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Zachmozach
Fluffy-Esque
USA
1534 Posts |
 Posted - 08/01/2005 : 2:23:35 PM
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So in case you haven't heard Niger is having a terrible starvation problem. It has been reported that 3.3 million people including a million children are facing starvation. The UN has of course stepped in and given more relief. So the country will probably be able to escape a sheer disaster.
Now this is probably going to sound incredibly heartless and that, but hear me out. Does it really make a lot of sense to be sending more food to peoples who are constantly having problems with starvation? If the world keeps sending nations that continually can't provide for it's food needs, then isn't this only making the problem worse? Especially when the countries population is allowed to rise continually as they keep depending on foreign food sources. Doesn't this in the end just lead toward more of the country not being able to provide themselves with food. I say let nature take it's course and if a country is continually starving let the population decline to a more workable number.
I know that a month or two ago a giant ship left our columbia river here bound for China filled with grains and such. Yet China has a big population problem. So why then does it make sense to increase the food supply to your country? It seems like all we are doing is ensuring that in many countries there will always be a food supply problem and that we will be having starving peoples for generations. Isn't that a pretty good sign when your geographic region can not year after year produce enough food to feed the people and they can only surrvive because of food donations from other regions that maybe your poulation is too high?
Does anyone else think like this? I know the common ideal is to help feed starving people, but it seems like it's just creating more of a problem with starving people. |
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Erich
Fluffy-Esque
USA
1427 Posts |
Posted - 08/01/2005 : 3:24:14 PM
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I get what youre saying, the whole "feed a man a fish / teach a man to fish" idea... but I think its a problem for a very different reason.
those people are starving because their governments are so corrupt and so filled with greedy miscreants that it doesnt matter WHAT we give them, it'll just be squandered. There is enough food and money in this world to make sure that everyone has a chance to eat, but countries with these major corrupt governments arent going to see it. Thats why world hunger is a problem.
Well, that, and to quote Sam Kinison:
quote:
'Hey, we just drove 700 miles with your food and it occurred to us that there wouldn't be world hunger, if you people would LIVE WHERE THE FOOD IS! YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING DESERT! YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING DESERT! NOTHING GROWS OUT HERE! NOTHING'S GONNA GROW HERE! YOU SEE THIS? HUH? THIS IS SAND. YEAH. DID YOU KNOW NOTHING CAN GROW IN THIS SHIT? HERE, EAT SOME OF IT, TASTE IT. KNOW WHAT IT'S GONNA BE A HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW? IT'S GONNA BE SAND! YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING DESERT! GET YOUR KIDS, GET YOUR SHIT, WE'LL MAKE ONE TRIP, WE'LL TAKE YOU TO WHERE THE FOOD IS! WE HAVE DESERTS IN AMERICA -- WE JUST DON'T LIVE IN THEM, ASSHOLES!"
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~pw'oikr
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PJK
Alien Abductee
USA
4159 Posts |
Posted - 08/01/2005 : 4:02:12 PM
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quote:
those people are starving because their governments are so corrupt and so filled with greedy miscreants that it doesnt matter WHAT we give them, it'll just be squandered. There is enough food and money in this world to make sure that everyone has a chance to eat, but countries with these major corrupt governments arent going to see it. Thats why world hunger is a problem.
Hummmm, sounds like the good old USA too, we have starving people here too, but we don't often hear about them. Some on reservations, some in the inner cities, some in the mountains and countryside.
Zach, I hear you, and in reply I will tell you in one word HUMANITY.
Erich is right but the facts he stated, while true, never makes me want to give up trying to help. My husbands cousins are missionaries in Africa. Actually they are state side until next year, but will return to Africa. While I am not a believer in organized religion, I have seen what they do to help the people and enabling them to be able to support themselves. When I give money to them, I KNOW it will go to the people there.
It has been said that the next world war will be over food. I'm not sure if that is true but the thought is well taken. We need to seriously watch what we are doing to our farmland here in America. My husband was a farmer, he was raised on a 200 acre dairy farm in Michigan. He cringes everytime he watches another housing development or shopping center go up on some of this countries best farm land.
If things don't change, America may not have enough food for its people.
