There is a Global Rice Crisis (economist.com) 124
The foodstuff feeds more than half the world -- but also fuels diabetes and climate change. From a report: According to Indonesian legend, rice was bestowed upon the island of Java by the goddess Dewi Sri. Pitying its inhabitants the blandness of their existing staple, cassava, she taught them how to nurture rice seedlings in lush green paddy fields. In India, the Hindu goddess Annapurna is said to have played a similar role; in Japan, Inari. Across Asia, rice is conferred with a divine, and usually feminine, origin story. Such mythologising is understandable. For thousands of years the starchy seeds of the grass plant Oryza sativa (often called Asian rice) have been the continent's main foodstuff. Asia accounts for 90% of the world's rice production and almost as much of its consumption.
Asians get more than a quarter of their daily calories from rice. The UN estimates that the average Asian consumes 77kg of rice a year -- more than the average African, European and American combined (see chart). Hundreds of millions of Asian farmers depend on growing the crop, many with only tiny patches of land. Yet the world's rice bowl is cracking. Global rice demand -- in Africa as well as Asia -- is soaring. Yet yields are stagnating. The land, water and labour that rice production requires are becoming scarcer. Climate change is a graver threat. Rising temperatures are withering crops; more frequent floods are destroying them. No mere victim of global warming, rice cultivation is also a major cause of it, because paddy fields emit a lot of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The crop that fuelled the rise of 60% of the world's population is becoming a source of insecurity and threat.
Rising demand exacerbates the problem. By 2050 there will be 5.3bn people in Asia, up from 4.7bn today, and 2.5bn in Africa, up from 1.4bn. That growth is projected to drive a 30% rise in rice demand, according to a study published in the journal Nature Food. And only in the richest Asian countries, such as Japan and South Korea, are bread and pasta eating into rice's monopoly as the continental staple. Yet Asia's rice productivity growth is falling. Yields increased by an annual average of only 0.9% over the past decade, down from around 1.3% in the decade before that, according to data from the UN. The drop was sharpest in South-East Asia, where the rate of increase fell from 1.4% to 0.4%.
Asians get more than a quarter of their daily calories from rice. The UN estimates that the average Asian consumes 77kg of rice a year -- more than the average African, European and American combined (see chart). Hundreds of millions of Asian farmers depend on growing the crop, many with only tiny patches of land. Yet the world's rice bowl is cracking. Global rice demand -- in Africa as well as Asia -- is soaring. Yet yields are stagnating. The land, water and labour that rice production requires are becoming scarcer. Climate change is a graver threat. Rising temperatures are withering crops; more frequent floods are destroying them. No mere victim of global warming, rice cultivation is also a major cause of it, because paddy fields emit a lot of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The crop that fuelled the rise of 60% of the world's population is becoming a source of insecurity and threat.
Rising demand exacerbates the problem. By 2050 there will be 5.3bn people in Asia, up from 4.7bn today, and 2.5bn in Africa, up from 1.4bn. That growth is projected to drive a 30% rise in rice demand, according to a study published in the journal Nature Food. And only in the richest Asian countries, such as Japan and South Korea, are bread and pasta eating into rice's monopoly as the continental staple. Yet Asia's rice productivity growth is falling. Yields increased by an annual average of only 0.9% over the past decade, down from around 1.3% in the decade before that, according to data from the UN. The drop was sharpest in South-East Asia, where the rate of increase fell from 1.4% to 0.4%.
No rice? (Score:2)
I'll take the risotto or the paella then.
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I'll take the risotto or the paella then.
Thank you for that suggestion Marie Antoinette,
Re: No rice? (Score:2)
Fuels Diabetes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Rice fuels diabetes? Ah yes, all those Asian countries infamous for their morbidly obese populations with diabetes driven by eating rice.
Re:Fuels Diabetes? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fuels Diabetes? (Score:5, Informative)
White rice which is what most people eat, has a high glycemic index.
OTOH, brown rice is much healthier. High fiber and low glycemic index.
The glycemic index of white rice
Average GI value is between 64 and 89, but can go higher than 90. The glycemic index of boiled white rice Average GI score is between 70 and 80.
