"We have more than enough resources in the world...

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...Just not enough brains in Washington"

Can't argue with that.

Last edited by thomas81 on 31 Oct 2013, 8:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Sending the food to Africa is harder than it sounds. While the wastefulness and over-indulgende in the US and Western-Europe is disgusting, the middle class and upper class in Africa could do much more for the poor people than they do today.

Are you sure about that? All these 1st world countries have no issues taking food out of such countries and supplying it to their own people. How hard can it be supplying the same food to 3rd world populations or simply providing our own crops and food that's already pumped to the brim with preservatives that increase its longevity?

Edit: The middle class and upper class of Africa have no obligation to help those people. They already pay their way in their society. It is not their fault that their governments are corrupt and squander the foreign aid. Much like UKIP, Ron Paul, and various European parties suggest, the solution is to end foreign aid to Africa but maintain a realistic support network of resources...in other words things that cannot be squandered, held back so easily, and would benefit whoever has access to them in little or no way at all.

Are you sure about that? All these 1st world countries have no issues taking food out of such countries and supplying it to their own people. How hard can it be supplying the same food to 3rd world populations or simply providing our own crops and food that's already pumped to the brim with preservatives that increase its longevity?
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How would you send milk, fast food and stuff like that to Africa? Grain, rice, nuts and food that does not spoil easily can be sent, though.



No, but they would make life a lot easier for the majority of the people in these countries if they did.



This is a good point.

Delivering aid is quite a difficult business. I have a friend in South Sudan doing aid work there at the moment. There is no concrete for infrastructure, so building prices are extremely high. There are not many airfields and the roads are awful. Societies most at risk of starvation group into two sets. The first are those with mostly local provisioning and when that breaks down it becomes really difficult to get aid to everyone, since the infrastructure does not really work to facilitate centralized delivery of food. The second groups are those where a state hoards the majority of the food and has a rationing system. The second type is really awful to deal with, from North Korean defectors who have been surveyed only around 10% reported getting any food aid.

What we are doing seems to be working in most places of the world, a reduction of 17% in just over ten years is pretty commendable considering that during this time population increased quite a bit.

http://www.wfp.org/news/news-release/gl ... lly-hungry

People in countries with lower inequality are happier. Also, rich people in countries with lower inequality are happier. I'll link to the study that made this correlation if I can find it again.

Depending at what way you look at it it's either really amazing or almost an eternal struggle. More people than ever before have been helped but due to population increase there are more millions than ever before suffering in poverty with hunger. Your point about the delivery of aid is fair.. so the question is this - if we have the resources, the resourcefulness, then why aren't nations being resourceful? Chucking money at the problem won't fix it.

Inside a living cow.

There is certainly an irreducible minimum point that cannot be resolved. My first job was working with the homeless in Australia, there were just some people who actually wanted to live outdoors but there were many that could be assisted. The statistics show that overall hunger is down and the decrease holds, even if you factor in global population growth. As such the strategy appears to be working. Development is another question but there is a reasonable case to be made the expansion of the present system will lead to good returns even if they are ultimately diminishing. It seems we are quite a way from that point in many places of the world. As such I would take issue with the question, since throwing money at the problem is not really what is happening and overall the situation is being improved. It is not the time to be throwing hands up and proclaiming defeat when the evidence shows that the opposite is occurring and things are getting better.

We have a rather strange form of economic justice in our country right now - it's the corporatist Robin Hood who steals from the rich and gives to General Electric.

We don't have anywhere near enough resources in the world to continue living our current lifestyles well into the future, unless we make some major changes. But food? Yeah, we have plenty of that, the challenge is more regarding distribution than actual supply.

Maybe but Malthusian thinking has not been that useful so far. My feeling is that the only way through this mess is technology.

We easily have enough resources on this planet alone to support a much higher population at a better standard of living. If we use it efficiently, that is. Do remember that the source of wealth is human ingenuity, and that's not a zero sum game - it keeps pace with population, at the very least, and is probably more than a linear function of the population, because more people means more giants shoulders.

But if we insist on being inefficient, and using violence to stop those who want to actually get on and solve the problems rather than milking them for all they can get? Well, that's not going to work out very well.

I think the best bet so far is extreme decentralisation. If every village is self-sufficient, the systems going to route around damage, be it natural or human caused.

Just give up on expecting politicians to solve the problems. They're the ones who are majorly responsible for the mess in the first place.

We really don't.

The big resource is energy- it correlates extremely closely with standards of living. We already use far too much oil, gas and coal. These are non-renewable resources (biofuels will simply drive up the cost of food, and shouldn't even be considered, except possibly for jet fuel in the future). Other sources of energy are more expensive, and damage the environment in their own right. Currently, lower middle classes in countries like the UK are struggling to pay their domestic energy bills. It would require a major breakthrough (such as hot fusion proving commercially viable) to provide affordable electricity to all of them, let alone Africa, and of course nuclear plants are not practical for people on small islands such as the Maldives. Electricity will be very expensive on those islands in the future.

Making every village self-sufficient sounds nice, but most villages cannot afford to be self sufficient. It is more efficient to pool resources for a nuclear plant or hydroelectric dam. "Local" sources of energy such as solar and wind power will not be suitable everywhere.

And that's before we get into other finite resources, such as gold, copper, indeed almost any metal.

This has been done for decades. Aid ends up in the hands of corrupt thugs that use it for economic and political gain.

We really do.

The big resource is energy. It falls from the sky, an average of ~350W for every square meter of the planets surface, so each square meter gets approximately 3 times as much energy as a human consumes in surviving. Alas, our food production isn't 100% efficient, so we need to assign, using current methods, several hundred square meters of land to feed a person. Oh noes, we don't have enough land to sustain more than 1 trillion people if we use it all for food! That is, of course, discounting advances in genetic engineering, the use of more efficient crops, artificial lighting powered by fusion (which comes with it's own major problems if done on that sort of scale...). But people want electricity as well. Wikipedia says that the US uses somewhere around 2.6x10^16 watt-hours each year. I'll be generous and say we need to provide 3 times that amount per person each year, because of manufacturing and needing to extract from lower grade ore (which I'm using here to mean the source of what we need, be it water, iron, aluminum etc). So approx. 2.6x10^8 watt-hours each year, or a power use of 30kW (shards, seems ridiculously high...). Modern solar is about 20% efficient, and unless they're in space, won't be getting all the energy. Still, we can expect 20W from them per square meter, meaning we'll need 1500 square meters of solar film. Which is a lot, but my numbers are also absurdly high. Going back to the current American usage, already high by western standards, we'll be using a much more manageable 500 square meters.