Just food for thought, no pun intended.
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"It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!"Friedrich Nietzsche |
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Zachmozach
Fluffy-Esque
USA
1534 Posts |
Posted - 08/01/2005 : 4:50:59 PM
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Yes, just having a friend back from africa he told me a few stories about corruption in the government in Kenya and elswhere. I guess corruption is a very large problem with people eating. I know about the explotation the people suffer there. I just think from an ecological point of view it makes sense for their to not always be enough food for the population when the population is trying to rapidly expand. My friend would always say I was full of it when I talked about how overpopulated we are. Then after his trip to africa he totally agreed. Their population in the last 100 years has sprang up dramitcally. Yet they don't have the resources to sustain it. They have killed off more land and more animals till now much of it is just a shitty place.
With the flurry of studies being done these days on sustainability (and then the US government completely ignoring them) it seems apparent that we will not have enough food to support more population growth then what is projected in the next hundred years when we should be aroung 10 billion strong. You also have to consider that if we continue extincting species at the rate we are today (100 per day) we will be in serious trouble. Although it will probably slow down somewhat. Anyway it just seems like to me that we need to let nature take it's course. I know it doesn't seem fair, but we can't keep working towards a growing population. The only way to cure world hunger so that it doesn't come back is to reach a level of sustainabilty.
It's a tough call. Part of the problem is getting the food that is available to people who need it, yet at the same time it seems to only extend the problem by allowing increases in population due to increased food supply. I don't really know what exactly is the right thing to do I just hope that we can make a policy shift towards sustainability. |
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PJK
Alien Abductee
USA
4159 Posts |
Posted - 08/01/2005 : 7:47:55 PM
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Myths about Famine in Africa
OK, this is a long article, but it sums up what I wanted to say far better than I ever could. This is an article written by Dr Leslie Jermyn.
If I stopped you on the street and told you that the spectre of famine was once again stalking the African continent, that millions were at risk of starving to death, what would be your reaction? If you’re the average North American or European, you would probably shake your head sadly and wonder when these people were going to get it together in terms of limiting population growth and producing enough food to feed themselves. More charitably, you might blame the weather and continued drought in some regions. These are the three famine myths – not enough food, too many people, bad weather – that permit famine to strike again and again in the developing world with not so much as a peep of outrage from us, the increasingly obese developed world.
Famine is a situation of chronic lack of food leading to eventual starvation and death for thousands or millions depending on the scale. It is not the result of singular causes like low rainfall or too many mouths to feed but results from a long series of social, political and economic processes and policies. Famines can be and are predicted with alarming accuracy because they take months and years to grow from food shortages to full-blown food emergencies. They continue to plague us despite the fact that we do in fact produce enough food for every man, woman and child on the planet. Why?
1. Land Use: Key to unravelling the mystery of food shortage is understanding how food is produced in the first place. Since European and North American colonial and imperial expansion throughout the southern hemisphere in this century, southern peoples and lands have become our main suppliers of raw materials and plantation foodstuffs. This has forced countless small producers off their land to make way for large-scale agribusiness or mining interests and has removed millions of hectares of arable land from food production for local consumption. The concentration of land ownership continued with Green Revolution technologies which required farmers to purchase expensive seeds, fertilizers and pesticides in order to enjoy the benefits of increased yields. Only the well off farmers could afford to partake and eventually they were able to buy out their poorer neighbours. Today, the pundits are still advising eradicating family farming for agribusiness, but not to increase food production, but rather to increase exports and debt repayment. To boot, the finished product of a Green Revolution or agribusiness farm is far more expensive to buy on local markets and is thus effectively unavailable to local consumers.
We now have 1#8260;2 the arable land per person that we had 40 years ago. This results from desertification and soil erosion where inappropriate technologies have destroyed land or landless peasants have moved into fragile zones, but mostly results from putting arable land to other uses such as urban expansion. We don’t think twice about another housing development or sprawl mall on former cropland because in the north, we import most of our food anyway and so don’t see the point in conserving farmland. Of course, our food is grown somewhere and wherever it grows, it’s not supplying local needs.
