Famine can never be stopped!

[King of Atlantis]

I'm reading a very intresting book right now, and it brings up many could points. Here is one of them.

No matter how advanced we get people will always go hungry. By increasing productivity, thus the food supply we are only increasing the population, thus more need to be feed, thus increase in production, thus increase in population. It is a cycle that may never end.

By sending food to countries in poverty, those place will have more offspring, thus the need will increase. The only way for this to end is for this places tp provide for themselves and stay at a population their country can support.

Any thoughts?

[Productivity]

One child policy.

[King of Atlantis]

If we dont do something like that we are just leading to our demise.

In the book our civilisation was described as a plane that cant fly being pushed off a cliff(thine bike with wings). At first we think it worked and enjoy the sights. We get closer to the ground, but we just think we need to peddle faster and everything will be alright. But, no matter how fast we peddle we will hit the ground cause our plane cant fly.

Our society is based on unlimeted population growth. This is unlike any other animal. If we dont learn to stop and change our ways we are simply doomed. :embarassed:


(This is kinda a differnt subject, but oh well.)

[Del Arroyo]

Heinlein thinks that we'll just keep on killing eachother until when and if we colonize other planets. Seems to me we'll have another pretty big war within the next fifty years, probably help the problem.

You could say that our current governments would never allow such a thing, but what if our current governments begin to collapse due to economic pressures...

DA

[King of Atlantis]

colonizing planets is not a good solution in my mind, think about humans will just spread across the universe until all the universe is wasteland. :embarassed:

[Franconicus]

I once read that just after the ice age human beings had an ideal life. There were many lakes with lot of fish and animals in the forrests. Population was low and they only had to work for 3 - 4 hours a day to make their living.
Just a couple of centuries later the population has grown. They had to grow corn and work like slaves to make their living. They found skeletons of a young lady. Her knees and backbowns were deformed from milling the corn. So you are right. Each improvement in the living conditions let to an increase in pop that overcompensates this.

I do not know if war is a solution to this problem Even WW1 and 2 could not stop the population growth. You had to have constantly heavy wars all over the world to keep an equilibrium.

Deseases do not seem to work on the long run.

Birth control might be an solution. But will the people accept that?

[King of Atlantis]

Probably not, but population control is the only real solution. :embarassed:

[edyzmedieval]

China.....

Communists.... I was at a dinner, and one of our friends started talking of what's in China....

Couples, if they have a girl, after she is born,they put her in a box and leave her in the street!!!! :embarassed: :furious3: The little baby girl dies of hunger and/or cold.......
They do this because the girl doesn't help, only a man helps the house.... Incredible.....

~:eek: ~:eek: ~:eek: ~:eek: ~:eek: ~:eek: ~:eek: ~:eek:

[econ21]

The argument in the first post in this thread is the classic one of Malthus. Conceptually, the main fallacy is that it assumes people in poor countries procreate unrestrainedly like rabbits (Malthus called this assumption "fixity of passion"). A more plausible assumption is that people have a desired family size. As people get more prosperous they seem empirically to desire smaller families - you might have noticed Gawain's periodic posts in the Backroom on Europe's fertility decline. The global population is also projected to stabilise this century, as fertility rates are falling even in most developing countries.

In terms of famine, I think these are seldom the result of overpopulation. The Nobel prize winner, Amartya Sen, has proposed an "entitlement" theory of famines where the basic point is that they occurr not because there is insufficient food supply, but because some people are not "entitled" to it (e.g. they lack enough money to buy it). Classic examples of this are the Irish potato famine and the 1943 Bengal famine. More recently, famines seem to be partly weapons of war - governments use them to starve out rebel areas.

Bottomline: Malthus's theory may work for animals, not people.

[Al Khalifah]

Increased food supplies do not necessairly lead to permantently increased population growth rates. In a society with greater food production, farmers can grow more food than they require for themselves, allowing them to keep some to sell to other citizens who are not farmers. This frees citizens from the land and allows them to become specialists in other crafts.
The number of farmers in a society should be fairly self regulating - unless external factors are introduced such as farm subsidies and exports.

[Productivity]

China.....

Communists.... I was at a dinner, and one of our friends started talking of what's in China....

