Nobel Prize Winners Call For Urgent 'Moonshot' Effort To Avert Global Hunger Catastrophe (theguardian.com) 75
More than 150 Nobel and World Food prize laureates have signed an open letter calling for "moonshot" efforts to ramp up food production before an impending world hunger catastrophe. From a report: The coalition of some of the world's greatest living thinkers called for urgent action to prioritise research and technology to solve the "tragic mismatch of global food supply and demand." Big bang physicist Robert Woodrow Wilson; Nobel laureate chemist Jennifer Doudna; the Dalai Lama; economist Joseph E Stiglitz; Nasa scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig; Ethiopian-American geneticist Gebisa Ejeta; Akinwumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank; Wole Soyinka, Nobel prize for literature winner; and black holes Nobel physicist Sir Roger Penrose were among the signatories in the appeal coordinated by Cary Fowler, joint 2024 World Food prize laureate and US special envoy for global food security.
Citing challenges including the climate crisis, war and market pressures, the coalition called for "planet-friendly" efforts leading to substantial leaps in food production to feed 9.7 billion people by 2050. The plea was for financial and political backing, said agricultural scientist Geoffrey Hawtin, the British co-recipient of last year's World Food prize. [...] The world was "not even close" to meeting future needs, the letter said, predicting humanity faced an "even more food insecure, unstable world" by mid-century unless support for innovation was ramped up internationally.
Citing challenges including the climate crisis, war and market pressures, the coalition called for "planet-friendly" efforts leading to substantial leaps in food production to feed 9.7 billion people by 2050. The plea was for financial and political backing, said agricultural scientist Geoffrey Hawtin, the British co-recipient of last year's World Food prize. [...] The world was "not even close" to meeting future needs, the letter said, predicting humanity faced an "even more food insecure, unstable world" by mid-century unless support for innovation was ramped up internationally.
talking out of both sides of our mouth (Score:2)
Tells the world that GMOs and pesticides are dangerous while eating prepackaged snack cakes filled with whipped transfats and colored with azo pigments.
We some weird subculture that thinks "leaky gut" is a medical condition. Reject vaccines that have worked for generations to eliminate childhood diseases in our region. And celebrities endorse either drinking shots of apple cider vinegar or alkaline water for health "reasons".
We're a nation of people with more money than sense. And I hope the rest of the wor
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drinking shots of apple cider vinegar
To be fair diluted apple cider vinegar is really effective at treating symptoms of a heartburn flareup for a lot of people. The working theory is instead of neutralizing acid temporarily and your stomach going "Shit need to make more" instead your esophagus goes "Waitaminute that ain't supposed to be here" and closes more securely.
Food production is not the problem. (Score:3)
Food distribution is the problem. We already produce enough food to feed the entire planet, and huge amounts of it get thrown away. On top of that, governments pay farmers to abstain from growing food to their full capacity just to ensure that the bottom doesn't fall out of food markets.
Ramping up production efforts will do zero good. It doesn't matter how much food you have if you can't get it to the people who need it.
Furthermore, it doesn't help to get food to those in need "every now and then." On h
Soylent green... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Soylent green is people (Score:1)
Only when we run out of cats and dogs.
- Haitian illegal #847280742
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What else do we expect to do with "9.7 billion people by 2050"??
We do not want a world with a population that keeps growing beyond either our usefulness or our ability to care for our needs. Have you seen an African famine village? People sitting around starving and waiting to die with nothing to do but fight and fuck. Overpopulation is bad.
In the words of Bob Barker: Spay or Neuter your SELVES.
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If you had seen pictures from the 1970s/1980s, they are to starved to fight or fuck.
Global poverty rates declining for 70 years (Score:4, Insightful)
World Bank "Estimates of global poverty from WWII to the fall of the Berlin Wall"
Refer to figure 2: Global poverty rate went from 58.5% in 1950 to 8.1% in 2020, a 70 year decline.
https://blogs.worldbank.org/en... [worldbank.org]
The international agencies have a mission to address poverty and other social issues and will be pulled towards reframing each issue as a perpetual crisis in order to draw attention, money, government transfer payments, and media stories to promote the existence of those programs and staff at the international agencies.
