Food scarcity is a dangerous myth - Frances Moore Lappé

[bananas]

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/mobile/story.html?id=6033424

Food scarcity is a dangerous myth
Sunday, January 22, 2012
By Frances Moore Lappé

More than 40 years ago, Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb
proclaimed that "the battle to feed humanity is already
lost," and today almost a billion people go hungry. In 2011,
a second food-price spike within only five years, along with
heart-wrenching images of famine in parched East Africa,
continued to keep the scarcity scare alive.

There's just not enough, right?

Well, no. Even on the "leftovers" - what's left over after
feeding a third of the world's grain to livestock and putting
more U.S. corn into cars than into animals or humans; even
after feeding a third of the world's fish catch to livestock
and simply wasting a third of all food - there's still enough.
The world food supply comes to nearly 3,000 calories each
day for every person on Earth, enough to make us all
chubby.

The scarcity frame is not just factually wrong, it's dangerous.

<snip>

[Fearless]

1. I think they mean more of a pratical scarcity...

That is, it may be POSSIBLE for everyone to eat, but clearly the systems are not in place to make sure that's the case. Undoubtedly if this is true today, it will remain true tomorrow, when the population is bigger. Thus... the food shortage is getting worse.

[area51]

2. +1 n/t

[usrname]

11. But it's important to tackle the problem where the problem resides

The problem is not the lack of food. There's too much of it. It's the uneven distribution of food and the difficulty in transporting food to critical locations.

Trying to solve the global food problem by paying Monsanto to create GM food is the wrong way to go about it. Not only does it give Monsanto carte blanche to patent the very things we eat, and at the same time probably harm us, it doesn't address the actual problem. Solving the global food problem is a transportation issue. Create better methods of transporting food into areas that are hard hit and you're done. Part of the difficulty, of course, is that local governments don't want better transportation infrastructure. They want to control their people and giving them better access to food removes one method of controlling the people. If the ethiopians and somalis are all well fed, they'd just as soon pick up and move on, thereby depriving the warlords and tribe leaders the population to control.

FDR's Four Freedoms include the freedom from hunger. Those petty despots can't allow their populace from being free from hunger, otherwise they can't be controlled.

[jwirr]

14. You are correct about the transportation but we had better factor in the idea of peak oil because

transportation is based on oil. I am not saying we should not plan but at least plan for the future we are expecting - things just are not going to be easy. It always bothers me that we do not and have never looked at a local solution for hunger. Where is the idea of growing your own in the plan for poorer countries.

[FrodosPet]

19. Some places grow food better than others

Nature tells YOU what will grow in a particular climate and soil. The only way to fudge that involves fertilizer, irrigation, pesticides, etc. Which requires energy and chemicals.

What we need is a non-racist, non-imperialist, humane way to dramatically drop the number of people and the rate of population growth in the most inhospitable areas.

[Fumesucker]

20. Education.. Specifically, educating women..

It's the only thing that's really proven to drop the birth rate in a humane manner.

[jwirr]

22. Today growing requires all those additives but I was born in 1941. We composted and used natural

methods to grow. I agree that some places cannot grow enough to help and that different crops grow in different areas but before we started importing so much food many places grew a lot more than they do now because corporate farming for export have bought much of what used to be family land and the families once supported on that land are now the poor of developing countries cities.

[Fearless]

26. Correct on all counts. n/t

[FrodosPet]

18. More railways, roads, warehouses, distribution centers, ships, trains, and trucks

Unfortunately, these have a negative environmental consequence.

[Fearless]

27. We can work on limiting those negatives if we truly put our minds to it.

(And not let Big Oil keep us under their control.)

[bemildred]

3. But if it's not scarce, it's going to be really cheap.

We can't have that, how would anybody get extremely rich?

[Hatchling]

4. ^This.

[MADem]

5. So....the issue is distribution, not scarcity? nt

[jwirr]

6. While technically this is true I do not see the greedy (including us) sharing our bounty equally

with them. So as long as greed exists there will be scarcity.


