I’d like to hear everyone’s opinion on this issue: about 1 out of 10 people in the world suffers from malnutrition and 1 in 5 lives in poverty. If we took all the hungry and poor people in the world and fed/sheltered them wouldn’t that only produce more people and thus increase the problem? I mean we’re (as a society) already overpopulating at amazing rates despite ongoing epidemics and starvation. It seems like the only way to solve the problem is through population control, even if it’s methods are rather harsh. Another option is education, trying to educate the overpopulators and wasteful (ourselves) to stop such damaging activities (This doesn’t seem to work most of the time and many people are unreachable (Mentally as well as physically)) Does anyone know of any other ways to approach this problem or have any alternate solutions? It’s hard for me to tell people sometimes why I don’t care about what happens to a fifth of the population and I was looking for outside opinion. Any help would be greatly appriciated.
-Mike
“I don’t go for non-violence if it also means a delayed solution. To me a delayed solution is a non-solution.” -Malcom X
Contraceptive, abortion, and family planning services worldwide? Agricultural modernization assistance?
OK, the good news is that there’s a curve of sorts: the old ecology (before advanced medicine) called for large families and had a high infant mortality rate. The transition ecology is where the population explosion hits: people keep on having large families but the mortality rate plummets. The modern ecology–which I believe is starting to replace the transition ecology in many areas previously plagued by population explosion, famine, and related problems–is one in which the birth rates have declined to the same low levels as the western world.
The bad news is that population statistics such as the one that said we’ll hit 10 billion by 2010 and 30 billion by 2100 [I’ll look up the cite if anyone wants it, I think it was called the Global 200 Report to the President, who was Jimmy Carter at that time] seem to have been taking the curve into account, along with probably inroads into population levels as a result of famine and whatnot. So the curve isn’t going to prevent the problem.
Food for the hungary will not solve the problem. The Hungarians already have enough food. I mean, they’re right near Turkey and Greece, for cryin’ out loud.
To remove poverty an malnutrition, remove government control of the access to food and food production.
Amartya Sen, who has studied the interactions of poverty, government, and the market for around 50 years, received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his rather conclusive demonstration that government interference is the leading cause of poverty and malnutrition. (He is not an absolutist free market capitalist, but he noted that famine has never occurred in a democratically governed nation.)
tomndebb is correct. Most of the famines we see on TV are caused by governments deliberately preventing food aid from reaching an area populated mostly by their political opponents - Ethiopia as a prime example. The famines in the Ukraine during the thirties are much the same - Stalin wanted those who resisted collectivization to die so the rest would do as they were told.
Another problem is that in Ethiopia, for instance, the Mengistu regime deliberately pushed food prices down so that the cities, where the army and civil service existed, would have cheap food, and thus the regime could retain political support. The farmers who actually raised the food could not get paid enough for what they produced (the army would simply confiscate it, or shoot anyone who charged market rates for their produce), so they could not buy replacement seed, or hang onto their grain for subsistence. Thus when bad weather hit, as it inevitably does for any farmer, they had no reserves, and starved.
Democracies, especially those with free press, find out about areas where there is famine, and ship food there. Dictatorships don’t let that happen.
Regards,
rs0522
“Property rights are human rights.”
Wasn’t that Emily Litella? IIRC, Rosanna Rosannadonna was the hyperactive schoolgirl that jumped on her bed a lot. Both played by Gilda Radner, though.
Evidently Amartya Sen never visited the southwestern United States during the 1930s. However, even if you don’t consider the Dust Bowl a famine, it was relatively easy to find an example of a famine that was prevented by government “interference”:
“In the absence of large-scale international assistance, primarily from the United States, Canada, and Australia, India would have suffered a major famine in 1966-67.” – Encyclopaedia Britannica article “Famine”, 1973
Perhaps someone ought to donate an old set of Britannica to the Nobel Committee.
To the Britannica quote, I would play the lawyer, and say: “objection, speculation”. Since the encyclopedia doesn’t seem to back up its assertion of what would have happened, I’m going to favor the Nobel Prize winning economist. Not that government interference being the primary cause of poverty and malnutrition, or the lack of a famine in a democratically governed nation are disproved by the use of foreign aid to prevent one famine.
Re the statement that most poverty, hunger, and famine is caused by government interference – I think this refers to interference by the government of the country where the famine or whatever is happening. As in the examples cited by Shodan.
You could probably make a case that the dust bowl was caused by government interference, if it’s true that the area where the dust bowl occurred was settled and farmed because the fed government encouraged people to settle there and farm. Wasn’t the dust bowl at least partially caused by the attempt to farm in an environment unsuited to such activities?
Sure, but what if he starves to death while you’re getting around to teaching him?
My point being: yes, the real answer is to make needy people self-reliant, but new crops take time to mature, skills take time to acquire and put into practice, social and economic infrastructure takes time to set up; people still need to survive while this is all happening, if you can’t make that happen, there isn’t any point in going the rest of the way.
