Quote: "The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that nearly 870 million people of the 7.1 billion people in the world, or one in eight, were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2010-2012."
I love hearing from environmental deniers, who say there's no limit to how many people we can feed -- people who ignore the fact that this is already not true.
> The article actually says we produce enough to feed the whole world.
The issue is not whether we could feed the whole world, the issue is whether we do. If we don't, then the hypothesis that we could is small comfort to those who are starving.
> Massive death tolls from famines always come down to political stupidity.
Political stupidity is much harder to sustain with small populations, people who can vote with their feet.
Your basic view is that there can't be progress until noone on the whole world is hungry? And no amount of declining starvations over the past decades and centuries is worth anything at all?
[I apologize in advance for having to go "meta" on this one; given the rest of the discussion I don't think it can be helped.]
lutusp: Do you care whether the statements you make are true? Or do you just want to not seem wrong, no matter what arguments are required to accomplish that?
When you give a link supporting your views, do you read the link first and check that it supports the argument you're making? Because it seems like you're not doing that.
In this case, the link you gave says that using the "new estimate method", there were 1 billion hungry people in 1990-92 (out of a world population of 5.370 billion) and there were 870 million hungry in 2013 (out of a population of 7.095 billion). So world hunger didn't just decrease as a percentage of population (from 18% to 12.3%), it decreased as an ABSOLUTE NUMBER. As the population went up, the total NUMBER of starving people DECLINED.
Your link also says this:
> "The world produces enough food to feed everyone. World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase. This is enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day"
So as you said, a bit snottily, "We already can't feed our present numbers, or haven't you been paying attention?", the link you provide in "support" actually said we CAN feed our present numbers and also says we're getting ever-better at actually doing so.
In short, your link does not in any way support your argument. So the "environmental deniers" you refer to are probably correct; you are wrong. As this is starting to seem like a trend, you might want to re-evaluate your information sources; they are not serving you well.
Here's a useful tip: most people are not complete idiots. If your sources give you the impression that everybody in some huge ideological grouping (say "environmental deniers", or even "climate deniers") IS a complete idiot, then they might not be showing you the whole picture. Try to seek out the MOST credible arguments against your position - and strengthen them if you can. Don't just harp on the relatively few stupid people making stupid, easily debunked arguments and assume that the opposite of what they believe must be true - "reversed stupidity is not intelligence". Give the other side some benefit of the doubt. Otherwise you can't learn anything.
Feynman said some of the necessary stuff better than I could:
> the link you provide in "support" actually said we CAN feed our present numbers
The hungry aren't fed by unrealized possibilities. All the numbers do is fluctuate, they don't ever indicate that we're feeding the hungry. It's not at all surprising that the numbers fluctuate, we're talking about reality, not a computer model. But one thing doesn't change -- the shocking number of people who are starving at any given time.
When it comes to hunger, there's no point in arguing that that we can feed the hungry, as you put it. There's only whether we did -- everything else is hand-waving.
> In short, your link does not in any way support your argument.
Of course it does. The number of people who are starving is very high. Some years it's higher, some years lower, but it's never "acceptable" and it always supports the claim I made about it -- we aren't feeding the hungry.
The presence of unused stockpiles of food means nothing -- there are any number of reasons why that situation exists, but the bottom line is that the hungry aren't fed. Do you really think some conscientious aid worker goes home after a hard day's work, satisfied that he had fed the hungry in principle?
> Here's a useful tip: most people are not complete idiots.
Think like a scientist. Use the null hypothesis as your guide. Let yourself be pleasantly surprised by what people know, but never assume that people know what they need to know to have any given conversation or deal with any given problem. The consequences of that mistake vary between foolish and dangerous.
Yes, very familiar with this article -- I use it in my anti-psychology campaign. For some reason, many psychologists think it identifies psychology as a science, when it clearly does the opposite.
> But one thing doesn't change -- the shocking number of people who are starving at any given time.
But that one thing DOES change! It improves! In what sense is the vast improvement since the 1990s not change?
> we aren't feeding the hungry.
We ARE. Hunger is becoming less prevalent, worldwide. Again, here's a gapminder chart (are you looking at these?). This one shows calories consumed per person, all countries, plotted against GDP, over time. Notice how at the start most of the mass of the chart is BELOW 2000 calories/day; at the end of it all but a few countries are ABOVE that line. Progress is occurring, even in very populous countries. Even in countries with a high rate of population growth. How do you explain that fact?
> When it comes to hunger, there's no point in arguing that that we can feed the hungry
If you meant to claim we don't feed the hungry, you should have said that. But you said can't. While giving a link to support it that said we can, and what's more, that showed that we were.
Agricultural technology is still progressing and we could probably feed any population growth beyond any current prediction of human population.