Interesting factoids:
If you took EVERY SINGLE PERSON on the face of the Earth, and moved them to the land mass inside of Texas, we’d have no more density than the entire city of New York (all borroughs, not just Manhattan).
The rest of the US’ current farmland, and that of Alberta could feed all people. No need to convert a SINGLE ACRE of park, city, mountain, forest or non-farm space to farming.
And the water outflow of the Columbia River would provide enough fresh water for everyone multiple times over.
We could leave the rest of Canada, Alaska, everything from Mexico down to Tierra del Fuego, and the other continents and oceans completely untouched and empty.
The problem with the Earth isn’t its ability to sustain us; the problem is the distribution of the resources! We grow more than enough wheat and corn, heck we pay farmers not to grow it. If that could be grown, and sold on the open market then there wouldn’t be starvation.
But because some petty dictator (or crazy Frenchman, in the case of France) wants to protect their own “farmers” they ban the importation of our foodstuffs either outright or via use of tariffs to make it economically unfeasible.
Yep, you are right about that. And people in New York, though they may not all have a 10 acre spread, live quite comfortably.
But because some petty dictator (or crazy Frenchman, in the case of France) wants to protect their own farmers they ban the importation of our foodstuffs either outright or via use of tariffs to make it economically unfeasible.
Yes, it is man that creates the problem of distribution and production. I remember reading somewhere, where a farmer in Iowa could yield 10-20 times more bushels of corn (or maybe it was wheat) than people in the third world. Many governments throughout the world, for one reason or another do not have the forsight to seek out help or knowledge to increase the yield. And this was mid 90's that I read that. Agriculture methods are not guarded secrets, it is man that sabotage.
There are labs across the world that is always trying to increase the yields for grains products and new technology could have increased it even more by now.
And, politics gets in the way too. Japan is a good example. Japanese rice farmers could grow more rice, but they protect their farmers. The reality is, if they open their markets up to imports, alot of rice farmers will fold. But then what'll happen is that those fields are still there, they'll just consolidate and they could invest in better equipment and methods and yeild more per acre.
Alot of things we hear or read about tend to be very one sided and does not explain the whole story. For example, some historians fret about the lost of bison on the great plains. Roughly 60 million. But those plains have more hoofed animals on them than ever before. There are probably 600 million heads of cattle on them. And if the American diet or preference where to ever change to bison instead of beef, I'm sure, over the course of a couple decades, there could be 600 million bison back on the great plains.