One Of The Inestimable Miracles…
By Mitch Berg
…I’ve seen in my lifetime is this: when I was a kid, famine still stalked Africa and Asia.
And today, worldwide, obesity is a bigger problem than hunger, in the third world. This has never happened in all of human history.
March 24th, 2022 at 6:40 am
The possibility of famine in third world shitholes is greatly exaggerated. In a few more years, 1/2 the population of Africa will have migrated to England and the EU, where as Berg notes, they will soon be as fat as hogs on their diet of Supersize Happy Meals.
The real danger is a decade in the future, when Europeans can no longer afford to feed their dependent hoards, and themselves become Happy Meals.
March 24th, 2022 at 9:41 am
Say, didn’t the Egyptians once grow so much food that they could squirrel enough away for the seven years of bad crops? And still sell to their neighbors? Did something happen to the Nile? Or people who might assist in farming? Couldn’t appropriate measure be taken with all the 5hit these people produce to make their own fertilizer?
(Honest question) Do all the fertilizer ingredients just disappear when taken up by plants? Or can they to some extent be recovered, post-harvest, from the plant remains in the fields?
And don’t we divert thousands of bushels of corn and soybeans every year to the pointless virtue signaling of ethanol production? I know, I know, most of the world doesn’t actually “eat”, per se, corn and soybeans, but still…
March 24th, 2022 at 12:23 pm
I’m thinking the Aswan dam, jdm. The extraordinary fertility of ancient Egypt, which exported grains as far as Rome if I remember correctly, was fed by annual flooding of the Nile. You have some other things in play–much lower population for starters, but without modern fertilizers or hybrids–but by and large, the fertile soil that washed down from Sudan is now simply dropping to the bottom of the reservoir south of Aswan, and flood plaines that used to be cultivated are now towns and uncultivated deserts.
Regarding food security, it strikes me that the U.S. could replace Ukrainian grain production in a heartbeat if we simply stopped burning our crops. Calculation; Ukraine grows 60 million tons in a good year, but the U.S. grows ~15 billion bushels of corn annually, 40% (6 billion bushels) of which is used for ethanol. That’s about 150 million tons we’re wasting.
For that matter, it’s said that 35-40% of food is thrown away in the U.S. That’s another ~130 million people we could feed, and I’m guessing western Europe has some similar issues.
But that noted, I’m back at something Rush Limbaugh liked to note; where you find starvation in the modern era, you generally have totalitarian government. Fix that problem (yes it’s tough), you have more or less ensured food security barring a natural disaster closing in on Noah’s Flood.
March 24th, 2022 at 1:34 pm
bike;
Soybeans return nutrients to the soil. They are the second largest cash crop in Minnesota and, if I remember correctly, the third largest in the U.S. My uncle had half of his acreage planted in corn and half in soybeans. He rotated them every year to save on fertilizer. Corn is a very heavy feeder, but when he planted in the previous year’s bean fields, he used 1/3 of the fertilizer.
March 24th, 2022 at 5:50 pm
Boss, absolutely. I’ve seen strips of corn between alfalfa for the same reason, and noted when I used to own land near Rockford IL that my crop rotation had gone from wheat-beans-corn to corn-corn-corn. I’ve also noticed as a baker that it’s gotten very hard to find some specialty flours like rye in the past few years.
My guess is that if we stopped subsidizing corn, we’d end up with a lot more pasture, a lot more alfalfa, a lot more rye and oats, and a lot more legumes–and a lot less corn. We might even see people growing regular vegetables more.