The glycemic index of brown rice
Average GI is 56-68, but can go as low as 48 or as high as 78. The glycemic index of boiled brown rice is less.
“As general advice, choose a parboiled rice or long grain brown rice over short-grain white rice, and remember that cooling rice or adding legumes to rice lowers the GI.
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White rice which is what most people eat, has a high glycemic index.
OTOH, brown rice is much healthier. High fiber and low glycemic index.
All of this is true but misses the real reason why white rice usually does not produce bad health outcomes, even though it's overwhelmingly eaten in Asia. The reason is that rice is never eaten by itself but with often (but not always) healthful foods, including lots of vegetables and small amounts of meat. Rice is not the staple and often is a small portion of the meal. With that type of diet, the difference in final health outcomes between white and brown rice is not much.
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I have Asian relatives and not a single one regularly eats brown rice. I prefer it, but unless I cook it myself, there will be none because nobody else wants some.
Many just don't like brown rice, or whole grains in general. I don't like being forced to eat other foods I don't like, so I won't judge.
Maybe try to get used to a 50/50 mix? Start with say 20/80 and work one's way up.
Re:Fuels Diabetes? (Score:4, Interesting)
In Thailand, brown rice is known as "convict rice" since only people in prison eat it. I had a friend who lived in Thailand and his housekeeper refused to buy brown rice because of the stigma.
There are lots of individual preferences to food and it is surprisingly difficult to get people to change.
I prefer whole grains since they have much more flavor. White flour and white rice are just too bland... perhaps that is why people like them.
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It was similar in Europe because de-fibered (white) wheat flower was associated with wealth and status, even as it gradually became affordable to most the middle class.
Re: Fuels Diabetes? (Score:2)
Re: Fuels Diabetes? (Score:2)
Kind of like tofu.
Beriberi disease (Score:3)
The posters for joining the Japanese army from after Meiji Restoration to some point in WW2 was:
Join the army, get all the white rice you can eat.
Turns out eating only white rice is a fast track to suffering from Thiamine deficiency, also known as Beriberi. Which the Japanese army almost had as a chronic disease until some point into the 1910s where supplementary diet almost eliminated the malnutrition plague.
This is only really true for 1st world nations (Score:3)
Diabetes isn't really an issue, because you don't have enough food to get fat enough for it. Especially with all that manual labor. It's office workers like us that are better off with brown rice.
And while I'm no farming expert, I'm guessing the husk/bra
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Kind of makes you wonder just what other parts of that rant are outright wrong...
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China's diabetes rate is pretty much identical to the US.
https://www.diabetes.co.uk/dia... [diabetes.co.uk]
Yes it does (with data) (Score:5, Insightful)
So not only do high GI foods like white rice cause diabetes.... ...Asia also has a shit ton of people who have problems with diabetes https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov] .
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/n... [harvard.edu].
"Numerous epidemiologic studies have shown a positive association between higher dietary glycemic index and increased risk of type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease. "
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So basically you have no idea what you're talking about.
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60% of the world's diabetics live in Asia.
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You know, even a cursory search would tell you something might be amiss in this set of assumptions.
https://wisevoter.com/country-... [wisevoter.com]
The US has about 9 times the obesity rate of Japan, but the prevalence of diabetes is not that far off - 10.7% vs 6.6%.
Something is driving that. And at first glance, rice seems like a pretty good explanation.
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The US has about 9 times the obesity rate of Japan, but the prevalence of diabetes is not that far off - 10.7% vs 6.6%.
Something is driving that. And at first glance, rice seems like a pretty good explanation.
I'm just curious if it has occurred to anyone on this thread that having 9 times the obesity rate, but similar rates of diabetes actually suggests that there's only a weak correlation between obesity and diabetes and maybe genetic factors have more influence over developing diabetes than lifestyle? I mean, there _is_ a correlation but even then the actual direction of causality is not that clear in many cases.
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no idea why that was rated insightful
it completely ignores facts
Wheat? (Score:2)
Wheat fills the role of rice in Europe and North America.
Is wheat lower carbon footprint than rice? I honestly have no idea how they compare, and the summary makes rice sound pretty bad. This article says wheat is lower - https://pubs.rsc.org/en/conten... [rsc.org]
If it is, would part of the solution be to introduce more wheat to Asia?