Couples, if they have a girl, after she is born,they put her in a box and leave her in the street!!!! :embarassed: :furious3: The little baby girl dies of hunger and/or cold.......
They do this because the girl doesn't help, only a man helps the house.... Incredible.....


This is true. A one child policy needs effective enforcement, both in terms of keeping children alive, and in keeping population down. Nonetheless, it is still something I would advocate for the world.

[Conqueror]

If you want people to stop having many children, you have to first ensure that children are not a necessity. If elderly people have to depend on their children to look after them when they are too old to work, there will be a need to make enough children to secure one's old age. And if there is no effective public health care system, the people need to make "extra" children to compensate for the risk that some of them will die young.

[Don Corleone]

I saw an estimate on this during a Discovery channel program. If mankind enforced China's 'one-child' policy globally, mankind would be extinct in 280 years.

One of the big problems with a one-child policy, which is what China is facing right now, is that the older generation reaches a point where it cannot be sustained. When you have 7 or 8 people working for every 1 old person, it doesn't put that much of a drain on the economy. But when you have 2 or 3 (or worse, 1:1) it is incredibly oppressive.

People have been predicting that humans were going to outstrip the environment's ability to sustain us for centuries. The fact is, we have no idea how many people a hectacre of farmland, with the most modern agricultural technology, will sustain 50 years from now. We've gotten a lot better since 1950 though.

The problem with famines, assuming they're not artificial (as somebody pointed out, they usually are) is one of 'food-flow', not total food produced. It's the same problem we've faced our entire agricultural history, some years you get a famine (you produce less than average) and some years you produce more (a surplus). In order for an agricultural society to be viable, they have to find a way to store surpluses and not waste them. This could mean sales, freezing, processing, whatever.

The biggest problem Africa faces right now is not a lack of ability to feed itself, but a lack of integrity in it's governments, and they don't see starving 150,000 people to death as any big deal.

[Productivity]

I saw an estimate on this during a Discovery channel program. If mankind enforced China's 'one-child' policy globally, mankind would be extinct in 280 years.

So you watch it, and vary the incentives. When you need to really cut population down, 1 child and huge incentives nto to have any more.

As the problem goes away you phase out the incentives, until it finally gets to a two child policy. I'm not advocating a blanket 1 child only, until the end of humans, but I do think that there is a position for government regulation of children. Humans fill me with no confidence about their ability to make rational decisions.

[Don Corleone]

I have to disagree with you here, dgb. Our planet isn't currently overpopulated, so it makes no sense to put us on a 1-child policy. I might agree with zero-population-growth as a goal, but I don't agree with taking drastic steps to reduce it.

[Ironside]

I saw an estimate on this during a Discovery channel program. If mankind enforced China's 'one-child' policy globally, mankind would be extinct in 280 years.

~:confused: ~:confused: ~:confused:

Using 20 years/generation gives a "growth" of 21% (were 100% is zero growth), and the one child policy gives a "growth" of 50%.

[Productivity]

I have to disagree with you here, dgb. Our planet isn't currently overpopulated, so it makes no sense to put us on a 1-child policy. I might agree with zero-population-growth as a goal, but I don't agree with taking drastic steps to reduce it.

Well this is going to be an agree to disagree thing. I think our planet is at about the sweet spot for total population. It can take more, but it will take some nasty sacrifices. If we could hold our population around where we are today, I'd be happy, but short of organised policy, that isn't going to happen.

[Don Corleone]

~:confused: ~:confused: ~:confused:

Using 20 years/generation gives a "growth" of 21% (were 100% is zero growth), and the one child policy gives a "growth" of 50%.

If each pairing of one adult male and one adult female only produces one offspring, the population would be halved every generation. But that 280 years included other factors as well... they assumed that if your 'one child' died, you wouldn't be able to have another. They also looked at the economic burden placed on society and the fact that starvations would occur. They also looked at the fact that at a certain point, there wouldn't be enough genetic difference to maintain a gene pool. They might not have said extinct in 280 years, they might have said that after 280 years, there'd be no fixing the problem, we were done for. I'm not certain.

[Don Corleone]

Well this is going to be an agree to disagree thing. I think our planet is at about the sweet spot for total population. It can take more, but it will take some nasty sacrifices. If we could hold our population around where we are today, I'd be happy, but short of organised policy, that isn't going to happen.

