U.N. warns of catastrophe as hungry people top 1 billion

Sam Kinison says it best. No food in the desert! (1:30)



[edit on 14-6-2009 by Dbriefed]

Our planet could sustain a lot more people but that all depends on how we live. There is no way in hell that our planet could support more people living like America or the west. We are what? 1% of the population using 25% of the world's resources? Also there is plenty of food to feed every living person on this planet 2-3 times over. No one should be starving.

Originally posted by Dbriefed
Agent Smith in 'The Matrix' summed it up, Mankind, "A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet."

How big can our population get before we burn this planet out? Nature will find a way to pare us down. The more we push it back, the bigger the implosion.

We're way overpopulated. Unfortunately those who contribute the least have lots of time on their hands to breed.

It won't be nature, the plan is already in place.

en.wikipedia.org...

"maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature"

The elite are telling you 6.2 billion need to get off their ride.

The Club of Rome has decided you and your kiddies need to die.

en.wikipedia.org...

Your growth needs to be limited.

Nature will need to get in line behind the new nazis and their planned
eugenics of the human race.

Good Luck to you all !

Originally posted by Zosynspiracy
Our planet could sustain a lot more people but that all depends on how we live. There is no way in hell that our planet could support more people living like America or the west. We are what? 1% of the population using 25% of the world's resources? Also there is plenty of food to feed every living person on this planet 2-3 times over. No one should be starving.

/win

exactly we live in a world of plenty our daily food pruduction IS enough to feed every last man, women and child for 2 days... the food shortage is fake... it's not the system thats wrong.. its the people in charge.

There is so much human misery...so much of it in the third world. The very fact you are able to read this using a computer suggests that you are not among the world's most miserable...

How many people in the first world have ever actually seen true third world misery? Ever wandered around the shantytowns of Lagos? I'm guessing most of you haven't:

The Third Mainland Bridge is a looping ribbon of concrete that connects Lagos Island to the continent of Africa. It was built in the nineteen-seventies, part of a vast network of bridges, cloverleafs, and expressways intended to transform the districts and islands of this Nigerian city—then comprising three million people—into an efficient modern metropolis. As the bridge snakes over sunken piers just above the waters of Lagos Lagoon, it passes a floating slum: thousands of wooden houses, perched on stilts a few feet above their own bobbing refuse, with rust-colored iron roofs wreathed in the haze from thousands of cooking fires. Fishermen and market women paddle dugout canoes on water as black and viscous as an oil slick. The bridge then passes the sawmill district, where rain-forest logs—sent across from the far shore, thirty miles to the east—form a floating mass by the piers. Smoldering hills of sawdust landfill send white smoke across the bridge, which mixes with diesel exhaust from the traffic. Beyond the sawmills, the old waterfront markets, the fishermen’s shanties, the blackened façades of high-rise housing projects, and the half-abandoned skyscrapers of downtown Lagos Island loom under a low, dirty sky. Around the city, garbage dumps steam with the combustion of natural gases, and auto yards glow with fires from fuel spills. All of Lagos seems to be burning.

The bridge descends into Lagos Island and a pandemonium of venders’ stalls crammed with spare parts, locks, hard hats, chains, screws, charcoal, detergent, and DVDs. On a recent afternoon, car horns, shouting voices, and radio music mingled with the snarling engines of motorcycle taxis stalled in traffic and the roar of an air compressor in an oily tire-repair yard. Two months earlier, a huge cast-iron water main suspended beneath the bridge had broken free of its rusted clip, crushing a vacant scrap market below and cutting off clean water from tens of thousands of the fifteen million people who now live in Lagos.

In the absence of piped water, wealthier residents of the waterfront slum at the end of the bridge, called Isale Eko, pay private contractors to sink boreholes sixty feet deep. All day and night, residents line up at the boreholes to pay five cents and fill their plastic buckets with contaminated water, which some of them drink anyway. Isale Eko is the oldest and densest part of Lagos Island. Every square foot is claimed by someone—for selling, for washing, even for sleeping—and there is almost no privacy. Many residents sleep outdoors. A young man sitting in an alley pointed to some concrete ledges three feet above a gutter. “These are beds,” he said.