Re:Wheat? (Score:5, Insightful)
Carbon footprint may not be the driving piece, or may depend on how you're measuring.
Low-tech farming (and, in fact, all farming) pays more attention to output per space (acre or hectare); on a quick set of searches, it looks like China, for instance, puts out about 7 tonnes of rice per hectare, or about 3.5 tonnes of wheat. Rice is therefore more efficient for the land use, which may be one of the drivers.
There are also challenges around space - rice needs water, and can be grown in tiered hilltops, but wheat prefers wide flatlands, for instance - that may drive interest in particular grains.
And all that ignores what the local consumers want, too...
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Need to look at calories per hectare, not tonnes. My guess is that rice is more calorie-intensive per tonne than wheat, at least in the form where the tonnes are measured.
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Interesting thought.
I can't begin to measure against the yield tonnes (precooked? cooked? hulled?) , but cooked, rice seems to be about 100Cal / 100grams, and wheat closer to 340/100grams (thanks again, google)
So, from a caloric view, even the ~50% lower yield by weight would seem to indicate a ~50% higher caloric yield for the wheat, per unit area being farmed.
With the earlier comment indicating that wheat is also a lower-carbon crop to farm, would seem to indicate a move towards wheat would be a good idea
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Unfortunately, looking at the cooked values isn't right either, because that also measures how much water is absorbed. Generally, carbohydrates are 4 calories per gram of carbohydrate. So, it would appear that rice absorbs a lot more water when cooked.
Raw rice is 80% carbs. Wheat is 60-70% carbs, depending on whom you ask. Probably raw rice has a little more carbs. (And less protein and fat.) ...And those numbers also probably only reflect how much water is in the raw product.
The deciding factor would
Re:Wheat? (Score:4, Interesting)
Rice needs flat land as well -- yes it often is grown on tiered hilltops but those are flat terraces. I am sure wheat can be grown on terraces too, an individual wheat plant doesn't know how far the flatness around it stretches. I will bet if you google it there'll be people doing it. The main issue is temperature, soil, and water.
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I am sure wheat can be grown on terraces too, an individual wheat plant doesn't know how far the flatness around it stretches. ... The main issue is temperature, soil, and water.
Well, getting a huge combine onto that terrace might also be an issue...
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lol .. oh yeah I didn't think of that ..could be done though, maybe spiral around the hill?
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Combines don't have to be huge. When I was a kid the combine was easily pulled behind a medium tractor. I think the header was only 8 ft wide, but it had to be offset from the tractor, that would still be narrower than the 30 ft headers around where I live now.
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I was just being silly... I had this funny mental picture of one of those huge midwestern-USA-style combines trying to maneuver on the Longji rice terraces.
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Greenhouse gas emissions are dependent on a lot of factors, so it depends. Subsistence farmer growing rice in a family paddy isn't going to emit a lot of carbon, but they're going to emit a bit of methane. Meanwhile, wheat farmer in Brazil could slash and burn rain forest then grow grain using heavy equipment just to feed cattle. The devil is in the details.
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Wheat fills the role of rice in Europe and North America.
Is wheat lower carbon footprint than rice?
I'm not an expert, but I can read Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], which says " The worldwide production of rice accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) in total than that of any other plant food. [theguardian.com] It was estimated in 2021 to be responsible for 30% of agricultural methane emissions [nih.gov] and 11% of agricultural nitrous oxide emissions. Methane release is caused by long-term flooding of rice fields, inhibiting the soil from absorbing atmospheric oxygen, a process causing anaerobic fermentation of organic matter in the soil.
Re: Wheat? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, flooded rice paddies produce methane. And that's the traditional way. However, rice paddies don't *have* to be underwater.
My understanding g is that they do thus to keep weeds down. Most plants can't tolerate the conditions, but rice can. So you could choose to grow rice on dry land, avoid the methane, and deal with weeds.
Also, fear-mongering. They are all worried about the *increase* in productivity being smaller than in the past. Perhaps they should put more emphasis on the actual problem: why is the population of Africa set to nearly double in 30 years? The other continents are nearly stable (including Asia) or decreasing. Human overpopulation is the driving factor behind so many problems...