What is needed is for international agencies receiving government funding need to have publicly open budgets, spending, travel, staff numbers, staff salary lists, etc. well beyond just a 1 page summary.
Also needed is a global discussion on priorities for addressing the issues and not just ever increasing budgets for existing programs.
If a global social issue has been reduced from 50% to 3%, when does it, its funding, its agencies and their staffing, need to be deprioritized and those resources used to address a higher priority global social issue.
There is a 70 year track record for multiple global social issues including the statistical data.
Crisis media as a funding source (Score:2)
The repeated calls to action news stories, NGO, and nonprofit reports are getting in the way of
- prioritizing the social issues to address
- how to fund them
- how much to fund them
- who gets the funding
- how do we measure success
- how do we decide which programs get less funding due to inefficiency, ineffectiveness, bureaucratic waste
- how to know that the organization implementing the program is actually addressing the social issue and not just existing
- what is the money being spent on, in detail, and are
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Refer to figure 2: Global poverty rate went from 58.5% in 1950 to 8.1% in 2020, a 70 year decline.
Pretty much all the markers of human prosperity are improving - reduced malnutrition, increased access to clean water and sanitation, more education, longer life expectancies, etc.
No doubt there is still much work to be done, but I'll take the half full glass to the half empty one any day.
There's no magical waste to cut (Score:1)
It doesn't exist. Human beings are just kind of wasteful and so yeah when you go looking for something you're going to find a chunk of waste. And then you're going to get bogged down in penny pinching until the program gets scrapped and the money gets pocketed by Rich assholes who are the
bat guano (Score:4, Interesting)
Sounds like when a bunch of scientists met because the planet was running out of bat guano then used as fertilizer. A bunch of them started working on the problem of fixing nitrogen, which led to the haber-bosch process and other processes which led to today's fertilizer industry. A good book about it is called "The Alchemy of Air:", subtitled "A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler".
Here's the book's summary:
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Sounds like when a bunch of scientists met because the planet was running out of bat guano then used as fertilizer.
I'm not familiar with many of the names listed except Doudna. I expect she's quite familiar with GMOs and how they affect food supply. I'd be stunned if I know more about the Green Revolution of the 60s and 70s than she does.
That said, I'm a little surprised she would sign this letter. The numbers on poverty and world food supplies are easily available and universally fantastic. Virtually no one starves today unless they're in a war zone. That tells me the solution to world hunger is straightforward: stop k
Doesn't Sound the Same At All (Score:2)
Sounds like when a bunch of scientists met because the planet was running out of bat guano then used as fertilizer. A bunch of them started working on the problem of fixing nitrogen...
It does not sound like that at all. What your describe sounds like a bunch of scientists in relevant disciplines who got together to come up with solutions to a problem they had identified and then went away and got research funding to develop those solutions. This is exactly how we should, and fortunately typically do, operate in science.
The current open letter sounds like bunch of scientists wringing their hands and calling on others to come up with ideas to solve the problem. If those who are experts
Wrong strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
Endless growth is impossible.
We need steady state sustainability, not endlessly increasing food for an endlessly increasing population
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Wars usually "solved" overpopulation in the past. If your tribe is running out of food, you invade neighboring tribes, bonk them, and take their food sources.
Maybe the KFC next to 'Lago closed, and that's why Don has the primal urge to invade little countries?
Re: Wrong strategy (Score:2)
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Also, technology and science increased life expectation, so now we have a lot of elders with long lives ahead (but most likely poor quality of life..
To be clear, don't be mislead by the "average lifespan was 40" statistical artifact. Up until 100-ish years ago, half of all children died before age 5. If you survived to 5, your life expectancy was somewhere between 60 and 80, roughly similar to what it is now. If half the population lives to 1 and the other half lives to 80, you get an median lifespan of 40.5 but that's not the mode lifespan.
When we talk about skyrocketing lifespans in the developing world, I think that's largely driven by decreasing inf
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Only temporarily. Wars tend to increase the population because people have more babies to make up for the losses as well as produce more troops.
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Clearly you just need another war to make up for the excess babies.
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Wars usually "solved" overpopulation in the past
I'm not sure that's accurate, at least, not for the last few centuries. There might have been wars of conquest to acquire cropland but I'm not aware of many which involved genocide of the previous inhabitants. That said, I only vaguely follow this so please enlighten me with examples.
