Forum Post: Population Growing
Posted 10 years ago on Aug. 19, 2013, 12:04 p.m. EST by Phanya2011
(908)
from Tucson, AZ
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Someone pointed out that we can feed 11 billion people, so what's the problem? They did not mention that we have 7.106 billion already and have not even started feeding them. For comparison, in 1350 -- that's 663 years ago -- the entire population had grown from Year 1 of 200 million to 370 million. That's about what the U.S. has now. It's beginning to look like human kind not only will not survive, but it should not, unless we allow ourselves to care about each other more than pretty colored pieces of paper.
We don't need to feed 11 billion people. 11 billion people need to be able to feed themselves. So long as someone is feeding another, someone will exercise control over another.
It's never been about feeding people. Food isn't produced for others to consume for free. Food costs resources to produce and food is sold to compensate the cost of those resources as well as for a profit.
People go hungry because they cannot feed themselves, not because someone else isn't feeding them. It isn't anyone's responsibility to feed non-dependents. However, it should be everyone's collective responsibility to ensure that every able bodied person in society is able to feed themselves. When the individual families of society become self-sufficient in feeding themselves, population growth becomes an issue of each individual family on its land rather than an issue of society as a whole. This, of course, would require a dramatic restructuring of society in which everyone would be members of agrarian based communities. This will never happen in the industrial urban societies of the world but could happen in the impoverished 'Third World' countries of the world where the need mainly exists. Unfortunately, the corporations and global financial institutions of the 'First World' along with the elitist governments of the 'Third World' are dispossessing the impoverished populations that had been capable of feeding themselves in the past.
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True; I did not mean it that others do the feeding. What I intended to say was we have to make people and planet more important than profit. Thank you for the clarification and the informaton.