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Wheat fills the role of rice in Europe and North America.
... and in Northern Asia! Hundreds of millions of Chinese eat wheat daily.
They do know it exists. North and West from Shandong, wheat is the primary grain.
introduce more wheat to Asia?
The largest wheat-producing countries on earth are China and India:
https://www.atlasbig.com/en-au... [atlasbig.com]
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It's hard to spread peanut butter and jelly on rice.
Are wheat noodles easier?
Let's not make this too complicated... (Score:2, Interesting)
We can contain the problem in Africa by getting an agreement across the Global North to simply stop all foreign aid to Africa. In Africa's case in particular, it's time countries like South Africa and Zimbabwe became an example for the ages in what happens when you persecute the groups who actually know how to feed your people. For Asia, the problem is largely contained to places like India, Pakistan and Beng
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White persecution syndrome?
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We'll teach them for getting rid of colonialism!
Fuck rice (Score:1)
FUD (Score:1)
The glycemic index of rice is high. But it has to be judged as part of the entire diet. For instance rice and lentils as a meal has been shown to be significantly less harmful than rice alone.
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Not just conservatives. There are plenty of left-wing NIMBYs fighting against windmills because they mess up the pretty landscapes.
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I love global warming! I've read that a warmer world is also a wetter world. Living in California, I'm loving all this rain. San Diego is typically dry and all the local fauna is brown and yellow. Now, it's all lush and green. I went hiking the other day and it was absolutely beautiful. If it would just keep raining once a week forever, I would be quite happy.
Also, we are finally out of the drought. I say, let's keep up with the global warming if this is the result. More water, greener outdoor spaces and ev
What if it is not shortage? (Score:1)
What if it's just too many people asking for rice? Like Chinese and Indians?
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It's kind of weird. India's population is continuing to grow rapidly, but it's actually a net exporter of food. Meanwhile, China's population growth has totally stopped and is likely starting to decrease, but they've actually become a net importer of food and significantly so. I would've thought that population would be the big story here, and certainly it's a part, but it seems that the real cause is more of a trade-up in what people are eating, rather than just the raw population growth.
Generally, as p
We waste to much food. (Score:3)
And too many resources.
The planet could easily feed 20 billion and still mostly be a pristine nature reserve, if we'd allocate resources correctly.
Food prices going up isn't necessarily a bad thing, given that the amount of obese humans exceeded the amount of underweight humans a decade or so back. We just need to distribute and use food better.
I'm not saying that food shortage isn't something to be concerned about however I do think there are quite a few feasible solutions to this problem. Reducing meat production would be one of them for instance. Way to wasteful vis-a-vis growing food directly. Given the increase in prices the meat problem will probably solve itself to a certain degree.
Re:We waste to much food. (Score:5, Insightful)
Obesity isn't due to too much food. It is due to shitty, hyper-processed, carb-packed sugar bombs that are made to resemble "food". Food prices going up is just going to make obesity work as more products get stuffed with cheap fillers or injected with brine + phosphates, while stuff that is actually nutritious is priced out of reach.
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Ask Dewi Sri for more rice then (Score:3)
Different farming methodes requried (Score:4, Interesting)
I "worked" in a rice paddy for 5 minutes. It is a grossly inefficient process in terms of every metric at every step. I am surprised automated vertical grow systems have not taken off because it would make water utilization dramatically lower, eliminate the need to burn the field, survive environmental issues better, and so on. The yield per unit area of rice is pretty miserable.
I know hydroponic farming is primarily focused on high-value crops, but when you can almost fully automate the process it would seem like staples would be viable.
Re:Different farming methodes requried (Score:5, Interesting)
My understanding is current farming practices around rice are all about keeping production cheap, not efficient. For instance rice doesn't require flooding, but it tolerates it, thus allowing cheap and effective weed control through flooding.
This might not be efficient, this might not be high yield, this might require unsustainable amounts of water; this also keeps it cheap (affordable), which is what a large portion of the world population needs.
I think the crux of the issue is global inflation, how it affects food pricing, how it pushes more people turn to cheaper staple foods like rice. The rice shortage is the symptom of a bigger problem unrelated to rice.