What's solved overpopulation recently is education, economic opportunities, vaccines, and inexpensive, reliable contraceptives. Given a reasonable chance of your children surviving childhood and a some control over how many chi
Education partially addresses this (Score:4, Interesting)
Statistics have shown that birth rates stabilize when girls receive a public education beyond primary school (so full K-12 program). And birth rates plummet when an industrialized culture expects women to work full time or obtain a college education.
Women having opportunities that doesn't depend on men to give them everything leads to women having fewer children. It should be common sense. But the patriarchally-inclined would rather manipulate and control women instead of having the confidence to win over a potential mate by on his own merit.
It's possible to have a world with a birth rate roughly the same as our death rate. A fairly linear increase in productivity due to technological advances.
The system of capitalism gets a little dicey is when that stable population isn't consuming at the rate of GDP growth. Fast forward a few decades or more with stable populations. You'll find economies cooling off quite a bit, with no recovery in sight. This would mean capital to be harder to obtain for expansion of business. This is even though job rates and quality of life might stay relatively good in that situation. People are working and have the things they need. So while this might seem rosy for labor, but capitalists would point at it as an economic disaster.
Can't really escape the class system when you look long-term. Even if recognizing that there is a class system sometimes labels me as a Marxists. Even if I'm mainly interested in finding fair results and reaching compromises that work for the most people possible.
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Statistics have shown that birth rates stabilize when girls receive a public education beyond primary school (so full K-12 program
What statistics show that? Sure the birth rates in pretty much every country is decreasing, any it may be the case that its because woman's education, but it might be something else or a combination of factors. Assuming that is just speculation. If you look at it buy income instead of its 1.5 children for high income vs 4.6 for low income. Countries like Kuwait that I would say have low woman's rights (I could be wrong just going by stereo types of Arab countries) have 1.5 rate.
https://database.earth/popula [database.earth]
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Countries like Kuwait that I would say have low woman's rights
60% more women than men have college degrees in Kuwait.
I could be wrong just going by stereo types of Arab countries
Women are more likely than men to have college degrees in most Islamic countries, even where you'd least expect it. For instance, Iran and Gaza.
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In general statistics show correlation and not causation.
But sometimes they are "right".
E.g. the initial main reason for decrease of birthrates in Africa was the introduction of the TV. ... what else could you do? Depending on latitude, sunset is 6PM, 7PM, 8PM (18:00 - 20:00) - and 20minutes later it is pitch dark, but it is to early to sleep ... and you have not enough light for reading or anything ...
Yes, television. Instead of making love at home
So, the majour of the village has a TV. He puts it outside
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The system of capitalism gets a little dicey is when that stable population isn't consuming at the rate of GDP growth.
Capitalism shines when there is excess production which goes into the creation of more capital, which results in either an increased quantity of what is produced, an increased quality, or both.
What will happen in this case (stable quantity of consumption) is that quality goes up, price goes down, or both.
A prerequisite for this virtuous cycle is a properly-functioning government that doesn't allow today's successful capitalists to prevent future competitors from arising, and potentially taking their place.
S
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The system of capitalism gets a little dicey is when that stable population isn't consuming at the rate of GDP growth.
Capitalism shines when there is excess production which goes into the creation of more capital, which results in either an increased quantity of what is produced, an increased quality, or both.
What will happen in this case (stable quantity of consumption) is that quality goes up, price goes down, or both.
A prerequisite for this virtuous cycle is a properly-functioning government that doesn't allow today's successful capitalists to prevent future competitors from arising, and potentially taking their place.
Socialist economies run in the opposite direction: they punish capital creation or saving in favor of redistribution, resulting in the steady consumption of overall capital. This is the basis of the statement "Socialism seems great until you've finished eating your seed corn. Then everybody starves."
What in the hell is this excess production to capital creation pipeline you've imagined? Excess production is waste. Excess production is literally a symptom of overinvestment. How's it going in your mind, excess production ... capital reinvestment ... increased production? Is this Tesla's strategy, produce extra Cybertrucks with flat demand, put the excess production into ... losing more money per unit? This is a virtuous cycle? A bunch of unsold inventory threatening to flood the market helps competition,
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Endless growth is impossible.
True, but given the size of the universe the issues we are running into today are limits of technology, not fundamental limits of the universe.