In the newer slums on the mainland, such as Mushin, rectangular concrete-block houses squeeze seven or eight people into a single, mosquito-infested room—in bunks or on the floor—along a narrow corridor of opposing chambers. This arrangement is known as “face me I face you.” One compound can contain eighty people. In Mushin, Muslim Hausas from the north of Nigeria coexist uneasily with mostly Christian Yorubas from the south. Armed gangs represent the interests of both groups. On the night of Febru-ary 2, 2002, a witness told me, a Hausa youth saw a Yoruba youth squatting over a gutter on the street and demanded, “Why are you sh***ng there?” In a city where only 0.4 per cent of the inhabitants have a toilet connected to a sewer system, it was more of a provocation than a serious question. The incident that night led to a brawl. Almost immediately, the surrounding compounds emptied out, and the streets filled with Yorubas and Hausas armed with machetes and guns. The fighting lasted four days and was ended only by the military occupation of Mushin. By then, more than a hundred residents had been killed, thousands had fled the area, and hundreds of houses had burned down.

to the city are not greeted with the words “Welcome to Lagos.” They are told, “This is Lagos”—an ominous statement of fact

More at source:
www.newyorker.com...

How many in the first world have anything but the haziest grasp of what this sort of life entails? And yet it is far closer to the median human experience than the relatively lavish existence of of most of us ATS posters, however "poor."

Sometimes I feel we in the first world are like barons at Versailles sneering at each other over who has more lace on his sleeve or who gets to sit closer to the king at dinnertime...meanwhile a growing hoarde of slat-thin starving peasants presses down on the groaning gates, the clanging of their empty dinner bowls against the metal a dim echo barely heard above the chamber quartet...all somebody else's problem, so far away and unreal...yes, its all fun and games until the guillotine starts swinging, of course...




[edit on 6/14/09 by silent thunder]

It's a common known fact that the food wasted in the West is enough to feed the world three times over.

Gandi said "There is enough for everyones need, not enough for anyones greed" it is true.

Why do movie stars get millions pretending to be someone else.Why do people need to amass billions, when so many are dying through starvation or lack of drugs.

Us Westerners want to go on our Safari's on the way we need water, never mind that we consume all the fresh water available in the village our hotel is in and that children are dying in that village because of the lack of fresh water.

Baby milk companies promote bottle feeding knowing full well the mothers cannot afford formula, because they ..the mothers..have been told 'it is better for baby' they use it and water it down. The companies often blackmail the local doctor with promises of this and that if they promote their baby milk.

I am also familiar with statements on the Georgia guidestones, and I would not support those. I am also not an environmentalist, in fact resent people who try to control how I live my life. However I do feel that the current population is unsustainable given our fuel supplies are finite. If the world ran out of fuel, hundreds of millions or billions would starve to death. It's not just growing food, it's the logistics of getting food to people before it's rotten. Also just because from an airplane you see large areas of land, doesn't mean it's usable as farmland. Turning natural land into farmland damages the ecosystem and digs the hole deeper.

The U.S. has the best most efficient farmers in the world. And our farms are staffed by the cheapest labor locally available, from across the border. Kind of odd that Mexico doesn't now have the best farms in the world. Anyway, farm technology doesn't seem to travel to third world countries very well. I know from the time I spent in India, that people looked down on machinery or automation since it didn't employ the masses of people they have there. In some ways not being able to feed the people is by their own decisions.

Another lesson from India; I asked my driver why no one seemed to care that some village was wiped out by rebels or by a government army. Or that a single cyclone wiped out 250,000 people in Bangladesh. The answer was that human life was not as valuable in India as it was in the west, that people believed the dead returned in a different form anyway. So in western countries we have a different perspective on how high we value life, whereas in some other countries death is part of the cycle.

[

It is not only food the third world needs. What about education, medicine, contraception, hope for the future etc. Should the the third world adopt the philosophies of the west? It is the philosophies of the west that have created these problems.

How has the west caused the food shortages?. It's the technology of the west that produces all this food. If western agriculture was at the third world level, food shortages would be ten times worse.

Originally posted by silent thunder
There is so much human misery...so much of it in the third world. The very fact you are able to read this using a computer suggests that you are not among the world's most miserable...