At the sweet spot. That I could agree with. Zero population growth. That means each couple having two children. Most western countries are already there, or under that mark.

[Don Corleone]

Actually, I should have done this before I posted it.

Let's just assume 1man + 1woman = 1 couple (I know, in an emergency polygamy or polyandry would have to be adopted). But humor me.

Our current population, I believe, is 5 billion. A 1-child policy would halve the population each generation (plus the fixed offset that it takes for people to die after their 1 child, let's say that's 60 years).

You can halve 5 billion population and still have a number greater than 1, 22 times (take log base 2 of 5 billion). That's 22 generations, times 20 years, is 440 years, plus that fixed offset of 60 years. 500 years and man would be gone under this policy (assuming we didn't resort to polyandry or polygamy).

Aside from which, the big rallying cry of the ideological left (that's the whole left, not left leaning people on this board) is reproductive freedrom. That means abortion when you don't have kids, which we've all argued time and time again, but it ALSO means state assistance if YOU DO want kids. To them, even if a woman has 12 children and wants to have 3 more, the state is obligated to keep paying for them. In that mindset, how are you going to force Africa, India & the rest of the parts of the world where they're well above 2.0 kids per household to stop having kids?

[Kagemusha]

I have pretty radical solution of starvation in Africa.We should stop dumbing our overflow of agricultural products to them.We should also stop sending aid money to their dictatorial or corrupt governments too.Instead we should edjucte them.Its clearly seen in South Africa that after white land owners have given some of their lands to black those fields and fruitfarms are not producing so much enymore.We should start educate the Africans how to farm more efficiently and instead sending them food we should send them machines for agricultural production.Only thing that can save Africa from being constant disaster area is to educate them.
Another thing that should be done is to have international conference under UN authority and Start creating African National states.Because novadays those states are left overs of Impearilistic states owned by Europeans. :bow:

[Marcellus]

The human population wouldn't die out in 280 years, because once the population reached a more sensible level, the one child policy would be lifted.

For example, at the moment the population of China is about 1.2 billion. Under the one child policy, the population is predicted to rise to about 1.4 billion (since much of the population consists of young, childless people). It will then fall to about 600-700 million (a sensible level), at which point the one child policy will be lifted and the population will stabilise.

I think that in some parts of rural China the two child policy has been reinstated to deal with infanticide.

[Productivity]

Don Corleone - Ideally I would like to see a low barrier movement system set up for population, and then say every country in the world has a 2.2 (or whatever is needed to hold the pop. stable, certainly 2 exactly wouldn't work (accidents et al.)) child policy, based around economic benefits and penalties. In reality it will never happen.

To go with this, I'd like to see a far more interventionist policy re. productive land. Areas like Zimbabwe, which are very productive but are wasted due to a totalitarian regime which is oppressive should be either coerced into changing, or failing that just plain removed.

I don't care how many children people want to have, set up the incentives so they can have that many, ie. if you love children so much that you want say 12, you can have them but it will cost you big time. Use economic adjustments to alter the birth rate.

Quite frankly it's not a nice plan. It's global fascism on a serious scale. But I have little faith in humanity to get it right.

EDIT: Current human population is ~6.5 billion.
EDIT2: Given we're on the topic, a useful reference for population is this. (http://esa.un.org/unpp/)

[Don Corleone]

At 6.5 billion, the number goes up to 32 generations, or about 700 years.

And I'm telling you right now, the moment you start denying support to families that have more than 2 children, the Left (again, the institutional Left, nobody around here, necessarily except maybe Jag) will go bananas.

[Productivity]

I know, I fully accept that my plan will never become reality.

In terms of realistic plans, I don't know what can be done. Certainly the world is going to put on a lot more people before it starts to stabilise, and I don't think that's a good outcome. The world needs better educated people etc. yes, but not more people straight out.

[Ironside]

Actually, I should have done this before I posted it.

Let's just assume 1man + 1woman = 1 couple (I know, in an emergency polygamy or polyandry would have to be adopted). But humor me.

Our current population, I believe, is 5 billion. A 1-child policy would halve the population each generation (plus the fixed offset that it takes for people to die after their 1 child, let's say that's 60 years).