In general, then, for the last 100 years, we have supported a shift from small family farms to large agribusiness and from our own self-sufficiency in food to relying on southern countries to produce for us. All of these policies have resulted in greater vulnerability for developing nations in terms of producing enough food to feed themselves.
FACT: Ethiopia exported green beans to Great Britain throughout the 1984-85 famine…
2. Social Structure: Throughout the southern hemisphere, there has been a net flow of people off the land to the cities. Despite opening of borders and free trade production zones, industrial employment has not kept pace with the numbers of people forced off the land looking for work. They swell the ranks of the urban poor who no longer have access to food through agriculture and who don’t earn enough to eat well or frequently. As well, imported food takes over from locally grown as per the recommendations of the IMF and World Bank, and this food costs more thus creating ever larger numbers of people who are inadequately fed.
FACT: The rich never starve in a famine…
3. Development Policies: For half a century now, we, in the north, have been ‘committed to the development of the south.’ In all honesty, they’d be better off without our concern and charity. At the level of global institutions like the World Bank, development policies have followed the same unswerving path: big projects that produce surplus for the north and debt for the south. Since we began to donate and loan money to the developing world, there has been a net flow of value (money and goods) to the north – much of the money came our way in arms sales to support Cold War hostilities on southern soil and to keep pro-Western or pro-Soviet strongmen in power. Currently, the pundits are advocating open markets, production of export commodities and reduced food independence – pretty much the same story as before but without the pretty disguise of ‘community’ or ‘sustainable’ development to hide the ugly truth. At the very same time, northern tariffs keep southern products out or make them less competitive while the sale of northern surplus grains aids an already overbloated industry that only survives with enormous government subsidies. Our justification is that they have to pay off their debt to us, debt incurred to enrich us in the first place. So, we push even more farmers off their land and invite more agribusiness in to produce flowers or cotton or bananas for us and then wonder when those same farmers have the affront to starve to death on television.
FACT: Sudan had silos of presold wheat that it could not distribute to starving people during the famine. It had sold the wheat, stockpiled for food relief, on the advice of the World Bank…
4. Global Inequality: Unfortunately, there’s no getting around the fact that our overuse of world resources is connected to other people’s lack of access and food is no different. We overeat and eat foods that use up more land space than the foods most southerners traditionally eat. As humans we are omnivorous meaning that we can process both plant and animal foods. But when we eat animal protein, we are in effect eating more grain that if we were to eat the grain directly:
It takes 2.5kilos of grain to produce 1k of poultry
It takes 4kilos of grain to produce 1k of pork
It takes 7kilos of grain to produce 1k of beef
That means that if there are indeed 3,600 grain calories per person produced in the world, we’re eating more than our share by consuming large quantities of meat. North Americans eat approximately 115 kilos of meat per person per year. If we want to ensure everyone has a fair share, we are going to have to change our eating habits so as to reduce the pressure on grain supplies and arable land both at home and abroad. Unfortunately, all we’re doing at the moment is exporting our ‘way of life’ to the elites in the south in order to sell more of our goods and services. We will reach the carrying capacity of the planet if we believe the way forward is a McDonalds at every crossroads. Our diet is unsustainable ecologically and morally.
FACT: If everyone on the planet ate like us, we would need 3 extra planets to produce the grain to feed to the animals.
Famine is a complex problem with complex solutions but it is not inevitable and blaming the victims will not bring us closer to solution.
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"It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!"Friedrich Nietzsche |
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dan p.
Alien Abductee
Uganda
3776 Posts |
Posted - 08/01/2005 : 9:58:42 PM
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i liked your article, but it doesn't exactly dispute what zach said, and what i agree with.
fact: these countries, for whatever reason, cannot get food to its people.
fact: by sending the starving food, we do not solve the problems that make them unable to produce food.
so, you can say humanity, and to an extent yes. we help people when we give them food, but only temporarily. temporary solutions for the less fortunate might be your definition of the word, but not mine. it seems more humane to solve the problems for good. the article you posted makes the real problems clear, and thus the solutions become clearer.
but what zach said makes more sense to me. it's more logical. simple division. x/y < x/b where b<y. a set amount of food spread over a smaller amount of people will allow more food per person. |
death to false metal. |
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Zachmozach
Fluffy-Esque
USA
1534 Posts |
Posted - 08/02/2005 : 01:53:16 AM
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Yes I don't suggest blaming victims and I'm not trying to do any blaming on anyone in particular. From what I understood in that article and from what I've read about the problem in the past, I understand a lot of the problem comes from in a majority economic inequality, but I still say that it doesn't make sense to continue to help the problem out by letting people continue to gain in population while they already cannot feed themselves. I also realize that some famines are not long lived and they can quickly re-establish the amount of food needed to sustain a population. However I also believe we are begining to see a chronic case of world hunger.
