The worst part of the Global War Without End on Terror is how it diverts our attention and energies from far more serious issues that threaten mankind. We're wasting a lot of time on GWWET that we should be devoting to questions of how to keep our civilization going for the next several generations.
The world population is growing rapidly. No one questions that. The U.S. itself just passed the 300-million population mark. China and India are each well past a billion.
What is not really growing is the amount of farmland available to grow food for this swelling population. There is more land available - particularly in our remaining rainforests - but the environmental price of putting this land into production could be horrendous.
Traditional farmlands are actually decreasing. Desertification is an increasing problem in Africa and Asia. Land is simply getting exhausted by overproduction to the point it can no longer produce food. By the way, 2006 is the "International Year of Drought and Desertification" or IYDD.
There are other stresses on existing farmland such as salinization. When irrigation is required, all it takes is small amounts of salt in the water to destroy farmland. This is what is believed to have brought the ancient Mesopotamians to ruin. The used irrigation to produce greater crops that, in turn, allowed their population to increase rapidly. However the water they were using was somewhat brackish. It wasn't enough to cause a problem for centuries but, as time passed, the salts slowly began to accumulate until they reached a threshold level at which the lands became sterile. Crop production failed and so did the Mesopotamians. Salinization is still going on around the world, even in the United States.
Will earth be able to provide enough food to feed its people? Depends on who you choose to believe. If you do a Google search on "global food production" you'll find lots of sites that claim there is and will be no problem, that the doubters are just being alarmist. The same sort of thing you get from one side of the global warming debate.
What I noticed about these "no problem" sites is how they rely on some optimistic assumptions and seem to ignore negative factors. For example, they tend to base their projections on a land inventory that continually grows whereas it is shrinking unless we savage the rainforests. They also don't like to get wet. Water and the effects of population growth and climate change on supply and distribution tend to get downplayed.
If you eliminate enough negatives you can come up with some pretty rosey projections.
Other sites that do factor in these negatives, even if discounting them to recognize uncertainty, come to less pleasant conclusions.
If you're like me you probably can't tell which side to believe. It would be great to embrace the "no problem" group but even a layman can see that they use old studies that were produced before the science of climate change was anywhere near what it is today. They don't seem to factor in the effects of the current depletion of groundwater reserves. No regard is had for the future that will see water distribution whipsawed by cycles of droughts and floods. Will water be there where it's needed, when it's needed and will it arrive in amounts that are controllable or will it be flood runoff?
Bear in mind that, as a practical matter, what we're talking about here is really a problem for the poor people of this planet. Wealthy people almost always have food to eat because they need it and they can afford to buy it. Poor people need it just as much but, when food becomes scarce, they can't afford it.
What we need right now is a full and open discussion of this issue. We need to engage the best minds and use the best science. There are far too many foundations and institutes weighing in on these questions, organizations that too often turn out to be tied to industrial interests. Even us well-to-do folks need those rainforests to be preserved and our societies will never be immune to the impact that food shortages will visit upon the poor regions.
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