By the way I read the Population Bomb and he says outright that the problem is not growing enough food for the world but getting it to the people who need it cheaply. And that was written before we were talking about global warming which seems to play hell with our agricultural bounty.

[chervilant]

7. hmm...

Every 'news release' I see these days provokes me to do my own research to get at some semblance of the 'truth.' Thus, I think we must uncover the 'hidden agendas' that drive 'reports' on food scarcity (are 'they' preparing us for scarcity before it actually gets here?). Furthermore, we must raise everyone's consciousness about the current status of US (and World) agriculture. We must identify the consequences for this planet of a burgeoning and parasitic population of humans. At what point will overpopulation stress our agricultural options past a breaking point?

We can have these discussions, even as we contemplate the inevitable consequences of our own hubris. Perhaps, if we do so, we can insure a viable future for our children, and our children's children.

[LongTomH]

8. Thanks Bananas, for an excellent post!

There are several issues addressed here: Turning food into fuel is only one of them.

Another is learning to farm with less water. I have a friend with dual Israeli-American citizenship who's talked of the farming practices used in Israel, in areas that were desert.

[jwirr]

15. That is a very good point. I would like to know more about the farming techniques used in Israel.

[The Stranger]

9. Frances Moore Lappé is spreading a dangerous myth -- in essence, a lie.

The question isn't whether all of the billions of people on the Earth could somehow get enough food not to starve (or even, for that matter, whether they could somehow have 3,000 calories per day of food miraculously teleported to their mouths).

The fact is that each of these new persons that the planet cannot support is going to want (need) more than that. Each of them is going to need to be given transportation of some sort (and he or she is going to want an automobile or motorized vehicle), to be provided with the ability to communicate (and he or she is going to want a cell phone or smart phone), to be housed (and he or she is going to want heating and air conditioning), to be provided health care (and he or she is going to want modern medicine, not a mobile tent medical unit), to be provided employment (and he or she is likely going to want to destroy even more natural habitat to "support their families&quot , to be provided with hygiene and waste disposal (and he or she is going to likely want plumbing, not a field latrine), to be provided with energy (and he or she will want electrical services, not a campfire).

In fact, there are so many energy-depleting and environment-depleting aspects to what this massive overpopulation will require, that one can only conclude that Ms. Lappe is really lying to you when she tells you that the Overpopulation Bomb is a myth.

She and Pope Benny.

[usrname]

13. There is no overpopulation

How does one decide whether the global population is too high, too low or just right? What's the metric? If 6 billion is just right, is 6 billion and 1 too many? Do we have a buffer of, say, 5 million? 50 million?

The concept of "overpopulation" is based on local perception. A person living in a rural town is happy with the way life is. Suddenly, things get popular and more people move in. More traffic, more noise, more pollution. (But, more revenue, more activities, more socializing, more infrastructure, more art, more culture, more diversity.) If you like to see the opposite of overpopulation in a local level, look at Detroit. Its population dropped precipitously and it may never recover. I doubt it. There's too much infrastructure there to ignore and not leverage, so I think it's possible for Detroit to recover. But having more people in an area is better than having fewer people.

But that's all on a local perspective. What we can't do is project out what happens locally to the global perspective. Globally, overpopulation is a misnomer. It's not well defined. At the moment, we've just surpassed 7 billion people living at the same time on earth. That number would be unfathomable even just 50 years ago. But not only are we all living at the same time, the life we're all living, in the aggregate is better now than ever before. People are living longer (which is the primary cause for the 7 billion, not that people are having babies like rabbits), people are living better lives. People are less violent to each other (another cause for having 7 billion people on earth, or would we want a nice major war to bring it down a few million?), we're healthier, more fit, and more mobile than ever before. Despite all the problems, in the aggregate, people are more free now than ever before.

This isn't claiming that everything is coming up roses. There are plenty of hotspots that need humanitarian help. But as the population in general get richer, the ability to provide that help is easier. As we move to the 21st century crowd-sourcing internet age, all of us are more capable to help our fellow man in easier and quicker and more efficient ways.

