but if push came to shove i don’t think it’s realistic to have a war over food, the cost-benefit analysis is very much against the invader and when the mechanics of food distribution are made more by a market than countries physically sitting on food i’m very doubtful there would be physical intervention.

in terms of india, there are people starving there now — i don’t think it’s about to invade anyone for food and i don’t see how such a situation could unfold.

Effectively you are saying the West will have slowly rising populations and be able to feed themselves and sit idly by while famines hit other regions simply saying “that should keep their population in check for a while.”

Do you really think well-armed countries with starving populations will sit by allowing their citizens to die while a rich neighbour feasts?

There will be wars galore, all good for business in the West.

Also, India and China have massive populations and are still growing relatively quickly (how large would China’s population be without their one child per family policy?) AND they have large armies and WMDs. They are ticking timebomb scenarios.

When I meant the population stabilises I mean that a famine will naturally reduce the population in the famine-stricken area to a more stable level. Famines typically strike quickly, eg. in the Stalin-engineered Holodomor in the Ukraine, several million peasants died in I think less than 4 months and then it was largely over (at least in terms of mass scale).

The main reason I’m not convinced by your scenario is that it’s precisely the rich and powerful countries that will have no problems with runaway populations. Being rich and powerful is VERY much correlated with low birth rates. So I don’t see a 1st world country ever going overseas to take food. While the problems you describe are quite real, this backwards effect makes the future a lot more complicated.

We currently make choices on who starves and who doesn’t; the west is, generally, obese and regions in Africa and SE Asia regularly have famines.

If populations rise then this problem will get worse and if rich and/or powerful countries cannot sustain their populations then they will use their wealth or power to take food from other countries. These countries may not be able to feed their own populations so we would be actively starving their population to feed ourselves.

This is analogous to the current problems with oil, with the exception that we can ween ourselves off of oil without starving our population.

Your idea that the population will automatically stabilise if food runs out is naive at best. Globally the population may stabilise, but locally there would be massive changes in populations. Imagine a US force going abroad and taking produce from other countries and shipping it home to keep the US populace fed, at the expense of the lives of the people in the lands they are taking it from.

As for the assumptions made to reach this Malthusian scenario – it doesn’t take much to imagine it as it is already happening. Western countries buy food from Africa while there are famines in Africa! Beef producers in South America clear forests and use perfectly cultivatable lands to produce cattle to serve the American market. People being people will inevitably think of their own well-being before the good of others, so farmers will produce the most profitable products rather than the most sustainable or nutritious.

Governments are there to represent and look after their constituents, in future that may come at the expense of people who are not their constituents. Whatever people we vote into office will have to make those decisions and they are not easy, how do you compare the value of a US life compared to an Afghan life? Perhaps more pressingly, how do you compare the enhanced quality of a US life with a life of an African? The reason I ask is that we will be trading foreigners’ lives for an increased standard of living in the West before long, in fact we already do to a limited degree.

Hopefully I am one of the haves, but it is a decision I would not wish on anyone.

Basically my view is that talk of such population planning definitely does come from overtly racist motivations in a lot of cases. There are of course other motivations. To evaluate them we need to examine whether the world works in this way. Personally, I think it doesn’t (I’ve posted on this at http://anadder.com/populate-or-perish-insanity-part-1 and http://anadder.com/populate-or-perish-insanity-part-2)

What you seem to be saying is to combat Islamic and Chinese communist ideologies the west should seek to emulate them more — or am I missing something?

Besides the moral imperative to help create a world that can feed more people than it does now, there are issues of plain self interest.

There are limited resources. We can feed approx. 15-18bn people if we move to a vegetarian diet (no link for figures, but you can google it and find a number).

The real question is what do we want the ethnic, social and biological makeup of these people to be? This is a VERY controversial question that in these PC times people will go to all lengths to avoid, but as I have seen with other controversial issues on this site, I assume you will be willing to face. Muslims represent a massively growing faith that comes from both converts AND newborns. No other faith matches it and I can’t see atheism/agnosticism catching up any time soon, apart from the Chinese, but communism presents its own problems.

This is not a clash of peoples, it is a clash of ideologies. The real problem the pampered, spoiled, industrialised West faces is its insistence on democracy and fairness. If you have a billion Muslims, a billion Chinese and 3/4 billion capitalistic Westerners then democracy is a busted flush.

So if we can allow only certain nations/regions to have enough food to sustain their population (or even grow) then, as the wealthiest nations, the choice is ours.

What we choose will determine the future of the human race!