VACUOUS wrote:The notion that population will outstrip food supply is empirically false.
You're mistaken if you think anything about the future is empirically true/false. But I get your point...what you meant to say was that the total food supply thusfar hasn't surpassed the nutritional requirements for the world as a whole. Correct me if I'm wrong on that though.
Overpopulation
certainly is a worry, but right now the greater problem is improper distribution. America's dealing with an epidemic of obesity, where millions are dying of causes at least partly attributable to overconsumption, and at the same time, you've got the following stats of some 4700 persons dying hourly from starvation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starvation ... statisticsI dug that up quickly by Jeffrey Sachs wrote an excellent book on the topic that all interested should read. Offhand, I think it's called
An End to Hunger, can't remember for certain.
In all honesty though, I think both sides of this discussion are partially valid. The world is far too populated for every person to consume to their hearts' desire. So if this were important, we'd have to cut down on the population a bit--noone's saying that necessitates a massacre--many portions of northern Europe have done so voluntarily by way of birth control and choosing smaller families. China has done so to an extent by rule of law (still in effect? idk). Alternatively, we could let the population expand to the limits of agriculture--and you can't reasonably claim that the advances in agriculture will continue indefinitely. Let's say that advanced agriculture could support 20 billion people.
We will hit this figure if population continues to grow unabated.
On the other hand, the population could grow significantly if we had better measures in place to export foods to poorer countries. Which many countries do currently, only to see the shipments reapportioned to support the buying of armaments.
So the bottom line is that at some point, either consumption will have to be reduced per capita or the population will have to be reduced. Likely, people will oppose either, and we'll fuck up our world beyond repair, either from pollution, waste, and eradication of natural resources, or a great war kicked off by food riots.
"I'm going to get into your sister. I'm going to get my hands on your daughter."
~Gatito