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Is there enough food on the planet to feed the current population explosion?

It depends on what we eat:

Right now, there is enough grain grown on earth to feed 10 billion vegetarians, said Joel E. Cohen, professor of populations at Rockefeller University and the author of "How Many People Can the Earth Support?" But much of it is being fed to cattle, the S.U.V.'s of the protein world, which are in turn guzzled by the world's wealthy.

Theoretically, there is enough acreage already planted to keep the planet fed forever, because 10 billion humans is roughly where the United Nations predicts that the world population will plateau in 2060. But success depends on portion control; in the late 1980s, Brown University's World Hunger Program calculated that the world then could sustain 5.5 billion vegetarians, 3.7 billion South Americans or 2.8 billion North Americans, who ate more animal protein than South Americans.

So, was Malthus correct when he predicted that the earth's population explosion would sink us into depravity?

As Harriet Friedmann, an expert on food systems at the University of Toronto, pointed out, Malthus was writing in a Britain that echoed the dichotomy between today's rich countries and the third world: an elite of huge landowners practicing "scientific farming" of wool and wheat who made fat profits; many subsistence farmers barely scratching out livings; migration by those farmers to London slums, followed by emigration. The main difference is that emigration then was to colonies where farmland was waiting, while now it is to richer countries where jobs are.

Dr. Friedmann argues that there is a Malthusian unsustainability to the way big agriculture is practiced, that it degrades genetic diversity and the environment so much that it will eventually reach a tipping point and hunger will spread.

It's even more sinister according to Dr. Cohen, of Rockefeller University: "Americans like Malthus because he takes the blame off us. Malthus says the problem is too many poor people."

Indeed, the rich Western nations think that global warming is due to new developing nations around the world:

Or, to put it in the terms in which the current crisis is usually explained: too many hard-working Chinese and Indians who think they should be able to eat pizza, meat and coffee and aspire to a reservation at Chez Panisse. They get blamed for raising global prices so much that poor Africans and Asians can't afford porridge and rice. The truth is, the upward pressure was there before they added to it.

Finally, as the author properly points out, the US and other European nations subsidize their already-rich farmers at the expense of their poorer brethren around the globe::

America has always been charitable, so the answer has never been, "Let them eat bean sprouts." But it has been, "Let them eat subsidized American corn shipped over in American ships." That may need to change.

Exactly...

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