7 ms·

Ah, not Borlaug again. Look, selective breeding and using fossil fuels for agriculture did increase output per unit of land. But the genetic specialization has

Ah, not Borlaug again. Look, selective breeding and using fossil fuels for agriculture did increase output per unit of land. But the genetic specialization has weakened the previous genetic diversity of food. Rendering our food supply more brittle, because we've created plants which need a very precise, artificial environment filled with external inputs. Now, we've added GMOs, which have decreased genetic diversity even more. (Massive monoculture plantings all with the same genes, with even more artificial needs.) The reason sexual reproduction succeeded was it creates as diverse of a genome as possible. By reducing that process, and substituting what we think of as "better", and then making it so 80% of our food supply shares the same genome, we're really setting ourselves up for a fall. The mythology of Borlaug is that there are these scientists silently saving the world off in a corner, our own super hero nerds to look up to. But, we're talking about massive systems here, things we really don't have a clue about. Can we outrun the adaptations of biology with our own GM technology? Can we keep using fossil fuels to outpace what we should be getting out of food? And with genetic modification, we're always taking something away when we substitute something else. There is truly no free lunch there. The point being, don't believe the mythology, and don't think this is a solved problem. Yes, we created a lot of cheap food using fossil fuels and brittle plant genomes, but what comes next?