Problems will always be with us, but humanity has shown a long record of success in solving these problems. Some solutions beget new problems, but they're solved as well. It always had and it always will. That's man's gift to mankind.

[jwirr]

16. There can be evidence to support over population. Growing up on a farm we learned that it takes

so many acres to support a cow, or other animal. If you go over that number you destroy the quality of the land used. For instance my father loved to raise geese - he put too many on our acreage until all that grows there is weeds. They ate everything that was good. If he had limited the number of geese he would still have good grazing land. I am not saying that you can look at people this way but we can determine how much it takes for the world to support a person.

[intersectionality]

17. There is no overpopulation without the land limits you were restricted to

Not to mention agroforestry, permaculture techniques, soil remediation (i.e. biochar, compost, etc.) exist but people just tend to say "well, it takes 8 acres to feed a cow so I guess we better not have a cow." Here is Michael Pollan explaining how you are stuck in a "zero sum" mindset and, when farming isn't done through the "usual" means, a single farm can sustainably produce (on 100 acres) 40,000 lbs. of beef, 30k lbs. of pork, 25,000 dozen eggs, 1,000 rabbits, 20k broilers, and 1k turkeys annually.

&t=10m45s

[usrname]

23. Thinking inside the box

There's absolutely no reason to assume that the current requirements for farming is needed in the future. Heck, even now, we can generate far more calories per acre than we used to 20 years ago. And then, we farmed more calories per acre than 20 years before that, and again before that. We learn and we modify and we adapt to the needs.

The point here is that we don't need to reap more food. There's plenty of food. There is food spoiling in want for use. There is food thrown away to help maintain prices. The central problem concerns distribution. We can plant all we want, but if we can't get food from where it's grown or cultivated to where it's needed, then there will still be hunger.

Nevertheless, the availability of food is not an indicator of overpopulation, and certainly given the surfeit availability of food at the present, it might indicate that we're UNDER populated.

Is proper-population an equilibrium state where if we add one more mouth to feed, we teeter off into the abyss of want, and if we lose one mouth to feed, we're low on labor? There's no adequate definition for proper, over and under population.

Tokyo has 10 million+ residents. Yet, they manage to feed every one of them, they're healthy as any group of people are, and the city is an Alpha+ city (highest ranked city for economic, cultural and political impact to the world; London and New York are the other two). Is that city over populated? Apparently not.

[chervilant]

28. hmm...

I am 56 years old. I read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring when I was 12 years old. When I finished her iconic treatise--one of the first to mention overpopulation--I made two fundamental decisions: 1) I would not bear children, and 2) I would be an activist for the rest of my life. I am glad that I achieved both those goals, considering where humanity finds itself at present.

During my brief tenure on this planet, I've witnessed:

--the heavy metal pollution of this planet's groundwater

--ubiquitous air pollution, and a growing hole in the Ozone

--global climate change

--the nationwide existence of 'Superfund Sites' that are so toxic, massive amounts of our tax dollars have been allocated to 'clean up' these abandoned, hazardous areas (visit Superfund websites and you'll find "Superfund for Kids!&quot

--Chernobyl

--Fukushima

--Two major Gulf of Mexico oil spills

--an exponential increase in diabetes, heart disease, and other diseases directly linked to the consumption of refined sugars (let's not even BEGIN to discuss hydrogenated oils...)

--the 'War on Drugs' (an ironic ploy that benefits the uber wealthy in two primary ways: more money, more money, more money; and keeping the hoi polloi distracted and addicted)

--a pile of floating garbage--in surface area, the size of the state of Texas--in the doldrums of the Pacific Ocean AND in the Atlantic

--a measurable decline in the amount of food fish we pull out of our oceans and lakes

--mercury and heavy metal contamination of the food fish we pull out of our oceans and lakes

--the steady decline of the honeybee population worldwide (called "Colony Collapse Disorder" by the scientists who are 'struggling' to identify the causes)

--a growing percentage of adults (as of the 90s, this figure was forty percent) who are functionally illiterate (thus, easily manipulated)

--a now ubiquitous 'message delivery system' (television) that has turned a significant number of humans into distracted, misinformed zombies

--a toxic, dangerous economic system that has concentrated the wealth of this planet into the hands of a miniscule fraction of our planet's global population (writing the representative percentage requires scientific notation, and a double-digit negative exponent).

