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There is enough food.

A response to Ruud, and an outline of why the food crisis isn't about production, but about buying power.
PlatonicJensen

OK, so Ruud has tossed the gauntlet, and I intend to pick it up. He came out saying that basically, we need mass government control and vast energy to survive the food crisis and other superthreats. It seems like this has been unpopular, because people have been ignoring it. Well, ignoring things we don’t like is part of what got us into this mess, so lets see if we can come up with something better.Like any decently thought out argument, the problem lies not in how he reaches his conclusions, but in the assumptions he’s working from. Lets see if we can identify a few.Population: Ruud argues that it’s impossible to feed 7.7 billion people on this planet. This is essentially the first half of the Malthusian argument: that the more people you have, the more food you need. It doesn’t really get to the second half, which is the more food you produce, the more people you get. A lot of people dismiss Malthusian arguments out of hand, or by saying “We’ll always come up with ways to feed more people.” I think Ruud may fall into this trap as well, because he seems to argue that we need to make more food. But the more food you produce, the more people you get. He also proposes population controls, of the top-down variety. I’m not going to argue with Ruud’s ideas about population control or Euthanasia, not because I agree with them, but because I think they are a sidetrack from the real issue.Ruud states that most of the 3rd world lies outside of what you call “Decisive Humanity.” Well, they’d probably agree. Except that they do have a way of making their desires known on the world stage, and that is the very problem we’re talking about here: Birthrate. See, in a democracy, as the world nominally functions, demographics are everything. These groups got the shaft in colonial times because they were small tribes that got overpowered by empires. They learned their lesson, that bigger is better. Also, the more people you have, the more say you have. The War nerd put it best a long time ago, Birthrate is a weapon . It’s how the disenfranchised people of the world are making themselves, as you say, decisive. In a way, they are griefing the system that discludes them.Political, social, and economic equality will do a lot to mitigate this. Birth rates are lower the higher one’s standard of living. Most of these demographics would stop breeding so much if they had other ways of making themselves important. The best way to lower population growth is to raise the standard of living and allow for greater participation politically.Food Production: I get into some of the why increasing food production is pointless above, but I really want to hammer home the point here.Firstly, Ruud says that there is no way to feed everyone in the world with current production. That may be true, that we don’t produce enough to feed everyone. But what definitely isn’t true is that we can’t produce that food. We DO have enough production capacity to feed everyone, it’s just that we use it for other things.The USDA seems to think that food production is actually increasing faster than population is. For now, at least.Estimation is that it takes somewhere between 3 and 20 acres to feed one person a year. That’s a huge range, but it depends heavily on diet. The 3 is from India, where diet is mostly vegetarian, while the 20 is for beef fed Americans. With the census above estimating that 13% of the world is arable, then we get roughly 4.8 Billion acres. This supports Ruud, except that, wait, much of that land is more productive than the baseline. And improved farming methods in some of those places produce loads more. Oh, and much of the area considered non-arable, is quite suitable for ranching, producing meat on land that can’t support grain. Oh, and then there is fishing, which makes use of the ocean instead of land. That last one might not be much use for long though, we’re definitely overfishing.And a lot of that arable land is currently growing things other than food. Things like poppies, because apparently a quarter million acres of them were planted last year in afganistan alone . I couldn’t find figures on tobacco. Cotton takes up 76 million acres worldwide, apparently. I’m just pulling little bits of facts off the internet for this, but I’m trying to show that we’re not even close to using the full production capability of the world for feeding people.Gardens actually produce More food per square foot than Farms do. Farms plant in rows, with large gaps, in monocrop situations that make it easy to harvest. Industrial farming is the most efficient in terms of labor, it takes less people to farm. But it’s not very efficient in terms of land or energy use. This is the type of farming that takes 20 acres to feed a person. According to John Jeavons, you can make a garden that feeds one person for a year, with a healthy, varied vegan diet, on around 4000 square feet. This requires a lot of interplanting, and cannot be mechanized, so you need a lot of human labor. But ironically, what we’re looking at is a decrease in the available amount of energy, and an increase in the population. The one type of energy we have in abundance is people power. And this increases the number of people that can be fed from one acre 30 times.So it’s not that we lack the capability to feed everyone. Sure, the methods involved might be unsustainable, but that’s not the point yet. The point is that right now, if we wanted, we could feed everyone. Why don’t we?Food production, as we noted above, competes with other crop products for space in our agriculture. Heck, even food plants like soy and corn are being diverted away from feeding people and into producing things like ethanol. These uses are more profitable to the farmer than growing food to sell to his neighbors. Once the 1st worlders are fed, they want other things, like cotton clothes, smokes, gas for their cars and opium for the weekend. They’ll pay lots of money for these things. It’s simple for the farmer: an acre of poppies nets a fortune, an acre of tomatoes doesn’t. It’s more profitable to sell corn to the ethanol distillers than the tortilla makers. The “decisive” people in the first world pay a lot for cash crops. That’s what makes them decisive, they have the money.Now at some point, if you don’t produce food, the supply diminishes, while the demand remains constant. Then the price of food goes up, until it is profitable to grow it again, etc. etc. The free market eventually reaches a price equilibrium. But that price equilibrium prices out vast swaths of the population of earth. The reason people starve, then, is not a supply issue, but an issue of purchasing power. If the starving had enough money to influence the market, you can bet your retirement fund that new ways of producing enough food to feed them would become prevalent.Farming sucks:This seems to be another point Ruud makes, which I think is a huge stretch. He is really saying that HE would not want to be a farmer. That’s valid. But to assume that others share that stance isn’t valid. I can tell you one thing subsistence farming sucks less than, for certain, and that’s starving.But if he wants to talk about how boring, how monotonous farm work is, I’d like to direct his attention to work on the assembly line. If he wants to talk about soul-deadening, I’d like to direct his attention to working a meaningless job shuffling paper from one cubicle to the next. Or working fast foo