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Originally Posted by Brutha  Maybe it will also increase the incentives to grow food more locally.
Developing countires should grow their own food anyway. |
Ideally, yes, however the "Green Revolution" of the mid-20th century drastically increased crop yields per acre, resulting in cheap and plentiful food worldwide, and putting a huge dent in perennial famines throughout the third world. The downside is that these techniques depend on economies of scale and artificial petrochem fertilizers, so modern "industrial farming" methods are necessary; this may not be environmentally sustainable in the long run (e.g. water is pumped from aquifers hundreds of times faster than these aquifers are naturally replenished.)
I'm not trying to be all gloom and doom (honest!), but there is the real question of whether or not it is even possible to feed 6.5 billion people without modern industrial farming.
I'd love to see universal organic, sustainable, locally-based agriculture, but that might not be possible unless the global population drops back down to 2 billion or so. And this "dropping down" is unlikely to be an orderly process. It would be nice if everyone agreed to a 1 or 2 child policy, such that population would shrink slowly over the next century, but I tend to think that won't happen.
More likely is population growth driving resource demand and increasing prices, eventually resulting in global famine and the disease outbreaks and conflicts driven by famine.
The wealthier nations may be immune (or at least not as seriously affected), but the problem will be widespread and severe enough that they will be unable to prevent or ameliorate it. Literally billions of the world's poor will die of starvation, disease and war.
Technology could theoretically prevent or soften this, but even technology has its limits. Can we sustain 7 billion, 10 billion, 20 billion, 50 billion? At a certain point, the carrying capacity of the environment is overtaxed, the system runs on a deficit, and everything crashes.
Collapse can certainly be avoided if we take action, but I don't see the proper actions being taken right now.