You can halve 5 billion population and still have a number greater than 1, 22 times (take log base 2 of 5 billion). That's 22 generations, times 20 years, is 440 years, plus that fixed offset of 60 years. 500 years and man would be gone under this policy (assuming we didn't resort to polyandry or polygamy).

Aside from which, the big rallying cry of the ideological left (that's the whole left, not left leaning people on this board) is reproductive freedrom. That means abortion when you don't have kids, which we've all argued time and time again, but it ALSO means state assistance if YOU DO want kids. To them, even if a woman has 12 children and wants to have 3 more, the state is obligated to keep paying for them. In that mindset, how are you going to force Africa, India & the rest of the parts of the world where they're well above 2.0 kids per household to stop having kids?

Well it's 6 billion people. Using a 0.4 reproduction rate it would need 24 generations ~D . But we agree that the population would drop quite fast with this method.

On the other issue, it's only an issue if the demographers got wrong with a people and thier nativity levels won't drop by higher living standards. If it actually becomes an issue, dgb:s comment about simple economical diminshing returns would work. Remind you that in Sweden, even with child support it isn't enough cover all your expenses, unless you're very, very cheap. Getting 15 children would be quite expensive.

Edit: 500 million more people already? ~:eek:

[Del Arroyo]

My personal position: I want at least two kids, would be happiest with three, would be willing to support four. I'm a human animal and that's what I was designed to do. As a global citizen I DO care about humanity as a whole, but only to a certain point. I will have my children and see that they prosper, and, if it ever came to it, I would absolutely kill whoever I had to to ensure this.

And if it ever DOES come to that, it's people who think like ME who will inherit the earth.

DA

[Don Corleone]

I like this new guy...

[Kagemusha]

My personal position: I want at least two kids, would be happiest with three, would be willing to support four. I'm a human animal and that's what I was designed to do. As a global citizen I DO care about humanity as a whole, but only to a certain point. I will have my children and see that they prosper, and, if it ever came to it, I would absolutely kill whoever I had to to ensure this.

And if it ever DOES come to that, it's people who think like ME who will inherit the earth.

DA

Here is an warrior.Thing that disgusts me about Socialism is why you shiuld care about everyone.In my mind people should first take care of those who ar close to their heart and only after that go save the others. :bow:

[PanzerJaeger]

Im doing my part to save the planet - there will be no little panzerbrats running around - so those enviro-lefties better not bother me about my gas guzzling SUV. ~;)

[King of Atlantis]

The argument in the first post in this thread is the classic one of Malthus. Conceptually, the main fallacy is that it assumes people in poor countries procreate unrestrainedly like rabbits (Malthus called this assumption "fixity of passion"). A more plausible assumption is that people have a desired family size. As people get more prosperous they seem empirically to desire smaller families - you might have noticed Gawain's periodic posts in the Backroom on Europe's fertility decline. The global population is also projected to stabilise this century, as fertility rates are falling even in most developing countries.

In terms of famine, I think these are seldom the result of overpopulation. The Nobel prize winner, Amartya Sen, has proposed an "entitlement" theory of famines where the basic point is that they occurr not because there is insufficient food supply, but because some people are not "entitled" to it (e.g. they lack enough money to buy it). Classic examples of this are the Irish potato famine and the 1943 Bengal famine. More recently, famines seem to be partly weapons of war - governments use them to starve out rebel areas.

Bottomline: Malthus's theory may work for animals, not people.


Your right famine isnt a result of population. Right now we have more than enough food for everybody. The problem is when you send food to countries that need it, they have more kids, thus needing more food.

[Don Corleone]

Not really. The problem is when you send food to the country as aid and it's leaders sell it on the open market to gain a profit. Or when the people work for years to build up emergency food surpluses, and the government sells those to make a profit. It's no wonder Africa has as many civil wars as it does when you look at the governmental policies (disastrous!) they're subjected to. My heart cries for them. One decent leader, to stop all the looting and pillaging, and their problems would evaporate. In terms of raw materials, and for the most part, agricultural production, it's a very rich land. But it's habitual mismanagement and instability, which discourages foreign investment, have yoked its citizens into abject poverty.

[Colovion]

Most 1st world countries import food.

What happens when the places that food is being imported from needs it for their own populations?