And whose fault is that? It's their own fault for insisting on large families.

reply to post by Make Speed Limit 45


Where to begin?
How about third world debt? Unfair sanctions, second rate technology exports, or why not make it simple?

"What are the underlying causes? The global TV image spotlights the victims of civil war, drought and flood. Famine in Somalia or Mozambique is mechanically ascribed to the "external" political and climatic factors: "the absence of rain carrying clouds and air pressure anomalies"... History is distorted, only the surface and colour of World events are disclosed. Somalia was self-sufficient in food until the 1970s; what precipitated the collapse of civil society? Why were food agriculture and nomadic pastoralism destroyed?...
. YET THE INNER CAUSES OF FAMINE REMAIN CAREFULLY CONCEALED.
THE IMF-WORLD BANK SPONSORED MACRO-ECONOMIC REFORMS IMPOSED ON DEVELOPING COUNTRIES HAVE BEEN RESPONSIBLE FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF LOCAL LEVEL FOOD SELF-SUFFICIENCY AND THE OUTBREAK OF FAMINE. WORLD AGRICULTURE HAS FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY THE CAPACITY TO SATISFY THE FOOD REQUIREMENTS OF THE ENTIRE PLANET, YET THE VERY NATURE OF THE GLOBAL MARKET SYSTEM PREVENTS THIS FROM OCCURRING. THE CAPACITY TO PRODUCE FOOD IS IMMENSE YET THE LEVELS OF FOOD CONSUMPTION REMAIN EXCEEDINGLY LOW BECAUSE A LARGE SHARE OF THE WORLD'S POPULATION LIVES IN CONDITIONS OF ABJECT POVERTY AND DEPRIVATION. 16 OCTOBER 1995: THE FOOD AND AGRICULTURAL ORGANIZATION (FAO) CELEBRATES IN QUEBEC CITY ITS FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY
THE FINAL ACT OF THE URUGUAY ROUND, THE ARTICLES OF AGREEMENT OF THE NEW WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION (WTO)) WILL GIVE UNRESTRICTED FREEDOM TO THE FOOD GIANTS TO ENTER THE SEEDS MARKETS OF DEVELOPING COUNTRIES AND ESTABLISH "PLANT BREEDERS RIGHTS" TO THE DETRIMENT OF MILLIONS OF SMALL FARMERS.
THE NEOLIBERAL POLICY AGENDA IS NOT QUESTIONED. THE INCIDENCE OF FAMINE IS NARROWLY ASCRIBED TO POPULATION PRESSURES, CLIMATIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS...
SINCE THE EARLY 1980S, GRAIN MARKETS ARE DEREGULATED UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF THE WORLD BANK, US AND EUROPEAN GRAIN SURPLUSES ARE USED TO DESTROY THE PEASANTRY AND DESTABILISE NATIONAL FOOD AGRICULTURE."

"While "external" climatic variables play a role in triggering off a famine and heightening the social impact of drought, famines in the age of globalisation are man-made. They are not the consequence of "a scarcity of food" but of a structure of global oversupply which undermines food security and destroys national food agriculture. Tightly regulated and controlled by international agro-business, this oversupply is ultimately conducive to the stagnation of both production and consumption of essential food staples and the impoverishment of farmers throughout the World. Moreover, in the era of globalisation, the IMF-World Bank structural adjustment programme bears a direct relationship to the process of famine formation because it systematically undermines all categories of economic activity, whether urban or rural, which do not directly serve the interests of the global market system. Import substituting industries for the internal market are dismantled as a result of the lifting of tariff barriers and the collapse of internal purchasing power, small artisans are impoverished, food farming is undermined in favour of export crops,... In turn, the State apparatus is undone through the imposition of fiscal austerity, civil society collapses and the Nation State becomes politically fragmented..."


Is that enough or should we talk about western involvement in third world politics, manipulation of governments, civil wars etc...




[edit on 15-6-2009 by midicon]

I really appreciate the thoughts conveyed here. One gets a good look at the thoughts an attitudes of others.

I have no doubts that we must change to make the world a better place. The greed model will only take us so far and it has quite a heavy price. The change needed is never the one we immediately think of. It would be amazing if it was something so simple that was painless to everyone but made a HUGE difference in the lives of all on this planet.

Thank you for all of your contributions