices cannot be substituted for by battery powered meat nor can cattle be extracted from ANWR.
Edit: Starvation is not a explicitly a problem of over population any more than a lack of underwear is. We don't lack the ability to produce enough food or underwear for everyone on the world, but lots of people live in large numbers far away from where underwear is cheap and these people don't have money, so they can't get underwear. If we had the political will we could provide these people with underwear, but we don't. Sure, if all the people who were starving or didn't have underwear didn't exist, then we wouldn't have people lacking underwear or starving, but that doesn't mean that over-population is the
problem - better said "de-population" (to put it euphemistically) would be a solution.
Current human practices are not sustainable, but the world's population is.
Also the species extinction is not happening in the first world and in developed economies, it's happening usually in less developed places. Most often it's the result of unsustainable agriculture practices that produce paltry amounts of food. If they stopped doing that and we provided them food, by eating less meat and giving them that food, this would decrease, but we're not going to do that because it would cost piles of $$$.