We're totally going to be Maya'd.

[Don Corleone]

We import food because we like variety and cheap prices, not because we can't grow enough to feed ourselves. The United States produces enough foodstuffs to feed at least 1 billion people a year, and we're far from being maxxed out on available farmland. I'm not worried about us running out of food anytime soon.

And of all the people in the world to worry about this... Canada produces more grain than any other country in the world. You don't have a thing to worry about for centuries.

[Ironside]

Here is an warrior.Thing that disgusts me about Socialism is why you shiuld care about everyone.In my mind people should first take care of those who ar close to their heart and only after that go save the others. :bow:

Is the mother of your (potential?) children close to your heart? Do you know who she is (if you don't have children)? Do you know the parter to your children or grand children?

There, a reason to take care of others from a pure egoistic viewpoint. ~D

[Kagemusha]

I didnt say you shouldnt take care of people who you dont know ,but first take care of those near your heart. :bow:

[Colovion]

We import food because we like variety and cheap prices, not because we can't grow enough to feed ourselves. The United States produces enough foodstuffs to feed at least 1 billion people a year, and we're far from being maxxed out on available farmland. I'm not worried about us running out of food anytime soon.

And of all the people in the world to worry about this... Canada produces more grain than any other country in the world. You don't have a thing to worry about for centuries.

Oh yes, the US and Canada are not the nations I'm speaking of really - we are still surrounded by much untouched wilderness yet to be exploited; it's the Europeans and other 1st world countries such as Japan I'm speaking of specifically.

[Azi Tohak]

I do think this is an interesting point. But I'm just curious about what can be done to give Africa a stable government. South Africa had it, but at the expense of the vast bulk of the population. The people in power in Africa do tend to be educated, but they are also thugs and the poor are too dumb to know what to do about it.

There could be more civil wars to establish a stable government, but that would just lead to another strong man taking power. I have no idea how to fix Africa. Maybe colonies (yes yes yes...I'm being racist), lead by 1st world countries, which can then educate the populace to take over for themselves.

But that won't happen. It can't. No one likes being ruled from afar.

I just don't know.

Azi

[King of Atlantis]

The only way to cure africa is for it to care for its own dirty laundry, which is hard for people in their state. :embarassed:

[bmolsson]

I am hungry now.....

[Brenus]

The production of food isn’t the problem. In Europe we paid our farmers to stop to produce…
The problem is quiet difficult:
To export our technology is exactly what we did, and just failed.
I will give an example I know: Ethiopia. Do you really believe that during their long history the Ethiopians never faced famine? Of course, they did and knew how to deal with it. But because the war, the nomads couldn’t move. After, the humanitarian help came and the war lords started their game. We all watched Black Hawk Down. But, more structurally, the distribution of food was done with our lorries, beautiful machine. So, the people killed their camels. Two years after, no more lorries because sands and lack of maintenance are not good for engine and all mechanical parts. But no more camels neither. It is a rough summary, but it shows the complexity of the problem.

[King of Atlantis]

production is this problem.

Right now the world is generating more food than is needed by a lot.
but, people are still starving.

When you have a large excess of food the world population will grow to meet the food supply and by then the food production will have increased again, with people still starving.

The problem is that people with famine get food from outside, thus have more kids, thus need more food.

[econ21]

Famine is actually not that prevalent today. There's a lot of under-nutrition (although the world has just passed the stage of having more over-nourished people than under-nourished ones). But the kind of under-nutrition that is prevalent today is not starvation but hunger - a shortage of calories and nutrients, but not acute enough to lead to incapacitation and death.

Famine tends only to happen in war zones and/or with negligent governments. Since famines are so rare nowadays, who lives or dies in contemporary famines has little effect on the world's population.

Also food aid is not that prevalent. Most developing countries can feed themselves and would export food if the rich countries (esp. the EU) stopped subsidising its own food producers. Poor countries may import food to overcome temporary shortages (droughts etc) or if they are in a really bad state (e.g. Afghanistan).

If food aid saves lives, then yes, there will be more people to feed in the future - people have not died and those saved people will have kids. But that's not the main cause of either population growth or subsequent food shortages and famines.

[PanzerJaeger]

^Well written and informative.. nice. :bow: