Is it possible to solve the problem of world hunger?

[Asherah]

I read a book called The Story of B and it was a really great read. I learned that populations grow in proportion to the amount of food available. So, if you have a population of rats, for instance, and you give them a set amount of food, their population will reach a point of stasis in which the proportion of rats dying versus being born remains constant. If you introduce more food, more rats will be born.

So, let's think about human beings, prior to 10,000 years ago. Humans were hunter-gathers and living in equilibrium with the environment. The Human population was pretty consistent with no huge spikes in population growth. However, once humans figured out how to grow food, there has been an explosion in the growth of the population. If more food means more people being born, then will there always be starving people? It seems that if we were to feed the starving people, then they will reproduce and there will be more people to feed and at some point there won't be enough food. Does my question make sense? Are humans competing for food and those that are starving don't have the resources to compete for it? Is this some form of natural selection that will always be present in any given population?


Asherah


EDIT: The derail about Jesus has been split off and moved to Religion - Tank

[Stevil]

Agriculture can be volatile.

Droughts can come and go, floods, disease can destroy crops.
Earthquakes and hurricanes can destroy infrastructure and hence supply passages.

War can disrupt supply.

Crazy political theories such as the giant leap forward can cause people to stop producing food and focus on other things.

Extreme poverty, there are probably some homeless people in your back yard who are starving to death.


I am not sure what the "Feed the children" types of charities do. If they don't focus on developing better infrastructure in an area and simply just ship some food to places then I don't see how that works. You save a child today, they grow up and have starving children tomorrow.

I think a good approach to reducing world hunger is to improve education. Educated people are more likely to build necessary infrastructure and are less likely to have children at a young age and less likely to have huge quantities of children.

[Tank]

In a simplistic sense resources control population. The resource could be food, water or space to live. At some point human population could be limited by resources. However human fecundity is drastically effected by infant mortality rates and that is driven by education levels and availability of contraception. So to stop the human race eating itself out of existence, or reaching a starvation driven dynamic balance, we need to educate (particularly women) and make contraception available (again particularly women).

[DeterminedJuliet]

I agree with Tank - education about reproductive issues and widely available contraceptives is preferable to letting a couple billion people starve to death. The original theory may apply to a lot of animals, but rats don't have access to condoms.

Edit: and people might have lived in harmony with nature when we were hunters and gatherers, but we also spent 10 hours a day trying to supply ourselves with food. If we still had that lifestyle, we'd have no technology and nearly no free time. Agriculture isn't perfect, but I wouldn't want to go back to the way things were. Getting eaten by a wild cat or dying because I broke my leg? No thank you.

[Asherah]

I see how the example I gave with the rats was way too simplistic. Agreed that education is extremely important as well. All points made were insightful.

DeterminedJuliet - I don't want to go back to the way things were either for the same reason!

[Twentythree]

Humans are an interesting species to review from an evolutionary perspective. On the subject of hunger, human beings are starving more worldwide due to misappropriation of resources and ineffective use of power coupled with political and civil inequalities. In human beings natural selection works more so within our ability to sustain ourselves in the social environment we have evolved. We are all dependant on specialists for the things we need. How many people reading these posts could scout a location and dig a well, build adequate irrigations system and grow crops? So when you think about it it's not really agriculture that has allowed our species to thrive it's our specialization. We have a master farmer that can train apprentice farmers. We have master builders and apprentice builders. We have people specialized in install a single bolt on an assembly line that creates the tractors that tow the food we need to areas that are extremely remote and very far removed from where the food is actually grown. So when thinking of natural selection for human beings it goes deeper than plain starvation because we rely on one another as a resource just as much as we rely on clean water and fresh air.  Who are the individuals that have less reproductive success in human societies? Individuals that do no integrate well into their given specialized cultures. Worldwide the societies that struggle the most are those that have yet to establish efficient means of allowing their populations to specialize. In a population where a head of house hold works a job and grows food and builds a shelter and fixes cars and builds bikes and cuts hair and raises livestock...he can only do all of those things adequately he does not have to opportunity to perfect any one of those tasks or processes. So societies that are able to take specific tasks and delegate them to specialists and regulate those specialists to the point that they do not hoard or monopolize then you have a functioning community and from those functioning communities thriving societies emerge. Thus is human evolution as it stands today. Granted we are not as a species immune from environmental pressures. However, if there is a drought, natural selection in human beings will not operate on an individual's ability to survive longer periods of time without water. Natural selection will operate on individuals who have the ability or inability to solve complex problems within the confines of their society and culture. So natural selection is working on the individual but the individual itself is no longer self contained the individual now operates within a society and its reproductive success is completely determined by how well that individual integrates into and affects the success of the society.

An easy way to view this is in imagining an enormous natural disaster. One that fractures society and dismantles infrastructure for basic commodities such as running water and electricity. Survivors who are able to coalesce and integrate into a functioning society will have a reproductive advantage over those who opt for a solitary lifestyle.

So humans are competing for food but not so much as in one individual competing with another, but one society competing with another. society is acting as a part of the environment, the part of the environment that most humans have immediate contact with. So just as our hunter gatherer ancestors had to be specialists in root identification or bow making we are now specialists of IT or assembly line automation. This keeps our modern societies working, this is all the natural progression of the human species and the way in which concepts of natural selection have to be applied to a highly social and specialized species.

With population increase and global communication capabilities the future is clear, we will be a global society sooner than later. Whether we integrate through diplomacy or war will paint the future of this planet but it is on the horizon and is as inevitable as a sunrise. The interesting thing about it is that we are just now beginning to understand the mechanics of our own existence and through this understanding we can only hope that future generations will use this knowledge to build better societies.

[Anne D.]

Humans are an interesting species to review from an evolutionary perspective. On the subject of hunger, human beings are starving more worldwide due to misappropriation of resources and ineffective use of power coupled with political and civil inequalities. In human beings natural selection works more so within our ability to sustain ourselves in the social environment we have evolved. We are all dependant on specialists for the things we need. How many people reading these posts could scout a location and dig a well, build adequate irrigations system and grow crops? So when you think about it it's not really agriculture that has allowed our species to thrive it's our specialization. We have a master farmer that can train apprentice farmers. We have master builders and apprentice builders. We have people specialized in install a single bolt on an assembly line that creates the tractors that tow the food we need to areas that are extremely remote and very far removed from where the food is actually grown. So when thinking of natural selection for human beings it goes deeper than plain starvation because we rely on one another as a resource just as much as we rely on clean water and fresh air.  Who are the individuals that have less reproductive success in human societies? Individuals that do no integrate well into their given specialized cultures. Worldwide the societies that struggle the most are those that have yet to establish efficient means of allowing their populations to specialize. In a population where a head of house hold works a job and grows food and builds a shelter and fixes cars and builds bikes and cuts hair and raises livestock...he can only do all of those things adequately he does not have to opportunity to perfect any one of those tasks or processes. So societies that are able to take specific tasks and delegate them to specialists and regulate those specialists to the point that they do not hoard or monopolize then you have a functioning community and from those functioning communities thriving societies emerge. Thus is human evolution as it stands today. Granted we are not as a species immune from environmental pressures. However, if there is a drought, natural selection in human beings will not operate on an individual's ability to survive longer periods of time without water. Natural selection will operate on individuals who have the ability or inability to solve complex problems within the confines of their society and culture. So natural selection is working on the individual but the individual itself is no longer self contained the individual now operates within a society and its reproductive success is completely determined by how well that individual integrates into and affects the success of the society.

An easy way to view this is in imagining an enormous natural disaster. One that fractures society and dismantles infrastructure for basic commodities such as running water and electricity. Survivors who are able to coalesce and integrate into a functioning society will have a reproductive advantage over those who opt for a solitary lifestyle.

So humans are competing for food but not so much as in one individual competing with another, but one society competing with another. society is acting as a part of the environment, the part of the environment that most humans have immediate contact with. So just as our hunter gatherer ancestors had to be specialists in root identification or bow making we are now specialists of IT or assembly line automation. This keeps our modern societies working, this is all the natural progression of the human species and the way in which concepts of natural selection have to be applied to a highly social and specialized species.

With population increase and global communication capabilities the future is clear, we will be a global society sooner than later. Whether we integrate through diplomacy or war will paint the future of this planet but it is on the horizon and is as inevitable as a sunrise. The interesting thing about it is that we are just now beginning to understand the mechanics of our own existence and through this understanding we can only hope that future generations will use this knowledge to build better societies.

Really interesting post. This makes a lot of sense.

[Asherah]

I agree, really interesting and thoughtful response, Twentythree.

And some of the other posts cracked me up!! LOL. I love reading this forum just for a good laugh 

[Tank]

EDIT: The derail about Jesus has been split off and moved to Religion - Tank

Jesus solves world hunger (Derail from serious topic)

[Too Few Lions]

Edit: and people might have lived in harmony with nature when we were hunters and gatherers, but we also spent 10 hours a day trying to supply ourselves with food. If we still had that lifestyle, we'd have no technology and nearly no free time. Agriculture isn't perfect, but I wouldn't want to go back to the way things were. Getting eaten by a wild cat or dying because I broke my leg? No thank you.

The reverse of this may actually to be the case. Hunter-gatherers are generally believed to have more free time than agriculturalists and industrialised people, and certainly had more free time than early agriculturalists ten thousand years ago. Agriculture was adopted because it supported larger populations and was a more reliable source of food, but it didn't create more free time.

Hunter-gatherers generally spend 20-40 hours a week 'working', although they can do that 'work' as and when they want and a lot of it is as much play as it is 'work' as we'd define it. There's a good article on it here

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200907/play-makes-us-human-v-why-hunter-gatherers-work-is-play

obviously we do have advantages of modern technology and medicine that they don't, but hunter-gatherers do generally have more playful existences filled with more free time.

[DeterminedJuliet]

Edit: and people might have lived in harmony with nature when we were hunters and gatherers, but we also spent 10 hours a day trying to supply ourselves with food. If we still had that lifestyle, we'd have no technology and nearly no free time. Agriculture isn't perfect, but I wouldn't want to go back to the way things were. Getting eaten by a wild cat or dying because I broke my leg? No thank you.

The reverse of this may actually to be the case. Hunter-gatherers are generally believed to have more free time than agriculturalists and industrialised people, and certainly had more free time than early agriculturalists ten thousand years ago. Agriculture was adopted because it supported larger populations and was a more reliable source of food, but it didn't create more free time.

Hunter-gatherers generally spend 20-40 hours a week 'working', although they can do that 'work' as and when they want and a lot of it is as much play as it is 'work' as we'd define it. There's a good article on it here

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200907/play-makes-us-human-v-why-hunter-gatherers-work-is-play

obviously we do have advantages of modern technology and medicine that they don't, but hunter-gatherers do generally have more playful existences filled with more free time.

An interesting perspective, but it seems a bit romanticized to me. I agree that hunter-gatherers definitely have a more "socialized" way of living, but I think the argument of how much they work really depends on someone's definition of work. I would like to see where the author's reference to hunter-gatherer groups only working 20-40 hours a week comes from, because I haven't read anything like that.  Hunter-gathers might not toil in a field all day, but  if they have to walk for two hours to find a hunting spot, I'd still consider that "work" even if they tell some really bonding and socially significant myths along the way. It still takes time out of their day. It just doesn't make sense to me that they'd have a lot of really "free" time, but their societies would remain pretty consistently un-changed. There have to be some kind of limiting factors there.

Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel lays out what I mean pretty well - he makes an argument for why some groups of people changed or "advanced" in technology/literature/government and why some stayed the same. A lot of it has to do with the development of agriculture based on geography and that makes sense to me. To argue anything else is pretty much a racial argument.

