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Sustainable Development
According to my Land Management Prof on 2/12/98
Are increases in world population and the resulting required increase in
food production sustainable?
*UNLIKELY*
Why:
-Pests are developing resistence to pesticides
(Corollary: everything natural that humans have mercilessly conquered,
from diseases to creatures to land, is coming back to haunt us in the
form of AIDS, the flu, and other immediate dangers that we will eventually
not be able to conquer)
-We are contaminating water-bodies by fertilizers and pesticide residues
-Returns from industrialization of agriculture may be diminishing
-In developing countries, there is a loss of agriculture land around
rapidly growing cities, decreasing that country's ability to sustain
itself
-Soil erosion happening everywhere
-Salination
(Special note: humans *need* freshwater to live.)
-Loss of biodiversity
(McDonald's renders thousands of acres of land un-agrable through the
strict and harmful breeding of extra-large potatoes for their special
French Fries...eventually nothing will be able to grow on this land for a
long, long time. Love those fries.)
The optimistic view is that we'll see a banishment of world hunger in time
as we have in world powers like Europe and the US if current trends
continue. The "pessimistic" (realistic) view is that the upward trend in
food production cannot be sustained as we are already seeing a stress in
the food system and on the envrionment.
Currently, there is a surplus of food in the world. To avoid economic
crisis (the significant reduction of prices in food costs), world powers
"remove the surplus from the food supply" which basically means paying
farmers not to produce it or to destroy it once produced.
Could someone get me those figures about how many people die from
starvation every year?
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