Posted on 01/25/2014 2:05:58 AM PST by Olog-hai
Greater food system efficiency and curbs to the expansion of cropland are necessary to prevent the collapse of global ecosystems, says a report presented today (24 January) by the UN at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
The report, by the UN Environment Program’s science think tank the International Resource Panel (IRP), says that policymakers must break the link between greater resource consumption and human well-being.
The authors say that rising demand for food could lead to a 320 to 850 million hectare expansion of global cropland, putting greater strain of the environment’s capacity for regeneration. …
(Excerpt) Read more at euractiv.com ...
Bureaucrats know everything! No need to ask experts.
The UN even uses their own term “policymakers” to describe them (obviously a synonym for “politician”).
Translation: Starve, peasants!
Even though barring an extinction event, or mass population die-off due to whatever causes (which will inevitably be government-caused), we shouldn’t expand the amount of crops we grow?
Another attack on suburban living. We all have to be crowded into high rise city ghettos to save space and the environment. I hate the UN
So now vegetables are bad for the environment? I'll add it to the list along with cows, etc.
The authors are totally clueless. Rising yields per acre lead to lower food costs, allowing the world to support its growing populations. Total global cropland has been dropping steadily for generations, and if these people read in their own field they would know that.
Their next slogan is, “Tree bark, the other dark meat!”
> Greater food system efficiency and curbs to the expansion of cropland are necessary to prevent the collapse of global ecosystems
Instead, the bodies of jackasses who write such nonsense should be fertilizing our food crops.
The UN...at the big annual meeting of Globalists and Free Traders at Davos...has just announced it is planning to starve a lot of people
More reason to eradicate Globalism from America. George Washington was so correct about America getting involved in foreign entanglements
Supporters of Free Trade Globaism are the biggest supporters of the UN...and vice versa
“Total global cropland has been dropping steadily for generations...”
It is truly amazing, just in my short life, how much prior producing farmland has now gone into dormant pastureland.
A Malthusian catastrophe (also known as Malthusian check) was originally foreseen to be a forced return to subsistence-level conditions once population growth had outpaced agricultural production.
Looks like the UN would like to force that upon us.
Every year California loses a large amount of farmland to salinization. That is, irrigation water deposits a small amount of salt in land that over the course of decades eventually makes the land too salty to farm.
The way to desalinize land is to flood it with water for several weeks, until the salts are carried far below where crop roots would go. The process is slightly accelerated by using mostly salt free water.
In turn, the way to provide this much low salt water is through desalinization plants. Normally these are energy intensive, but recent developments in nanotechnology has resulted in highly efficient and low maintenance water filters, that use only a quarter of the energy of typical reverse osmosis.
While California would be unwilling to do something so sensible as to provide itself with a vast amount of fresh water, Texas should consider this immediately. This is because they have vast amounts of energy in the form of natural gas, that is often treated as a waste product of oil production.
The vast majority of any increase in demand for food is not for food for people. It's for food for animals, which are then fed to people.
Depending on the animal and other factors, it takes 4 to considerably more than 10 calories of plant foods otherwise edible by humans to produce one calorie of meat edible by people. IOW, sometimes like 5x to 15x the amount of land to feed the same number of people.
This expansion in meat production is of course a very good thing indeed, since it is caused by billions of people around the world climbing above absolute poverty in the last few decades. One of the very first things people do when they reach this point is to eat more meat.
People living in cities are much more easily controlled. If the peasants don’t behave, stop shipping in food, taint the water, stop picking up trash or plowing streets for a while. They will come around in a hurry.
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