More anecdotally, I'm also reading Samuel de Champlain's biography right now which is pretty interesting because, when the French came over to Canada, they ran into some Native groups that were hunter-gatherers and some native groups which had agriculture. The groups that had agriculture pretty much always did much better than the groups who were hunter-gatherers (the groups that could build up grain stores over the winter survived much better than the groups that had to scrounge around in the wild during a snow-storm). After reading about the hunter-gathers in New France knocking on Champlain's door, begging for food, because their women and children were dropping dead with malnutrition, I gotta say, it doesn't appeal to me.  

It'd be a nice idea if we could all live in the sub-tropics and only work-play 20 hours a week, but I think it's a pretty romanticized view. Hunter-gatherer groups have their benefits, but they have their limitations, too. "Living in harmony with nature" means dying when there are bad or unproductive seasons and developing complex superstitions about the spirit world. Hunter-gatherers aren't all peaceful egalitarian societies, either. They have wars - some clans enslave other clans, some have ritualized mutilation rituals - there's any combination of what we'd value as "good" or "bad" social traits. I don't think there's anything inherently "moral" or "immoral" with a hunter-gatherer society or an agricultural society, and I don't think the Western world is "superior" in a conventional sense, either.

I just see a lot of sentiment around that, oh, if only we could go back to the way that "nature intended for us" that everything would be great. Call me cynical, but I don't really buy it.  

[ThinkAnarchy]

That is along the reasoning I follow and most people think I'm un-empathetic due to it.

The welfare system in America supports your premise. Meaning, if we give the unproductive food and means of survival, they will simply reproduce without gaining self sufficiency. Granted, there are examples of individuals who arose from this system and made there own money, both benefiting society and and providing for their offspring, but most do not.

I hate to use a biblical parabal, but teaching a man to fish is far better than giving a man a fish. One fish does nothing to break the cycle, teaching does a whole lot.

When looking at continents like Africa, they aren't fully to blame for their problems. External influences have hindered their progress for centuries. The west has been embedded in the region for a while now, and due to most of the regions dependence and foreign aid, they have failed to rebuild their civiliztion. Giving people shit for free usually does not benefit the individual or group of individuals in the long run.

Ultimately, I say there will alway's be a larger population than the earth and humanity can support. The more abundant food, medicine, etc, the better survival rate of infants. Once we reach that stasis point, famine sets in. It is a natural and likely unavoidable cycle.

Many on this forum would argue for unnatural population control at the hands of government. I simply argue for natural population control at the hands of famine and Mother Earth.

[Anne D.]

Many on this forum would argue for unnatural population control at the hands of government. I simply argue for natural population control at the hands of famine and Mother Earth.

I wouldn't call education and ensuring the accessibility of contraception "unnatural population control at the hands of government." Or were you talking about something else?

[fester30]

As logistics technology improves, someday perhaps we can solve world hunger.  To do it today, we would need a change in attitudes.  Even if you could solve it in some places, others would pop up.  There are some parts of the world that were once productive agriculturally that are now turning into desert.  People are often very slow to leave their homelands, even if famine sets in.  Even when they are willing to leave for a better life, often other countries are not willing to receive them because of the fear that the sudden increase in population will hurt their economy.  There are parts of Africa going through generational wars now because of that. 

Could this happen to a first-world country?  The Sahara desert is growing north past the Mediterranean.  You can see it if you look at satellite pictures of vegetation over the last decade.  The trend is that Italy and perhaps Spain/Portugal could eventually be swallowed by the Sahara.  Would they possibly turn into war zones because of it?  Would the rest of the world care more about the hunger of first-world countries than we currently do about third-world countries?

[Ali]

To do it today, we would need a change in attitudes. 

This is my thought exactly.  I'm not sure that we wouldn't have the resources to do it now, but first we would have to change the way we eat (for example instead of using the corn and oats and grain that we use to feed livestock for meat, we could use it more efficiently to feed people.)  Also, we would have to change our attitude that food is a priviledge, not a right.  Until we do those things, people will always be hungry.