zeckalpha 13y ago
GMO does not force one to use monoculture farming techniques. In fact, there is work being done on using GMO to develop better polyculture species (like the three sisters). The future of farming is polyculture, organic, and GMO.
- derleth 13y ago
  Ah, but GMO means Large Corporations, and Large Corporations are Inherently Evil. And that, I believe, is where their chain of logic pretty much stops.
Tuna-Fish 13y ago
Ah, not this stupid argument again. It's really easy to talk about decreasing genetic diversity when you have never known hunger. In India alone, the work of Norman Borlaug and his co-workers saved at least a hundred million lives. Before his intervention, large-scale famine and starvation in India was widely considered inevitable. Those are real people, whose lives you seem to weigh very little when you consider them against the still theoretical disadvantages of modern selective breeding.
- holri 13y ago
  This is not theoretical. Ground water is contaminated due to pesticides. Small farmers are loosing there farms and income because of the economics of scale and competition from food industries. Farmers are getting dependent on foreign companies and policies. Organic food tastes much better. The number of known varieties is decreasing and with it change and healthy diversity. The soil is exhausted. Rain forest is cleared.
  - anologwintermut 13y ago
    Millions upon Millions of people starved before this stuff existed, and you point out that "organic food tastes much better." Honestly, wtf. Are you trying to get beheaded in the next French Revolution? The rest of your points are reasonable concerns, but need to be followed up by a very important question: are there alternatives that produce similar quantities of food for similar costs? Because until/unless there are, fixing the issues you raised means starving people to death.
    - holri 13y ago
      Is there a reason you only pickup up one point?
      - anologwintermut 13y ago
        Is there a reason you didn't read the rest of my comment? >The rest of your points are reasonable concerns, but need to be followed up by a very important question: are there alternatives that produce similar quantities of food for similar costs? Because until/unless there are, fixing the issues you raised means starving people to death.
zeteo 13y ago
Because what are the lives of hundreds of millions in the Third World, compared with the fears of entitled (sub)urbanites who have never produced their own food that we're twisting our connection with "Nature".
- burningion 13y ago
  Interesting assumption by all to think both that I haven't experienced hunger, and that I haven't lived in the third world. I've done both. Also interesting is that it's immediately assumed I'm an elitist first world asshole who's never had any real problems, simply because of some ridiculous abstract "risk" I insist on bringing up. These responses bring out the almost religious emotional investment of both sides of the argument. You're suggesting that logic must be applied to save lives, and I'm saying be careful. Things aren't as cut and dried as presented by either side.
  - mmatants 13y ago
    Why do you think that the response is addressing your person directly? It is saying that similar logic is employed by fairly powerful folks, and attacks that logic, not your own personal experience.
    - daliusd 13y ago
      It shouldn't matter who express the idea. It should only matter if idea is right or not. Just because it was expressed by someone you don't like it is not less right (or vice versa).
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - skylan_q 13y ago
    People are more interested in appeasing their "poor person abstraction guilt complex" than in actually looking for truth and pointing out potential problems. It's more important to ease one's guilt about the abstract notion of poor/hungry people than it is to actually help them.
option_greek 13y ago
From the Wikipedia article: Of environmental lobbyists he stated, "some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things". Apparently, people like you existed even then.
- RachelF 13y ago
  He was a great man, one who got his hands dirty.
antris 13y ago
using fossil fuels Can you explain what does fossil fuels have to do with this? And with genetic modification, we're always taking something away when we substitute something else What does this mean? Really. I don't understand this at all. Rendering our food supply more brittle, because we've created plants which need a very precise, artificial environment filled with external inputs Can you name examples of this "brittleness", how it is caused and how it has affected the food supply when compared to another way of farming (and what that other way exactly is)? making it so 80% of our food supply shares the same genome, we're really setting ourselves up for a fall Can you explain how having 80% of our food supply sharing the same genome is setting ourselves up for a fall?
- burningion 13y ago
  Sure thing! Here's a link from Oregon State giving a brief overview of the usage of fossil fuels in agriculture: http://people.oregonstate.edu/~muirp/fossfuel.htm http://people.oregonstate.edu/~muirp/fossfuel.htm Basically, we use nitrogen fertilizers derived from oil, pesticides derived from oil, harvesters which run on oil, herbicides derived from oil, irrigation which runs on oil, and the transporting infrastructure to delivery all of that food. As for the taking away something when we substitute something else: Biological organisms have a general amount of energy their capable of taking in and processing. Whenever you substitute another gene "part" into an organism, you lose your net output of energy. It means that "cost" of energy is spent in producing that side effect, and not elsewhere. IE not in defense against other organisms. As for the "brittleness" of genes: The entire point of sexual reproduction is to make it so there is as much diversity in the genome as possible. This makes it so one bacteria or virus can't unlock the genome of an entire species and wipe it all out. I think this also explains the last piece. We're exposed to a virus getting the code for a specific piece of that gene and wiping out all of that system very rapidly.
  - burningion 13y ago
    Being downvoted for not enough citations, I guess: For the energy load incurred by adding to the gene sequence: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/073497509500004A http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/07349750950... Brittleness of genes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_diversity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_diversity Potato famine in general.
sampo 13y ago
> "Rendering our food supply more brittle, because we've created plants which need a very precise, artificial environment filled with external inputs." Well yes, the farmer takes on some energy costs from the plant, by e.g. providing nutrients and protection from pests. In exchange to these external inputs, the plant provides us more food. The alternative would be more diverse, less efficient crops, and 1–2 billion less people. You may sound nice when you talk against fertilizers and pesticides, but if you rephrase and say that those 1–2 billion people should have never existed, you'll sound much darker.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  In a population overshoot scenario, the greater the population overshoot, the harder the crash. So, dark or not, yes, peaking world population well below present levels would put us in a much better position. Allowing more people to live endangers the future of technological civilization, if not the species. Sometimes a really long term vision is useful to contemplate: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-next-ten-billion-years.html http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-next-ten-...
carlosrt 13y ago
Solve this problem by starting a company. Build a portable vertical garden of 100+ plants (herbs, vege's and fruits) Install an Arduino, and a couple sensors, have this garden tweet when it's not getting enough water. Start a gardening company in your town, managing these gardens for families. Congratulations, you just hacked how to start an organic farm. And you didn't have to buy any land, and you're guaranteed revenue for your service (you're not selling a product). You're now a "farmer" that earns ~$100 per hour per month on each family (e.g. $50/month at 15 minutes every 2 weeks). Now scale.
Tichy 13y ago
If it is not sustainable, this saving of a billion lives might have come at the expense of killing several billions of future lives.
- philwelch 13y ago
  Meanwhile, economic development leads to dropping birth rates. The entire first world is below replacement birth rate. So it's not a Malthusian catastrophe, it's just a question of increasing yields and developing the rest of the world into a higher standard of living before we run out of runway.
  - Tichy 13y ago
    Do you know why ecvonomic development leads to dropping birth rates? Is thast really a law of nature? And what if economic development doesdn-'t keep up?
vsbuffalo 13y ago
> But the genetic specialization has weakened the previous genetic diversity of food. This is indeed true, but all crops we eat have lost diversity. Domestication implies selection on domestication traits, which means that there will be a drop in diversity. This is why we eat corn and not teosinte, large delicious tomatoes rather than tiny tomatoes, etc. We have selected on variability for certain traits to give us better crops. > Rendering our food supply more brittle, because we've created plants which need a very precise, artificial environment filled with external inputs. This is just farming. Agriculture by definition is changing landscapes by adding external plants, and tendering them. This has not made our food supply more brittle, but has allowed a degree of specialization that has allowed us to feed more mouths with less inputs. > Now, we've added GMOs, which have decreased genetic diversity even more. (Massive monoculture plantings all with the same genes, with even more artificial needs.) GMOs have nothing to do with diversity. You can breed varieties, crossing wild populations with domesticated ones, and then add in a transgene at the end. This doesn't undo the diversity you've added through wide crosses beforehand. We grow monoculture crops because we need consistency for consumers. Look at apples: sure we could have apples that are all genetically different in an orchid. But traits like flowering time, color, taste, texture would be all different. Consumers would eat less apples because many are just gross, and this would lead to huge wastes in agriculture. There's a reason we do monoculture. > The reason sexual reproduction succeeded was it creates as diverse of a genome as possible. By reducing that process, and substituting what we think of as "better", and then making it so 80% of our food supply shares the same genome, we're really setting ourselves up for a fall. See above. But also, all organisms experience such risks. Even diverse ones. This is why extinction happens. Modern molecular breeding techniques greatly alleviates this because we can see which varieties confer resistance to a pathogen or pest, and then breed in those select traits. We maintain consistency in product but add borrow diversity from resistance loci. Borlaug's success was very simple: no GMO, just simple breeding techniques. He bred for semi-dwarf traits, which allow most of a plant's energy to go towards creating grain rather than vegetative mass. How is this inefficient? Why would it be more optimal for us to dump fertilizer and use agriculture space and have it go towards vegetative mass rather than something that feeds people? I agree agriculture is not great for land, but our best option is to make it as efficient as possible. I suggest you study breeding and agriculture if you wish to argue on these topics. These incorrect views spread very harmful misinformation around.
dredmorbius 13y ago
Ah, not Borlaug again. You're doing him a disservice. He's a valuable reference both for what he's done to address a pressing problem, and for what the consequences of those actions have been. Borlaug himself addressed the issue of population and the needs to control it ultimately, quoted directly in the Wikipedia article: Besides increasing the worldwide food supply, early in his career Borlaug stated that taking steps to decrease the rate of population growth will also be necessary to prevent food shortages. In his Nobel Lecture of 1970, Borlaug stated, "Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace of the 'Population Monster' ... If it continues to increase at the estimated present rate of two percent a year, the world population will reach 6.5 billion by the year 2000. Currently, with each second, or tick of the clock, about 2.2 additional people are added to the world population. The rhythm of increase will accelerate to 2.7, 3.3, and 4.0 for each tick of the clock by 1980, 1990, and 2000, respectively, unless man becomes more realistic and preoccupied about this impending doom. The tick-tock of the clock will continually grow louder and more menacing each decade. Where will it all end?" And yes, he later said he thought that 10 billion people could be fed (though that doesn't address other needs of those 10 billion and whether or not they can be adequately supported in other ways. My own sense is that long-term sustainable population in a post-carbon world is likely on the order of 0.5 - 2 billion, though I'd allow for halving or doubling that depending on other factors. Remember Eric Sevareid's Law: The chief source of problems is solutions.
austinz 13y ago
At the least, we buy more time to develop more sustainable technologies and/or implement humane population control to arrest and break world population growth, because: - the possibility still exists that we can have these things and a soft landing, - the alternative was millions of people starving to death in the short term - a natural course correction, but still a horrific one. That being said, realistic (technical, political, etc) proposals for humanely arresting population growth are few and far between. China is pilloried for its (often monstrous) population control policy, but the Chinese population has stabilized. What sort of policy are we proposing for the countries with the greatest population growth, those with few economic resources, rather weak governments, and reluctant, justifiably suspicious populations? Look at global warming - how effective has the "you'll have to suffer slower economic growth, but it's for the sake of the entire world" argument been in the eyes of developing countries? Why would it be any different here?
- philwelch 13y ago
  First world countries have near or below replacement birth rates. So help the rest of the world develop to that level of wealth.