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Flooding apparently increases yield. The biggest waste and damage is burning of the fields after (or is it before... get confused with sugarcane) harvest. It is a cheap, low-cost farming technique that dominates for sure... and your yield per m2 of land or tray is only ~1kg of rice worth ~$1. So for self-sufficiency you would need about 1x1m2 tray per day to be cycled (180 trays total).
Which kind of get back to my thinking that you need something highly automated to really make it viable... but it should
Re: Different farming methodes requried (Score:2)
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WTF? Rice farmers generally don't burn rice fields, it's a relic. Vertical growth systems and growing indoors when the sun is outside in no way is efficient. The yield per unit of rice is comparable to other crops - depending on local weather, etc., it can be the highest of any crop.
Everything you said in your post is wrong.
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They burn the rice fields in Southeast Asia. They also get droughts and floods that destroy the crop. They flood the fields for irrigation and have significant evaporation and runoff losses. I am not referring to American industrialized farming methods.
Vertical Farming? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if it would be feasible to use Vertical Farming hydroponics in this case.
I've read some studies which seem to indicate that by integrating crop farming vertically we can farm far more food in a much smaller footprint faster and more efficiently than current methods by using less water, energy, nutrients, pesticides, and other inputs I'm likely missing. We can also use dedicated lighting to tailor the spectrum to one most beneficial for the plant we're growing thereby allowing us to generate larger fruits / yields while maintaining a continuous 24 hour growth cycle. This could also contribute toward reducing climate change as we're now producing the food where the people are thus shortening transportation distances, while electric delivery vehicles could be used to deliver locally further reducing long term GHG production.
Something like this would allow us to return existing farm lands back to nature, contributing toward reducing the impacts of climate change. In the instance of rice we could even look toward potentially capturing the methane off-gassing, which the summary mentions, and recycling it into useable power for the building. We could potentially even collect the CO2 byproduct and and pump it back into the facility to provide additional energy to the plants during photosynthesis.
To me it just makes sense and I could totally see large rice fields being returned back to nature, with the local farmers instead now heading to the tall building in the distance to harvest not only their rice crops but the other fruits and vegetable which were too pricy to import but the vertical farm now allows them to grow locally.
If we need to grow ever increasing amounts of food while contending with the fact the arable land to produce that food keeps shrinking due to climate change, then going vertical and carefully controlling the climate within to minimize the outside environmental impact seems like the way to go.
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Greens, tomatoes, strawberries, and a lot of other crops work well vertically. While rice is sometimes grown hydroponically, even horizontally the yields are a lot lower than in soil. It also takes six months to grow, and rice is expected to be cheap, and a long period isn't compatible with getting low costs out of hydroponics.
You can kinda sorta go vertical with rice with a lot of effort [inhabitat.com], and it's not true vertical hydroponics, either — that would reduce yield even farther. It works fine for greens b
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This is a bit like saying "I wonder if we could live in cloud castles". Yes it could be done at extraordinary expense but it's just a dumb fantasy. Just build a house on the ground. Much cheaper to desalinate water and grow stuff in a desert. Even cheaper again to genetically engineer rice to use C4 photosynthesis rather than C3 so you can grow it will less water.
Plants are solar panels with low efficiency about 3%. So if you're getting your power from solar at 20% and then pumping it into a process which g
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Nuclear requires 760 tons of concrete, 165 tons of iron steel and 3 tons of copper.
How many tons of uranite does it require? How do you clean up the radioactive contamination of aquifers from the mine tailings?
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Per TerraWatt of capacity Wind requires 8000 tons of Concrete and cement, 1920 tons of steel, 23 tons of copper. Solar requires 4050 tons of concrete, 7900 tons of steel and 850 tons of copper. Nuclear requires 760 tons of concrete, 165 tons of iron steel and 3 tons of copper. Being sustainable is about using less and there's a message in the numbers above.
Yeah, there is a lesson there. That lesson is that you're full of it. Consider: if a TeraWatt of nuclear power required 760 tons of concrete, 165 tons of steel, and 3 tons of copper, then a Gigawatt would required 750 kg of concrete, 165 kg of steel and 3 kg of copper. That would mean that the bulk of a 1 GW nuclear plant would mass around 1 metric ton, or less than the average car. That's obviously wrong. You're off by a factor of around a million.
