3 years, 4 months ago
about Global Food Crisis
will future bring serious food shortages as countries fail to improve agricultural productivity?
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M$1 Answer
Ever since Thomas Malthus' essay in 1798, people have been predicting dire consequences as food production fails to keep pace with population.
As recently as 1967, the environmentalist Paul Ehlich was arguing that it was futile to even try to help India feed it's population, claiming: "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980."
He was dead wrong, as the levels of hunger and malnutrition in India and the world overall have gone down significantly.
Every time these sorts of predictions are made, the people making them say: "I know predicitons like this were proved false in the past, but this time it's different because..."
People keep under-estimating future food production, and keep over-estimating future population growth. The reasons for that are many:
- It's easy to take a trend now, and say "if this keeps happening for another 20 years...". Much harder to understand why the trend will change.
- Innovations in technology and society are hard to see in advance. But they do keep coming, and at an ever increasing pace.
- The predictors of doom under-estimate human responsiveness to challenges, both individually and collectively. Predictions assume we'll keep on ignoring problems, won't make needed changes, won't help each other out, etc. History shows that while humanity is slow to get its act together, eventually it does, and does so in ways beyond the wildest dreams of cynics and pessimists.
Here is just one example of that, something that Bill Gates and Kofi Annan are doing for food production in Africa:
http://www.agra-alliance.org/
My message to any doom-mongers is simple. Stop worrying so much about predicting doom, start getting to work to build a better future.
As recently as 1967, the environmentalist Paul Ehlich was arguing that it was futile to even try to help India feed it's population, claiming: "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980."
He was dead wrong, as the levels of hunger and malnutrition in India and the world overall have gone down significantly.
Every time these sorts of predictions are made, the people making them say: "I know predicitons like this were proved false in the past, but this time it's different because..."
People keep under-estimating future food production, and keep over-estimating future population growth. The reasons for that are many:
- It's easy to take a trend now, and say "if this keeps happening for another 20 years...". Much harder to understand why the trend will change.
- Innovations in technology and society are hard to see in advance. But they do keep coming, and at an ever increasing pace.
- The predictors of doom under-estimate human responsiveness to challenges, both individually and collectively. Predictions assume we'll keep on ignoring problems, won't make needed changes, won't help each other out, etc. History shows that while humanity is slow to get its act together, eventually it does, and does so in ways beyond the wildest dreams of cynics and pessimists.
Here is just one example of that, something that Bill Gates and Kofi Annan are doing for food production in Africa:
http://www.agra-alliance.org/
My message to any doom-mongers is simple. Stop worrying so much about predicting doom, start getting to work to build a better future.
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
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