Hyperion is going to post some good material about how abundant the earth actually is for farming, even without reversing the deserts so I’m offering this to him as the starter. ΟΚΙΔΟΚΙ
~Don
hi all,
Seed_Daily has posted the following research from the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota.
It would appear that with simple re-orientation, we as a civilization, are quite capable of feeding four more billion.
The research does not enter the realm of what would happen with more radical approaches.
So much for the ‘unsustainable excess population’ myth
/source/ http://www.seeddaily.com/reports/Existi … e_999.html
Existing cropland could feed four billion more
by Staff Writers
Minneapolis MN (SPX) Aug 08, 2013
Demand for crops is expected to double by 2050 as population grows and increasing affluence boosts meat consumption.
The world’s croplands could feed 4 billion more people than they do now just by shifting from producing animal feed and biofuels to producing exclusively food for human consumption, according to new research from the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota.
Even a smaller, partial shift from crop-intensive livestock such as feedlot beef to food animals such as chicken or pork could increase agricultural efficiency and provide food for millions, the study says.
“We essentially have uncovered an astoundingly abundant supply of food for a hungry world, hidden in plain sight in the farmlands we already cultivate,” says graduate research assistant Emily Cassidy, lead author of the paper published in Environmental Research Letters. “Depending on the extent to which farmers and consumers are willing to change current practices, existing croplands could feed millions or even billions more people.”
Demand for crops is expected to double by 2050 as population grows and increasing affluence boosts meat consumption. Meat takes a particularly big toll on food security because it takes up to 30 crop calories to produce a single calorie of meat.
In addition, crops are increasingly being used for biofuels rather than food production. This study sought to quantify the benefit to food security that would accrue if some or all of the lands used to produce animal feed and fuel were reallocated to directly produce food for people.
To get at that question, Cassidy and colleagues first mapped the extent and productivity of 41 major crops between 1997 and 2003, adjusting numbers for imports and exports and calculating conversion efficiencies of animal feed using U.S. Department of Agriculture data. The researchers assumed humans need an average of 2,700 calories per day, and grazing lands and animals were not included in the study. Among the team’s findings:
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Only 12 percent of crop calories used for animal feed end up as calories consumed by humans.
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Only 55 percent of crop calories worldwide directly nourish people.
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Growing food exclusively for direct human consumption could boost available food calories up to 70 percent
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U.S. agriculture alone could feed an additional 1 billion people by shifting crop calories to direct human consumption.
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When calculated on the basis of protein rather than calories, results were similar. For instance, of all plant protein produced, 49 percent ends up in human diets.
In addition to the global findings, the research team looked at allocation of crop calories in four key countries: India, China, Brazil and the U.S. They found that while India allocates 90 percent of calories to feeding people, the other three allocate 58 percent, 45 percent, and 27 percent, respectively.
Noting the major cultural and economic dimensions involved, the researchers acknowledged that while a complete shift from animal to plant-based diets may not be feasible, even a partial shift would benefit food security. Quantifying the impact of various strategies, they found that a shift from crop-intensive beef to pork and chicken could feed an additional 357 million people, and a shift to nonmeat diets that include eggs and milk could feed an additional 815 million people.
The researchers emphasized that they are not making diet prescriptions or recommendations, just pointing out opportunities for gains in food production. They noted that humans can completely meet protein needs with plant-based diets, but that crop systems would need to shift (e.g., toward more production of protein-rich legumes) to meet human dietary needs.
“The good news is that we already produce enough calories to feed a few billion more people,” Cassidy says. “As our planet gets more crowded or we experience disasters like droughts and pests, we can find ways of using existing croplands more efficiently.”
Thanks a lot for Δoing this, Hyperion [Image Can Not Be Found]
It’s pretty amazing that this info came from a gov’t/corporate funded university! The significance of this, for me, is that these institutions were responsible for keeping the Global Warming myth alive and, before that, were responsible for promoting the failed ‘overpopulation’ genocide agenda of the UN. That agenda was essentially killed by leaders of the third world countries who were supposed to have started killing off, on behalf of the UN, their own populations during the ‘population reduction’ phase in the 1990s. If you want a good scare, read any of the authors whom the UN publishes. The Theosophy association of half of these experts is transparent. You’d think they would want to hide that a bit.
It’s getting harder to get hay for our horses, here, because so much of it is now being shipped to China. The Chinese are only farming a fairly small prt of available, arable land, by the way, so I take it that there are now Chinese cowboys on some of that.
Thomas Malthus was a preacher who was employed by the British East India Company in the early 1800s to justify their genocide campaign in India. They had cut off the right hands of all of the Indian weavers in order to create a suitable market for English textiles and scores of millions died of starvation after they forced Indian farmers to stop growing food and only grow poppies for opium. They needed the opium in order to drain all the silver from China. Silver to the Chinese is traditionally the same as gold to the West. That was the birth of the global dope trade, which the Brits still manage, relying heavily on the CIA and FBI, now. The Bush family came to their wealth in that trade and still profit from it. I think their cretin who was more recently appointed president is a cocaine addict. The Mossadomites, another organ of the old corporation, help protect the cocaine trade in South America.
You can easily see that the corporation needed to have the sympathy of the British Pajama People by selling them the myth that the earth has limited resources, so people naturally starve in large numbers. Note that they hired a preacher for this job, haha.
Queen Victoria was so horrified when she discovered this agenda that she disbanded the British East India Company, which is to say they just reshuffled the deck and all the players assumed different jobs within the larger corporation [Image Can Not Be Found] Their inbred progeny are all hiding under QEII’s skirts, now.
The corporate parasite uses a similar myth to keep the price of petroleum high, of course. I think evidence is strong enough, now, to suggest that petroleum is constantly produced underground. In the same way that the average Brit wasn’t able to go to India to see the situation for himself, the average car driver can’t dig down to see oil being generated in the earth. Nor can we fly up to see whether there’s a hole in the ozone, by the way–NASA gives us that ‘information,’ [Image Can Not Be Found] and NASA was started by high ranking SS officers who had evaded the Nurenburg noose with the Pope’s blessing. It was (is?) impossible to be an SS member without having murdered at least one innocent person. Is any cold blooded murderer trustworthy? I don’t think NASA’s hierarchy ever changed.
I don’t think we ought to wait for these corporate-funded institutions to give us the greenlight (their published endorsement) to believe in any of these empowering things but it’s always good to witness some of their own publicly undermining the old corporate myths!
They managed to get the PJ folks to believe in scarcity by bombarding them in the media and schools with their obfuscations and lies so it’s going to take a similar bombardment on the internet to reverse this filthy magic spell. Thanks again, Hyperion, for your tireless datamining and constant sharing!
~Don