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or maybe when you get to a certain capacity, nuclear power scales abnormally welll.
It doesn't. You're getting the fact that it scales abnormally poorly at small scales confused with scaling well at large scales. The simple fact is that nuclear reactors are thermal power plants. They make their power by heating water into steam and using the steam pressure to turn turbines hooked up to generators. Make them bigger and, yes, they can get more efficient up to a point. You get diminishing returns on scaling up though, until you reach a point where simply making parts bigger runs into real, ph
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Vertical farming is extremely inefficient [globalecoguy.org] compared to traditional farming. Just think about it - instead of the sun growing your plants, the sun shines on a solar panel, which generates electricity, which powers lights, which grows plants. Why insert all those lossy middlemen when you can use the sun directly? The light produced by LED bulbs doesn't even have the frequency spectrum which is optimal for plant growth.
Population (Score:1)
Nobody wants to talk about reducing human population as part of the solution.
Every other excuse is made up pointing at everything else but we all know what the real issue is.
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And yet, when a society starts to get more educated, the population tends to drop. China's is trending downward. The USA would trend downward if not for immigration.
Of course the governments aren't to keen on less population because of the pyramid schemes they got going on. Instead of being sustainable, we have built our system on growth. We'll eventually level off on population then likely start to shrink down. If we don't figure out how to be more sustainable and actually encourage it, we will likely be w
Re: Population (Score:2)
Another abomination calling for genocide.
Upmoded.
The world's population will implode. Soon.
Look at the actual data!
And post under your name, leftard!
Then, lead by example and off yourself.
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Overpopulation is what awakens Godzilla every 3996 years.
Beef is way worse than rice (Score:2)
Asia accounts for 60% of the world population and contributes 53% (citation below). So rice eaters are not the reason, need to cut down meat consumption. https://ourworldindata.org/ann... [ourworldindata.org]
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Lots of cows wandering around the Indian subcontinent, burping methane but otherwise contributing nothing. There's your food source.
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We can joke about Indians worshiping the cow and not eating it. But scientifically you get 10 times the calories in the form of milk from a cow than by eating it. One eat the cow after its milking life is over, but not sure that beef is considered fit for human consumption.
Technically we use the stomachs of the cows to convert vege
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Their dung is used for a renewable energy source, and fertilizer. That's not quite nothing.
Someone can get my ration, no biggie (Score:2)
After my bariatric surgery, I can not eat rice. So someone else can have all my rations, no biggie.
Also, I can eat wheat, no problem, so I'll help myself to the rations of some Celiac, again, no biggie.
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If you're include those of the self-diagnosed celiacs and people assuming themselves to be gluten-sensitive, you could eat forever. Man, the world is awash in them...
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If you're include those of the self-diagnosed celiacs and people assuming themselves to be gluten-sensitive, you could eat forever. Man, the world is awash in them...
I agree 100% with your words and the sentiment.
The only silver lining on those "fake celiacs" is that, by virtue of inflating demand for "glutten free" products, true celiacs have more options than ever before...
There is a global X crisis (Score:2)
Translation (Score:2)
no, there isn't. (Score:2)
https://www.gro-intelligence.c... [gro-intelligence.com]
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Of course if you bothered to read the entire summary you would have seen that the problem is not that rice production isnt growing, it's that it isnt growing fast enough to keep up with population growth and the increased demand for rice that that is bringing.
So basically in less than half the time it took you to find that link you could have actually understood what was being discussed.
should we just stop eating an kill ourselves then? (Score:2)
Not a Rice crisis... (Score:1)
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Nice humanitarian response, are you volunteering? Should the calculus of cleansing be based on your carbon or environmental footprint?
I'd prefer a slightly kinder approach of minimising our impact on the planet while investing in energy sources and technologies which have a low environmental impact. I eat beef, lamb, chicken pork and fish, however if a manufactured meat of a similar quality were to become available to replace these I'd use it. The current crop of products aren't really there yet. I'd also f
Genetic engineering = More Rice (Score:3)
Rice is a C3 crop which limits the regions in which it grows. Maize is a C4 crop which allows it to grow in drier regions.
