4 ms·

Re > dramatically reduce world hunger is a direct consequence of humans' capacity to improve crop yields such as rice and corn through breeding and engineering

Re > dramatically reduce world hunger is a direct consequence of humans' capacity to improve crop yields such as rice and corn through breeding and engineering. and > the technical plant wizardry that prevented the starvation of millions of people. What exactly are you referring to? In my mind, crop domestication and selective breeding is what allowed population growth, not what prevented starvation. In other words, population grew thanks to the increase in production, rather than the increase coming to combat decline. Was that a wrong notion?

kirubakaran 5y ago
> In my mind, crop domestication and selective breeding is what allowed population growth, not what prevented starvation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution "Norman Borlaug [...] is credited with saving over a billion people from starvation"
- i_am_proteus 5y ago
  This was selective breeding of plants in order to take advantage of fossil fuel and mineral fertilizers and industrialization of fossil-fuel-powered machines to produce more food per unit land. Says so right on the wikipedia dot org web site you showed the link to: >It was associated with chemical fertilizers, agrochemicals, and controlled water-supply (usually involving irrigation) and newer methods of cultivation, including mechanization. Bioengineering to convert petroleum products into something people could eat. Really, preventing famine and causing populations to increase are the same thing. A food surplus lets populations grow, a food shortage causes famine.
interblag 5y ago
I think that, at the margin, very few people make a decision about whether to have kids based on global food supply projections. And, at any moment, a lot of population growth is just "baked in" by the birth rates of previous generations. Taking those two things together, I think there is a good argument for the "prevented starvation" interpretation.

kirubakaran 5y ago

> In my mind, crop domestication and selective breeding is what allowed population growth, not what prevented starvation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution "Norman Borlaug [...] is credited with saving over a billion people from starvation"

i_am_proteus 5y ago
This was selective breeding of plants in order to take advantage of fossil fuel and mineral fertilizers and industrialization of fossil-fuel-powered machines to produce more food per unit land. Says so right on the wikipedia dot org web site you showed the link to: >It was associated with chemical fertilizers, agrochemicals, and controlled water-supply (usually involving irrigation) and newer methods of cultivation, including mechanization. Bioengineering to convert petroleum products into something people could eat. Really, preventing famine and causing populations to increase are the same thing. A food surplus lets populations grow, a food shortage causes famine.

interblag 5y ago

I think that, at the margin, very few people make a decision about whether to have kids based on global food supply projections. And, at any moment, a lot of population growth is just "baked in" by the birth rates of previous generations. Taking those two things together, I think there is a good argument for the "prevented starvation" interpretation.