[quote]SLAINGE wrote:
[quote]Mettahl wrote:
The fact that major agriculture schools across the U.S. (such as in Texas, Nebraska, etc.) are currently researching methods to vastly increase crop yield while reducing the amount of water required to grow them, in order to stem the tide of potential famine, speaks for itself.[/quote]
Its simply a supply and demand thing and GM crops are rapidly satisfying this need.
I am in no doubt that countries that can plan ahead are doing so with some urgency because they dont want to be left out in the cold ‘if’ shit happen (senvironmentally speaking) and for their growing populations - hence some 1st world countries buying up swathes of land in third world areas. But the impending apocalypse? Nah! However the people who are unlucky enough to live in the poorest regions of this planet would probably disagree becasue they face their own apocalypses on a regualr basis[/quote]
Re-read my post. I didn’t say apocalypse anywhere. I also mentioned the problem of water supply, which is going to be just as, if not more so problematic than the supply of food.
Also, I said in an earlier post (something along the lines of) that us in the first world wouldn’t feel the brunt of problems. It would be third and second world countries that are hit by such problems. That makes it WAY more real than what us in the Western World would go through, being that we represent such a small percentage of the world’s population. The logistics involved in trying to feed the people already existing in certain regions is difficult. More population simply further effects this.
The “countries that can plan ahead,” as you said, don’t represent the whole of the human experience. I guess that’s a typical American viewpoint though. Don’t get me wrong, I’m from this country and I love it here (going to be fighting for it soon), but it bothers me how little some of us are able to look beyond our own borders.
I think that when people hear claims of impending “food shortage and famine,” they think of people running through New York City screaming and killing each other for a can of beans, then roll their eyes at that ridiculous scenario. In reality, a severe famine in certain regions of the world will be a repeat of what has been happening to the human race for most of its existence, and still is happening to many of us, but simply magnified due to the increase of the amount of people that could very well die because of it.
No population has ever been wiped out because of a nuclear bomb (well… not on a large scale, anyways!), or a zombie apocalypse, or a rapture, or some wacky Mayan prediction. MANY populations, however, have been wiped out due to a lack of resources such as food and water. I’m not seeing the logic in believing that this is a far-fetched story created by sensationalists and hippies.