There are efforts under way to create frankenrice which will use C4 photosynthesis pathways which should allow rice to be grown in drier areas. It would also allow existing production areas to use less water reducing the pollution in rivers.
This should result in an increase in production worldwide ensuring that fewer children go to bed hungry.
GMO sounds really bad doesn't it? However grants to third world countries often explicitly forbid GMO techniques and research which show so much promise. I'm talking about you EEU.
While we're here I'd like to also point out that "organic farming" means using more land to produce less food. So in a world where we want to reduce our environmental impact organic farming is exactly the wrong answer. The recent fiasco in Bangladesh demonstrated this clearly. So you folk buying organically grown food are in the same category of clowns who drive pimped up 10.4L V8 around and scoff at scientific fact and theory.
Rice causes climate change. (Score:2)
Correction: overpopulation and consumption crisis (Score:2)
Actually there is a general overpopulation and consumption crisis, which is manifesting as all of these other crises.
But the root cause is overpopulation and overconsumption. One way or another, humanity will be forced to live within its means and stop borrowing from the future.
Here they go again (Score:2)
Nature solving the problem (Score:1)
Nature solving the problem of global warming and overpopulation by regulating food supply.
Good supply has been natures way for millions of years.
There is no crisis. (Score:2)
If the rice productivity is still rising, as the article says, then there is no crisis. Yields can't rise ad infinitum. There are natural limits. It's the same as with the Moore's law in microelectronics.
But no, I did a mistake. There is a crisis actually, but it's not a rice crisis. It's a population crisis. A population increase not backed by a suitable food production increase. We should call things with their real names.
Re:We get it, we get it, Living is Killing the Pla (Score:4, Insightful)
1. I won't change because I don't want to.
2. All governments that try to influence change through policy and laws are exactly the same as Dr. Strangelove.
3. I don't care about the consequences my actions will have on the pain and suffering of others.
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Your argument boils down to:
Do what we say, because we say so.
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2. Thinking grossly influenced by a very vocal minority of people.
You were modded down by that vocal minority. Or, more accurately the vocal minority that will be the first group marched in and put up against the wall when the leadership behind them comes to power and can't tolerate the continued presence of activists and intellectuals that could turn against them.
Re:We get it, we get it, Living is Killing the Pla (Score:4, Insightful)
Hahaha, far righters ultra paranoia is always good for a laugh.
No one is forcing you to eat a thing but I'm sure you think evil forces are trying to.
My favorite part though is how you try to cloak your selfishness in righteousness. I mean, heaven forbid you be made to drive an electric car that will likely help make global warming a bit less bad for future generations, right? Obviously no one could possibly be thinking of others in advocating for such a thing. Of course it's all about money and power.
What a bunch of ridiculous horse shit!
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If they really cared about global warming, they would take all the money they want to toss at electric cars and give us a 24/7/365 viable set of public transportation options and they would gradually ban car ownership. Take all that pavement and make it into bike and e-bike space. Even golf carts.
We could reduce the work day to 6 hours across 5 days, giving everyone plenty of time to use these new (old actually) forms of transportation. We would be healthier and happier. None of it will happen though.
I do s
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If they really cared about global warming, they would take all the money they want to toss at electric cars and give us a 24/7/365 viable set of public transportation options and they would gradually ban car ownership. Take all that pavement and make it into bike and e-bike space. Even golf carts.
Right, because countries with good mass transportation don't have cars.
Furthermore, how do you think we'd run trains to modern town centers here in the US? Or do you really think we could ever afford subways in every town?
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Let's take California as example. We have many many freeways. If we kicked off most of the cars, we would be able to install rails, open up bike ways and still have a lane in each direction for the remaining vehicles.
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And you think that is a solution that would be supported by California's voters do you?
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Actually, that car in the movie belonged to Ferris's friend Cameron's dad....not Bueller's.
You're point is well taken, but needed to clarify the movie trivia a bit.
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So, don't aspire to better - declare the past to be superior and reject any attempt to improve on it. Refuse to incorporate change.
If you're American, and I was in Vegas wagering on how you would vote, I know where my tokens land.