

Is There Enough Food Out There For Nine Billion People? - cwan
http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-vine/there-enough-food-out-there-nine-billion-people

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amock
One of the commenters on the article points out that we already produce enough
food to feed more than nine billion people, so the reason people go hungry
isn't because there isn't enough food it's because the food isn't in the right
places. The infrastructure in places like the U.S. can handle food
distribution for a much larger population, but in third world countries there
is obviously a problem even with the current population. So what we really
should be thinking about is how to get the food to the people who need it, not
how to produce more food.

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patio11
Famine was a solved problem three hundred years ago in peacetime Europe. The
challenge isn't growing food. The challenge is making sure thugs with guns
don't take it between the place where it is produced and the place where it is
consumed. (It matters little to this analysis whether the thugs with guns are
cops or robbers, since if you live in a country with famine they are probably
only distinguishable by the color of their uniforms, if that.)

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stellar678
Cool article!

I have no idea on the true scalability of it to billions of people, but Havana
is a good example of low-tech high-yield food production that helped out when
lots of people were going hungry in Cuba after the Soviet Union collapsed.

A byproduct is that it's relatively labor-intensive to get high yield out of
the small urban farms, thus providing extra good jobs.

Would be interesting to see if these kind of low-fi solutions could contribute
meaningfully to the problem of feeding 9 billion people in the coming years...

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barry-cotter
_A byproduct is that it's relatively labor-intensive to get high yield out of
the small urban farms, thus providing extra good jobs._

Farming is horrible backbreaking, unending, relentless labour. A good job it
is most emphatically not. My great-grandfather would no doubt think that
modern farmers are total wusses, what with not having to even muck out horse
stalls since we've now got tractors. Even so, farming is a crap job compared
to the alternatives available to those capable of doing it properly for most
of those capable of doing it. You have to be willing to work like a dog for a
substantial portion of the year, and if you've got animals you never get any
proper time off, ever. Being a small businessman in any other sector is a much
better prospect financially, a hell of a lot safer (there's a reason why non-
farm and farm work related workplace fatalities are reported separately) and
you can live in something resembling an urban area.

Oh, and extra good jobs? This is an example of what's variously termed the
lump-of-labour fallacy or make-work bias.

tl;dr _Farming sucks_

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stellar678
Your response is correct in the context of later 20th century farming when
mechanization and subsidies allowed less labor to be involved, allowed food to
become a commodity product, and vastly reduced market prices. Of course it's
pretty well recognized that all of that is not a sustainable model and will
need to work differently.

I'm not recommending that we re-establish the farms that your great-
grandfather worked on. There are higher-tech ways to produce. (Hydroponic
greenhouse vegetable producers are a good example - they require more labor
than planting fields with a tractor, but it's not the back-breaking labor of
manually tending fields.)

As for the financial prospects - if more people need food and less of it is
available, prices will rise. From what I understand, this has played out in
Cuba...people who grow and sell food outside the planned economy live quite
well.

The make-work bias is really only applicable if we're holding up two
equivalent systems and I'm arguing for the more labor-intensive one because it
is more labor-intensive. I guess mentioning the extra labor was kind of
superflous because what I was proposing is that high-yield microfarming might
play a roll in feeding more people in the future. More labor demand would just
be a byproduct...

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johngalt
It's possible to feed 50billion. It's just a question of cost.

Consider a skyscraper with a farm on each level (vertical farming). The vFarm
is located right next to a nuclear plant that desalinates seawater for
irrigation. Your flour will be $10/lb but it's _possible_.