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Endless growth is impossible. We need steady state sustainability, not endlessly increasing food for an endlessly increasing population
Yes. Various talking heads assure us world population will peak "naturally (as if planned)" in coming decades and then start to decline before the negative side effects of overpopulation really start to manifest. They want to shield you from the cold hard truth of reality. I'm here to tell you a voluntary depopulation is unlikely, and at some point the global humanity load will hit a resource availability wall, and our growth will indeed be limited "naturally", as in the way nature does it for every othe
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100% agree. If the population were to settle at some sustainable level, it solves many global crises at once. I don't know what the right level is, but arbitrarily speaking in 2000 it was 6 billion people, 1990 was 5.3 billion, 1980 was 4.5 billion. If I tighten my Dunning-Kruger brand trousers, I feel confident in saying that the planet can easily sustain 5 billion people with all of them having access to enough food, water, shelter and energy to make for a very decent, long life.
The pyramid scheme th
Population not increasing much more, nearing cap (Score:1)
not endlessly increasing food for an endlessly increasing population
Population is not increasing much longer, we are about to run into fertility rates globally that do not even meet the replacement rate [healthdata.org]!
This also calls into question the need for some kind of food moonshot.
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According to the link the global population in 2100 is estimated to be 11 billion with these countries making up the top 10. Does not seem like the majority of these countries will be well equipped to handle their population increases. Better to start early and avoid the human suffering.
India 1,529,850,119
China 766,673,270
Nigeria 546,091,662
Pakistan 487,017,405
DR Congo 432,378,400
United States 394,041,155
Ethiopia 323,741,600
Indonesia 296,623,475
Tanz
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No, your strategy is both wrong and evil. Your evil attempt at population control by starvation and economic war is what leads to famines and destabilizing population growth. Let's be clear. Prosperity leads to population collapse. We are seeing that in South Korea, Japan, Europe, basically the Western nations. People who are food insecure have more kids because they need more farmhands. Plus the women are not empowered enough to obtain birth control or assert their choice.
The root cause (Score:2)
The reason we're keeping up with food production at the moment, for the most part, is that for the last few decades we've been experiencing globalization. Specifically the ability of any nation to trade with any other nation, where the safety of your ships on the high seas was guaranteed by the United States, which has an unmatched naval force, and saw a benefit to policing the world's oceans as part of efforts to constrain the soviet union up until the 90's. But that world slowly fell apart after the end
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"Now that globalization is on its way out..."
"The American people have very clearly voted that they don't want their country policing the world's oceans anymore..."
There is no evidence for either of these claims.
"And there is no other superpower with the naval capability to fulfill that policing role worldwide, even if they somehow wanted to."
Given the absurd premise that the US was doing it and was capable of doing it, and that it no longer will, there certainly could be a power to step into that gap. It
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I have 2 solutions (Score:2, Insightful)
More realistic: perfect fusion and run grow lights in controlled environments
Let them die the way nature intended (Score:1, Troll)
They may sound crass.... but, wouldn't that just be natural selection and the problem correcting itself?
Less people = less food requirement, less energy usage, less water consumption
Less food requirement = less pollution
Less pollution = less potential for climate change
Just let the weak die off, the way nature intended
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What's going to happen when hungry nations have nukes? The plans are circulating, just mine and add centrifuges.
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Panama and Greenland first! Stable Dr. Orange is way ahead of us!
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Crass is not the word that comes to mind for that, it is far too kind.
You are not part of "the strong", only "the fortunate", and once you let "the weak die off", you become the weak. As far as Trump is concerned, you're "the weak" already, he doesn't need your vote, so you can "die off" already. It's how fascism works, more for the wealthy that remain.
I'd love to be a fly on the wall when you explain to your retired parents how we should "just let the weak die off", or explain to your child when he is st
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Less people
Okay, let's do that. You go first on starving to death.
Two things (Score:2)
2 - what worries me is that every 200 years on average a *BIG* volcano blows up and sends enough shit in the atmosphere to cause a global winter lasting 2 or 3 years with plenty of crop failures. When that happened in the past, there were always major food shortages and starvation. There
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Background info (Score:2, Insightful)
I highly recommend the Yale course Global Problems of Population Growth [youtube.com], which is all kinds of informative about these issues.
