Feeding a larger population on a warmer planet
Thanks to Joe Bish for this article from the Post Carbon Institute’s Energy Bulletin.
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At a recent event hosted by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington D.C., Mark Rosegrant, Director of the Environment and Production Technology Division, said, “Income and population growth drive food prices higher, putting pressure on our food system.” And climate change adds more pressure to these already big challenges. “We can expect to see more extreme events – more floods, more droughts, more shocks to agriculture,” noted Sherman Robinson from the United Kingdom’s Foresight Programme on Global Food and Farming Futures Project. There is, therefore, an urgent need to manage these challenges in a more sustainable way.
For full article, visit:
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-12-10/feeding-larger-population-warmer-planet
The full report can be downloaded at http://www.ifpri.org/publication/food-security-farming-and-climate-change-2050
January 29th, 2011 at 6:11 pm
Is there any possibility open to a species so gifted, splendid and miraculous as Homo sapiens that could liberate us from feeding/breeding ourselves into extinction?
January 30th, 2011 at 8:25 am
Dear Katie Elmore, Joe Bish, Robert Walker, John Feeney and Bill Ryerson,
GPSO -2011 is about to begin. In fulfilling my pledge this year I hope to have something of value of offer those who seek an adequate enough understanding of why absolute global human population have been skyrocketing during my lifetime.
There is another matter I would like to introduce now here that I am thinking about that might becomwe my 2012 pledge, but I have been difficulty for much too long finding credible information on the topic. Perhaps you could help me find adequate information regarding a question I am having difficulty answering in a way that seems reasonable and sensible. The answer may shed light on saving life as we know it and ourselves. Or perhaps not. After all, in the year of my birth the growth of absolute global human population numbers appears as a problem for the human family that we could more ably have acknowledged, addressed and overcome at that time when the human population was less than one-half its present size. What has been gained by maintaining a willful silence, formulating global gag rules and ignoring scientific evidence for the past 40 years.
Now for the question. After the Ehrlichs did their work in the late 1960s and the Club of Rome published its work on limits to growth shortly thereafter, why did the Rockefeller Foundation shut down its research on human population growth?
Always with thanks,
Steve
February 10th, 2011 at 9:44 pm
A possible connection between the activities of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Papacy.
http://www.population-security.org/issue_m.htm
Please note that Stephen D. Mumford, who coincidentally happens to be a resident of Chapel Hill, has done more research than anyone else I know to share an understanding of the pivotal role of the Catholic Church in thwarting at every turn the efforts of many individuals and organizations to acknowledge, much less begin to address, the formidable threats to human well being and environmental health that are posed in our time by the human overpopulation of Earth.
Three cheers are due Stephen D. Mumford for his extraordinary life work!
February 12th, 2011 at 8:51 am
Dear Mark Rosegrant, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Sherman Robinson, Ann Tutwiler, Sandra Postel, Rajul Pandya-Lorch, Jules Pretty, Anna Lappe, David Lobell and experts everywhere with responsibilities to assume and duties to perform with regard to feeding the human community,
How on Earth are we going to adequately feed the hungry and starving, and simultaneously not keep ‘feeding the problem’ of human overpopulation?
http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/frostovertheworld/2011/02/2011259341259393.html
How is it possible for so many top rank experts of great stature to be adamantly advocating for more “food production to feed a growing population” and yet be failing to mention the profound implications of skyrocketing absolute global population numbers on Earth? For such a thing to be occurring in 2011 appears preposterous. It is morally outrageous and dangerous both to future human well being and environmental health, I believe, for well established experts to be reporting ubiquitously in high-level discussions such things as are directly contradicted by unchallenged scientific research of human population dynamics and human overpopulation. Is it possible that so-called, self-proclaimed experts are not aware of peer-reviewed, published research in their area of expertise that indicates the food supply is the independent (not dependent) variable and human population numbers is the dependent (not independent) variable with regard to the relationship between human population numbers and food supply? It appears that many too many experts are collectively reporting specious theory and data regarding the human population that cannot be supported by the best available scientific evidence, I believe.
The food supply is the independent variable not the dependent variable. Human population numbers is the dependent variable not the independent variable. The believers in demographic transition theory and in the idea that “we must increase food production to feed a growing population” are simply mistaken. The false promise of Demographic Transition Theory, that population stabilization will somehow occur benignly and automatically a mere four decades from now, as well as the upside down thinking that human population numbers is the independent variable and food supply is the dependent variable, are at least two of the crucial and deliberate misunderstandings that are being deployed to direct the human community down a patently unsustainable “primrose path” no human being with feet of clay would ever choose to go.
The uncontested scientific finding of the relationship between food supply and human population numbers is being obscured and denied by the very experts upon whom the human community relies for guidance and direction. Conscious obsfucation and willful denial by ‘the brightest and best’ of the scientific finding regarding the relationship between food supply and human population numbers has been occurring pervasively for way too long a time. This incredible failure of nerve by ‘the smartest guys in the room’ in my not-so-great generation has got to be acknowledged, addressed and overcome.
The children’s future is being stolen by thieves of the highest order. And what is the communal response? A code of silence! Are people going to choose yet again to be bystanders at a moment when bold action, intellectual honesty and moral courage are required? Willful blindness, hysterical deafness, elective mutism and utter passivity cannot continue. The children will soon enough express their anger and disbelief at what the elders in my not-so-great generation have either failed to do or else done poorly “on our watch”, while wealthy and powerful crooks in high places robbed those among us who are still young of a good enough future.
How on Earth are we going to adequately feed the hungry and starving, and simultaneously not keep ‘feeding the problem’ of human overpopulation? This is the question no one is asking, the one that needs to be asked.
Please speak out loudly and clearly….