zeckalpha 13y ago

GMO does not force one to use monoculture farming techniques. In fact, there is work being done on using GMO to develop better polyculture species (like the three sisters). The future of farming is polyculture, organic, and GMO.

derleth 13y ago
Ah, but GMO means Large Corporations, and Large Corporations are Inherently Evil. And that, I believe, is where their chain of logic pretty much stops.

Tuna-Fish 13y ago

Ah, not this stupid argument again. It's really easy to talk about decreasing genetic diversity when you have never known hunger. In India alone, the work of Norman Borlaug and his co-workers saved at least a hundred million lives. Before his intervention, large-scale famine and starvation in India was widely considered inevitable. Those are real people, whose lives you seem to weigh very little when you consider them against the still theoretical disadvantages of modern selective breeding.

holri 13y ago
This is not theoretical. Ground water is contaminated due to pesticides. Small farmers are loosing there farms and income because of the economics of scale and competition from food industries. Farmers are getting dependent on foreign companies and policies. Organic food tastes much better. The number of known varieties is decreasing and with it change and healthy diversity. The soil is exhausted. Rain forest is cleared.
- anologwintermut 13y ago
  Millions upon Millions of people starved before this stuff existed, and you point out that "organic food tastes much better." Honestly, wtf. Are you trying to get beheaded in the next French Revolution? The rest of your points are reasonable concerns, but need to be followed up by a very important question: are there alternatives that produce similar quantities of food for similar costs? Because until/unless there are, fixing the issues you raised means starving people to death.
  - holri 13y ago
    Is there a reason you only pickup up one point?
    - anologwintermut 13y ago
      Is there a reason you didn't read the rest of my comment? >The rest of your points are reasonable concerns, but need to be followed up by a very important question: are there alternatives that produce similar quantities of food for similar costs? Because until/unless there are, fixing the issues you raised means starving people to death.

