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27.9%ANMag Issue 27 Global Awareness
Food Production
By Chin Gen-tsin, Chairman of Earth-Humankind Society
Trinidad, West Indies − Part II − Nations that are wholly – or almost wholly – dependent on others for their food, whether they have enough money to import it or they get it from charitable agencies and organizations, can apply the system described in this article full, that is, 100%; nations that have to import half of their food can scale this back by 50%; nations that overproduce food and have lots more reserved in their silos and warehouses can continue as they have been doing.
Hunger – and, worse, famine – are two problems that have beset us humans for millennia. Even today, every day, in this year 2005, eight hundred million people suffer from hunger or malnutrition and over sixteen million children will die from hunger or hunger-related diseases during this year. Just as depressing, seven years before, in Oct, 1998, in Rome, Italy, in a UN-sponsored FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) meeting, the world’s top agricultural scientists, engineers, consultants and other experts gloomily concluded that in the year 2020 only four hundred million people* will suffer from hunger or malnutrition and, one presumes, only eight million children will die that year from hunger and diseases derived from this hunger.
(*The 800 million people on near-starvation rations in 1998 do not seem to have gone down at all in the seven years since then. And their best figure of only 400 million people virtually starving is more than the entire present population of Europe (350 m) plus another 50 million or that of the USA plus another 100 million.)
It is possible that these agricultural scientists, engineers, et al can do this – achieve a partial and, quite frankly, unacceptable solution (Has any of these experts or their families ever went one day, just one day, without food?) to the world’s hunger problem - if it is done their way. And their way, the conventional way, is:
(a.) The large-scale cutting down, clearing, and leveling of what remains of the world’s forests, from horizon to horizon so that it looks like the American-Canadian Prairies. This means, of course, the near complete destruction of all forms of wildlife in them – millions of species of trees, shrubs and other plants, animals, birds, amphibians, insects, fish, etc, every one of which can be useful to humankind, if we study them in depth. One can start by asking the natives who use them. Clearly, this wholesale destruction of our forests, too, is most unacceptable.
(b.) Huge financial investments, nearly $1m for every farm, in land, buildings, heavy machinery and equipment – tractors, plows, harrows, reapers, etc – and a vast network of services to fully utilize this newly-available land;
(c.) Filling mangroves, swamps and lagoons. This, of course, means the destruction of even more species. And since these are the nurseries of many types of edible fish then fish catches in the future will plummet dramatically;
(d.) Denuding hillsides which, if not managed properly and at all times, will mean massive flooding in the valleys below as well as soil erosion and eventually landslides and destruction of property in their paths. The availability of water for much of the year will drop severely. And, of course, water is a must for agriculture, homes, offices, factories, etc. It is the basis of civilization. Water is life;
(e.) Massive quantities of water – a near doubling of the amount used today to grow the food needed by the two-thirds increase of our world population, from six billion to ten billion. No one knows where this water will come from. (The water entering fertile land from rising oceans due to global warming will be salty. And here one can mull over the environmental, social and political consequences of 40% less land to grow food.)
(f.) Millions of tons of highly-poisonous agricultural chemicals – fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, etc. Sooner or later, all these – along with industrial and household chemical pollutants - will enter the food, air, and drinking water systems and then our bodies and continue the myriad of long-term health problems, such as cancers, chronic liver and kidney ailments, etc. With each passing year, this will raise the world medical bill that, now in the hundreds of billions of dollars every year, is already too high;
(g.) More and more agricultural subsidies. The so-called ‘highly-efficient, scientific method of modern agriculture’ is subsidized from beginning to end – from seeds to services in the field and satellite imaging to marketing the food nationally and internationally, where it makes a mess of the agricultural production and economy of third-world countries. These subsidies cost nations throughout the world hundreds of billions of dollars each year.
All in all, this manner of producing food for all in the future is not sustainable. And, of course, after all this – the wholesale destruction of the world’s forests, the filling up of thousands of swamps, the denuding of sides of mountains and hills, the massive loss of biodiversity with millions of life forms or species gone forever as their habitat is destroyed, the poisoning of the global environment, massive subsidies, etc – there will still be a shortage of food for four hundred million people. Philosophically, humanely, politically, socially, financially, environmentally – any way one looks at it – this is simply not acceptable.
We are in a new era and a new era demands new ways of seeing, thinking and doing things, especially when the old ways are not working properly, if at all, and/or dangerous to the earth and human society.
The system described in this article can be used to grow adequate quantities of food for everyone, especially the 800 million starving people. They – and everyone else – will be able to get enough food to eat within one year, more than enough in three years, and much, much more than enough in eight years. The only condition is that, for everyone to get enough food in a sustainable manner, we have to grow it ourselves.
The goal of our organization, the earth-humankind society, of course, is, among other things, a well-educated world society that is progressing rapidly in a right and healthy direction, and to have such a society all the members must be properly and adequately nourished to develop their brains and bodies to the optimum or maximum level so that they can perform at the high level demanded by such a progressive society.
Earth-Humankind Society is a non-profit organization based in New Haven Ave & Monty, Marabella, Trinidad, West Indies