In particular this lecture [youtube.com] gives a good overview of all the issues currently facing humanity.
All of the problems, issues, and potential catastrophies we face, including climate change, can be mitigate a great deal by reducing the human population, and this means reducing the fertility rate. We're currently growing our population by 1 billion every 13 years, and the ecological footpri
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Western subsidized universal free access to long lasting birth control would probably reduce birthrates massively and cost next to nothing, but I don't see it happening. Governments in developing nations with high fertility might from a technocratic point of view agree, but religious leaders would object and even more liberals would whine about neocolonialism. Birth control has to be a grass roots effort in those nations, the west can not be visibly involved.
That said, 50 years too late ... pray AI saves us
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Second comment: global emissions in Africa are negligible.
https://ourworldindata.org/gra... [ourworldindata.org]
And most of the other relevant variables scale with emissions. So, exactly how is population control in Africa going to solve the world's problems? I don't wan
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The consumption per capita in developed nations and population in developing nations are mostly orthogonal problems, neither is sustainable. Developed nations using less fossil/mineral resources for conspicuous consumption might reduce emissions but they don't increase the food/water supply.
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After carefully thinking about it and reconsidering, I’m going to double-down on my original post. The population-control argument pretty much boils down to “this town is overcrowded, so let’s shoot 2/3 of the people (the ones I don’t like).
And you’re singling out Africa as the problem. Really. Really?
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For now. High population growth African and Asian nations becoming increasingly dependent on developed nation high productivity agriculture is dangerous for them. In a crisis there won't be triage in an unified world, there will be mass starvation.
Their population growth is in their hands, developed nation charity is not.
Two ways (Score:3)
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I vote decrease demand (through birth control). It solves the food problem and sooo many other global problems at once. We had 6 billion people in 2000 and got along fine. With the increases in technology, automation, science, etc in that time we can easily support 6 billion people with access to enough food, water, shelter and energy to make for a very decent, long life for all. And bring the ecological environment back to health.
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Mechanized farming did a lot to improve food production. Also a big gain was from petroleum based fertilizers and pesticides. I'd have to check the stats but as I recall there's been a reduction in global food production as nations started to implement controls on nitrogen fertilizers. One problem with nitrogen fertilizers is that current practices consume a lot of petroleum for production, and often releasing CO2. This isn't exactly "burning" the fuel but the end result is much the same. Another probl
not our job to feed the world (Score:1)
all our aid to africa has only resulted in an extra billion africans dependent on aid. we tried to teach them farming and nearly all the farms collapsed once we turned them over to africans.
we need to worry about our own countries and let the 3rd world reach equilibrium. they never developed the methods to support their own population, and now our countries are being flooded with 3rd worlders who can't even take care of their own countries. white people are only 7-8% of world population, why is it our job t
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It may not be your job but helping others is a human prerogative that most people, thankfully, feel. It wasn't white people’s jobs to go purchase/kidnap over 10 million slaves and colonize multiple continents either.
God forbid you have to work a little bit extra to help your fellow human. You still get to live a modern lifestyle, have family, vacations, and things like that.
Capitalism does not care (Score:2)
In fact, capitalism derives more profit from world hunger not being solved. If this world hunger catastrophe is to be avoided, capitalism must be eradicated.
Let's be clear (Score:1)
There is no "food shortage" globally.
There is a distribution problem born (mostly) from political failures of repressive or incompetent governments.
Solution already exists (Score:1)
It's called a condom.
Use it.
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It's also called "fertilizers, pesticides, and GMO crops". Use them.
It's also farm machinery. US agriculture is insanely productive in part because we have tractors, harvesters, and other wonderful, special purpose machines [youtube.com]. But, while they're astoundingly expensive, they also allow farmer Bob to harvest a lot of potatoes at very little cost.
And then let's not forget "shipping containers". Part of why food is so cheap and available in the first world is it's just jaw-droppingly cheap to ship things around t
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Hey degenerate.. do you think there is an infinite supply of water? Arable soil? Oil for fertilizers and tractors, harvesters? Landfills for waste?
You should've been flushed in aforementioned condom.
Helping to feed the hungry is racist (Score:2)
So I guess we better leave it to Wakanda to avert the hunger catastrophe.