First, you have a point that to get out from under Malthus' strangulation, we have to get people's living standard up (and move them to cities, which really lowers the number of children).
I was in an argument on this subject a little bit ago. I went to Wikipedia and checked it up. From memory...
BTW, check Hans Rosling on TED.com, really informative.
About a billion in the world is hungry (mal-/undernourished).
About 37% were in India and China. Both will fix this inside a generation or two (and both will have good economies soon; btw, should USA borrow more money from China to pay for China's farmer's food...?)
Bangladesh had about 5% of the world's hungry -- but that is the acknowledged most corrupt country in the world, where the politicians lives on stealing aid money. To help the farmers you'd have to do a military invasion! (Which would kill lots of people.)
Of the remaining 60%, most hungry where (a) in countries with conflicts (Congo, Pakistan, Sudan, etc) or (b) dictatorships/corrupted countries (Arab world, North Korea and Zimbabwe). In both cases, you'd more or less have to topple the regime to save lives by feeding the hungry... Uh, no.
Then we have countries which will solve their own problems soon (e.g. Brazil).
But e.g. Ethiopia and Tanzania might be able to use even more aid. That is (a) a small minority of the world's hungry and (b) the only one I really know a bit about is Tanzania -- it seemed to be a milder variant of Bangladesh...
The good thing to do is to work for good governance. That might even be the only thing which will really improve the situation.
First, you have a point that to get out from under Malthus' strangulation, we have to get people's living standard up (and move them to cities, which really lowers the number of children).
I was in an argument on this subject a little bit ago. I went to Wikipedia and checked it up. From memory...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malnutrition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Hunger_Index
BTW, check Hans Rosling on TED.com, really informative.
About a billion in the world is hungry (mal-/undernourished).
About 37% were in India and China. Both will fix this inside a generation or two (and both will have good economies soon; btw, should USA borrow more money from China to pay for China's farmer's food...?)
Bangladesh had about 5% of the world's hungry -- but that is the acknowledged most corrupt country in the world, where the politicians lives on stealing aid money. To help the farmers you'd have to do a military invasion! (Which would kill lots of people.)
Of the remaining 60%, most hungry where (a) in countries with conflicts (Congo, Pakistan, Sudan, etc) or (b) dictatorships/corrupted countries (Arab world, North Korea and Zimbabwe). In both cases, you'd more or less have to topple the regime to save lives by feeding the hungry... Uh, no.
Then we have countries which will solve their own problems soon (e.g. Brazil).
But e.g. Ethiopia and Tanzania might be able to use even more aid. That is (a) a small minority of the world's hungry and (b) the only one I really know a bit about is Tanzania -- it seemed to be a milder variant of Bangladesh...
The good thing to do is to work for good governance. That might even be the only thing which will really improve the situation.
Edit: Syntax and more syntax, sigh.