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Huge amounts of farm produce is just thrown out because we all want uniform fruit and veg.
I say extinction-level event, our ancestors survived the last comet to hit Earth, chances are we'd survive the next one.
Many are starving, and if rice and corn prices continue to rise many many more will go without.
We could bring in The Modest Proposal.
I doubt it, the US would over rule it because they dont like condoms being given out.
The EU has decided to stall biofuel regulations which would have seen the EU doing what the UK did last week ...introducing a minimum of biofuel into petrol sold on the forecourt ...cos guess what ...growing food for machines is forcing the price of food up and causing hunger ...something some of us dimwits foresaw a couple of years back ...which brings me back to mismanagement again. The people we rely on to make things work can't seem to see beyond the end of their noses and don't have the common sense of the ordinary man in the street.
Rain forrest is now being stripped faster than ever for fuel.
The very technology that has given us so much is the very technology that is now threatening to destroy millions of us. It seems to me to be a bit like religion ...blind faith in false gods. The god we are looking to to save us is the very same god that is wrecking the planet.
I can't summon up that kind of faith as i tend to believe what i see.
whoever owns the means of production creates and owns all the wealth. The production has moved elswhere and in the UK we don't even have natural resources to fall back on to make money ...apart from coal of course which is set to make a big comeback ...in desperation.
So who is going to pay for your pension ...the Chinese ...the Indians?
You're missing my point though. Your argument is that the world has reached capacity, in much the same way as if you fill a bucket of water too much. It will overflow. As humans we are able to increase the capacity for humanity to a varying degree i.e. increase the size of the proverbial bucket, and if we measure the standards of living across the world (I included China, where it is increasing much faster than here) by every quarter century it has increased.
What this means in my very simplistic view of things is the bucket is getting bigger faster than we are growing to fill it. Yes there is a limit but I just see no evidence otherwise. The reason poor people in poor countries are starving is because of the capitalist profit system. We have plenty and they don't have enough. If it was perfect and things were shared, everyone would have enough. Overpopulation is the point where if things were shared, not everyone would have enough.
The amount of food per head if taken in the wider context has only ever increased though. If you look at it today to last year, you may be right in saying there is less now. But food riots are not because there is not food available, but because of political and economic factors prohibit those people who need food from getting it. Every few years in India there is a drought and the crops fail, but they could import food if they had the money, it's just unfortunate that they don't, and instead we import it - although as buddha says the massive problem is waste.
I think overpopulation will be an issue in the future but I honestly can't say I've seen any justification for it being the case now.
I think bashing the 'capitalistic profit system' is unwarranted. Globally rice production is set to reach a record high for 2007-8. The problem is that the major Asian exporters are hoarding grain as a store of value because the dollar's going to shit.
Precisely.
India does have the money to import it. The market could provide for all if it was allowed to work freely. If governments weren't listening to lobby groups and taking up land for bio-fuels, or subsidising inefficient native farmers. The global south is better suited for growing things. Give them the technological know-how to farm efficiently and to increase crop yields, get rid of tariffs, and let the invisible hand of the market do its thing.
It isn't at all. But you'll always get misanthropic Thomas Malthus types with a weird desire to see less babies being born, and who see contraceptives as a silver bullet going on about 'overpopulation'.
A few rockets don't cost THAT much, not like we aren't using those reasources anyway to launch Murdoc's Sky TV satelites and shit.
But terraforming the planet (which we could begin right now) would take at least 300 years for it to be remotely habitable.
Unfortunately when you stand for an election, how do you justify increasing tax revenues to send rockets full of algae or whatever it is to Mars. No chance
If you have time to spare, look on www.ted.com, it's basically intellectuals on all sorts of subjects giving talks. It's really interesting because there are some really basic things that crop up - an astronomer points out there is no government funded organisation in the world that seeks out asteroids that might hit the earth, it's all amatuer. And so on and so forth.
As for the current food crisis ...India and China have more than enough money to buy up food ...and they are doing in massive ammounts. this is forcing the price of all foodstuffs up dramaticaly. As well as metals and oil and everything else on the planet. If you have fifty thousand tons of grain for sale you can almost gaurantee that China/ India will outbid everyone for it.
Millions of acres of land across the globe are now growing crops to feed machines instead of people ...again forcing prices up and up. Are you not aware of the current food crisis?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/food-crisis-needs-aid-on-scale-of-tsunami-to-avert-famine-814066.html
http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.2104849.0.2008_the_year_of_global_food_crisis.php
http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.2104849.0.2008_the_year_of_global_food_crisis.php
Hunger. Strikes. Riots. The food crisis bitesAcross the world a crisis is unfolding at alarming speed. Climate change, China's increasing consumption and the dash for biofuels are causing food shortages and rocketing prices - sparking riots in cities from the Caribbean to the Far East. Robin McKie and Heather Stewart report on the millions facing starvation - and the growing threat to global security
Just type food crisis into google and you can read some alarming stuff.
coupled with economic problems ...wars ...job losses ...pension crisis ...rising energy costs ...iut makes for grim reading and some of you think the answer is to move to mars before xmas!
The most direct link between bio-fuel and food prices in in Central America and corn. The US is using corn for ethanol and Mexico and other countries are seeing a huge increase in price in their staple.
If the CAP didnt make it cheaper for people in West Africa to import powdered milk made in the EU they would make it themselves. The tarifs and export subsidies we put on food is massively reducing food production in Africa.
As for the many posts that followed, the costs are sky rocketing, population in Britain and the fact that fuel for everything, cars, buses and especially haulage is out of control. i mean 65p in every £1 of fuel is taken as tax by the government... and because transport is so expensive, retailers have to put up prices to compensate, its an endless cycle all because of out of control taxes on fuel.
This does not deminish the massive demands of course... we need free condoms handed out everywhere, we need incentives to not have kids, we need to stop the perminant movement of people in and out of countries until we have some sort of stabalised populations and we NEED to stop fucking about with bullshit redtape health and safety local council and big government nanny state fines cunting about shitness... as well.
I think you are ignoring the levels of technology now. We can no longer go to war as we once did on a global scale due to nuclear arms. They make conventional warfare for the "Great Powers" a thing of the past. Only "small" wars, which usually are one sided genocides (see Sudan) take place these days and not on a scale large enough to affect the whole world in a way to have an impact on population reduction.
2. Israel will use the chance for a concurrent attack on Syria.
3. Israel will attack Hizballah?s strongholds in Lebanon.
4. A broad, coordinated US-Israeli offensive will be mounted against Iran, Syria and Hizballah.
Iran and Syria view Israel?s four-day home defense exercise against missile attack, conventional or non-conventional, beginning Sunday, as setting the stage for these attacks.
John McGlynn is an independent Tokyo-based economic and financial analyst. He has prepared his own version of what is taking place calling it Day of Infamy: The March 20, 2008 US Declaration of War on Iran . He writes ?March 20, 2008, destined to be another day of infamy. On this date the US officially declared war on Iran. But it?s not going to be the kind of war many have been expecting.
There is a massive difference between pushing a satelite into orbit and even getting to the moon, let alone getting the Mars. And even if we got to Mars getting anything back would mean carrying another rocket to get back. The whole process would be far too costly.
Anyway, we dont want to be colonising places like Mars, we need to get to a Goldilocks planet that way we've got a much better chance of a self sustaining occupation.