--destructive, endless 'wars' based on lies and profitability (don't even get me started about Depleted Uranium)

--a radical shift to exponential growth (read 'change') that few recognize and even fewer discuss.

Sigh...

I don't have time to list all of the other issues I've been witnessing. This would take weeks, if not months.

Suffice it to say, I'm watching as more and more of us resort to 'react' mode, letting our inchoate fears and frustrations manifest as road rage, name-calling, sarcasm, and other forms of mental, emotional and physical violence. Calhoun's experiments with rats comes readily to mind. Are there too many of us on this planet? Are humans experiencing a critical tipping point in our evolution as a species?

For those who assert that the key issue is the logistics of distribution, rather than overpopulation, consider Sahlins' analysis of our species' economic behaviors:

The market-industrial system institutes scarcity, in a manner completely unparalleled and to a degree nowhere else approximated. Where production and distribution are arranged through the behavior of prices, and all livelihoods depend on getting and spending, insufficiency of material means becomes the explicit, calculable starting point of all economic activity. ... Consumption is a double tragedy: what begins in inadequacy will end in deprivation.

How much longer must we debate the likely consequences of our species' relentless hedonism?

[The Stranger]

29. Absolute and complete fucking nonsense.

Of course there is evidence that the current overpopulation is unsustainable. To deny it -- and claim that it is "all on a local perspective" -- is asinine. There are myriad studies of and unavoidable mountains of evidence that the current population is not sustainable based on the Earth's resources and the Earth's environment, which are being depleted and rendered uninhabitable, respectively.

There are in-depth studies showing that only a massive continuous use of energy -- which arises from resources either being depleted or which use threatens air and water quality -- essentially, the ability to sustain life -- and that when that energy runs out, the ability to artificially enhance food production and transport it around the world will run out with it.

Of course you can "project out" what happens. That is what scientists and environmentalists and policy wonks and everyone fucking else studying a problem do.

And, finally, of course "problems will all be with us," but idiotic platitudes and cliches are wasting precious time.

[progressoid]

10. Then lets have more babies!!!

[JDPriestly]

12. We have enough food in the west because of our sophisticated and energy-guzzling

growth, storage and refrigeration processes.

Food spoils. The surplus of food in the Midwestern US in the summer and in the great valleys of California year round would spoil by the time they got to your house up there in Maine or North Dakota were it not for refrigerated transportation.

And water? It takes water to grow food. It takes water to live. Our water is being contaminated and a major cause for the contamination is overpopulation by humans.

I once heard that people in Europe did not have enough food to eat until maybe around 1920. In modern times, we have only had an adequate food supply for a short period.

[WHEN CRABS ROAR]

21. Is overpopulation a myth? The shrinking fish stocks worldwide as well?

The coming water shortage? Better start looking further down the road.

[usrname]

24. 3/4 of the earth is water

There is no shortage of water. Of course, most of that is salt water, which is not usable for growing land-based plants. But technology will come to create economically viable desalination plants that can get us spring-water quality water that can be consumed or used for farming. It's not that far away. Many countries in the Middle East, Qatar, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, are experimenting with various types of desalination plants. The question is economic-efficiency, not necessarily the technology. (The technology is very simple: vaporize the water; the salt will stay in the bottom, and the steam can then condense into pure water. The problem is that water has a high heat capacity, so it takes a lot of energy to vaporize it. Turning water from 100C to steam at 100C takes like 800J/Kg. My numbers might be wrong. But that's a lot of energy. Maybe they can combine that with some power plant as part of the cooling process.)

[WHEN CRABS ROAR]

25. I was referring to naturally occurring fresh water sources, including water table levels.