Like the article said, if everyone ate like we did we would need 3 planets. However helping more and more people to try to eat like we do only digs us deeper in the hole. It's still one of those things where it's hard to know what to do, but I don't see any real sustainablity thought going in to the relief actions in Africa. It's like Dan said in that it's a basic mathmatically understandable law. It's really one of the big laws of biology. |
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PJK
Alien Abductee
USA
4159 Posts |
Posted - 08/03/2005 : 06:35:24 AM
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dan, I never said I was disputing what Zach said, just adding information.
I honestly don't know how to help stop the starving in Africa, if I did I would be pretty famous I'm sure, but I still can't just turn my back on those people. I am trying to do what I can, trying to get the 9th grade classes at the school where I work to do some project to directly help people in Africa, especially since that is part of their social studies units. I want them to get a better understanding of reality in Africa, not just what the textbooks tell them. I am interested in working with UNICEF and other organizations. Of course I am one little person and can only do so much, so I don't really know if I make a difference or not, but I can't sit back and do nothing. That is just my nature.
There are atrocities all over the world. The dying rooms in China, the genocide in Africa and South America, terrorists are just some of the things that are out of our hands, like starvation, but humanity demands that we do something. My biggest worry is that we are no longer being human.
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"It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!"Friedrich Nietzsche |
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tericee
Alien Abductee
USA
2579 Posts |
Posted - 08/03/2005 : 08:34:00 AM
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| This all reminds me of that book Fluffy made me read. About the gorilla teaching the human. What was that called? |
teri 
Twittering about the DC adventure since Dec '09...
(Micro)Blog * Photo Album
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PJK
Alien Abductee
USA
4159 Posts |
Posted - 08/03/2005 : 11:14:39 AM
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Ishmael  |
"It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!"Friedrich Nietzsche |
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Zachmozach
Fluffy-Esque
USA
1534 Posts |
Posted - 08/03/2005 : 4:36:29 PM
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| Don't forget there is My Ishmael and The Story of B. that are really good too, by the same author. Daniel Quinn. I think it should be required reading in high school. |
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tericee
Alien Abductee
USA
2579 Posts |
Posted - 08/05/2005 : 03:06:47 AM
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| I haven't read those yet... |
teri
Twittering about the DC adventure since Dec '09...
(Micro)Blog * Photo Album
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Fluffy
Administrator
USA
10739 Posts |
Posted - 08/05/2005 : 04:10:15 AM
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| Ahhhh glad someone brought them up.....I kept thinking about Ishmael and moreso Story of B as I read this thread. Those books address these issues almost directly. Well at least in certain kinda way. CHECK THEM OUT!!! |
Peace & Keep the Faith
Fluffy         
"THE MUSIC BUSINESS IS A CRUEL AND SHALLOW MONEY TRENCH-- A LONG PLASTIC HALLWAY WHERE THIEVES AND PIMPS RUN FREE AND GOOD MEN DIE LIKE DOGS. THERE'S ALSO A NEGATIVE SIDE..." -Hunter S. Thompson |
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Zachmozach
Fluffy-Esque
USA
1534 Posts |
Posted - 08/05/2005 : 2:24:17 PM
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Well Fluffy you turned me on to them so I had to keep the word going. I remember you mentioned something about The Story of B. and then I saw Victor Wooten had reccomended Ishmael and I thought I better check them out. I'm very glad I did too.
Have you happened to read his other books like The Holy, or Beyond Civilization? Everything I've read by him continues to open my mind. I remember you said Tim was reading Ishmael a while ago too. I hope he dug it like I did. |
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Starving People