zeteo 13y ago

Because what are the lives of hundreds of millions in the Third World, compared with the fears of entitled (sub)urbanites who have never produced their own food that we're twisting our connection with "Nature".

burningion 13y ago
Interesting assumption by all to think both that I haven't experienced hunger, and that I haven't lived in the third world. I've done both. Also interesting is that it's immediately assumed I'm an elitist first world asshole who's never had any real problems, simply because of some ridiculous abstract "risk" I insist on bringing up. These responses bring out the almost religious emotional investment of both sides of the argument. You're suggesting that logic must be applied to save lives, and I'm saying be careful. Things aren't as cut and dried as presented by either side.
- mmatants 13y ago
  Why do you think that the response is addressing your person directly? It is saying that similar logic is employed by fairly powerful folks, and attacks that logic, not your own personal experience.
  - daliusd 13y ago
    It shouldn't matter who express the idea. It should only matter if idea is right or not. Just because it was expressed by someone you don't like it is not less right (or vice versa).
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- skylan_q 13y ago
  People are more interested in appeasing their "poor person abstraction guilt complex" than in actually looking for truth and pointing out potential problems. It's more important to ease one's guilt about the abstract notion of poor/hungry people than it is to actually help them.

option_greek 13y ago

From the Wikipedia article: Of environmental lobbyists he stated, "some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things". Apparently, people like you existed even then.

RachelF 13y ago
He was a great man, one who got his hands dirty.

antris 13y ago

using fossil fuels Can you explain what does fossil fuels have to do with this? And with genetic modification, we're always taking something away when we substitute something else What does this mean? Really. I don't understand this at all. Rendering our food supply more brittle, because we've created plants which need a very precise, artificial environment filled with external inputs Can you name examples of this "brittleness", how it is caused and how it has affected the food supply when compared to another way of farming (and what that other way exactly is)? making it so 80% of our food supply shares the same genome, we're really setting ourselves up for a fall Can you explain how having 80% of our food supply sharing the same genome is setting ourselves up for a fall?

burningion 13y ago
Sure thing! Here's a link from Oregon State giving a brief overview of the usage of fossil fuels in agriculture: http://people.oregonstate.edu/~muirp/fossfuel.htm http://people.oregonstate.edu/~muirp/fossfuel.htm Basically, we use nitrogen fertilizers derived from oil, pesticides derived from oil, harvesters which run on oil, herbicides derived from oil, irrigation which runs on oil, and the transporting infrastructure to delivery all of that food. As for the taking away something when we substitute something else: Biological organisms have a general amount of energy their capable of taking in and processing. Whenever you substitute another gene "part" into an organism, you lose your net output of energy. It means that "cost" of energy is spent in producing that side effect, and not elsewhere. IE not in defense against other organisms. As for the "brittleness" of genes: The entire point of sexual reproduction is to make it so there is as much diversity in the genome as possible. This makes it so one bacteria or virus can't unlock the genome of an entire species and wipe it all out. I think this also explains the last piece. We're exposed to a virus getting the code for a specific piece of that gene and wiping out all of that system very rapidly.
- burningion 13y ago
  Being downvoted for not enough citations, I guess: For the energy load incurred by adding to the gene sequence: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/073497509500004A http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/07349750950... Brittleness of genes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_diversity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_diversity Potato famine in general.

sampo 13y ago

> "Rendering our food supply more brittle, because we've created plants which need a very precise, artificial environment filled with external inputs." Well yes, the farmer takes on some energy costs from the plant, by e.g. providing nutrients and protection from pests. In exchange to these external inputs, the plant provides us more food. The alternative would be more diverse, less efficient crops, and 1–2 billion less people. You may sound nice when you talk against fertilizers and pesticides, but if you rephrase and say that those 1–2 billion people should have never existed, you'll sound much darker.

dredmorbius 13y ago
In a population overshoot scenario, the greater the population overshoot, the harder the crash. So, dark or not, yes, peaking world population well below present levels would put us in a much better position. Allowing more people to live endangers the future of technological civilization, if not the species. Sometimes a really long term vision is useful to contemplate: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-next-ten-billion-years.html http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-next-ten-...

carlosrt 13y ago

Solve this problem by starting a company. Build a portable vertical garden of 100+ plants (herbs, vege's and fruits) Install an Arduino, and a couple sensors, have this garden tweet when it's not getting enough water. Start a gardening company in your town, managing these gardens for families. Congratulations, you just hacked how to start an organic farm. And you didn't have to buy any land, and you're guaranteed revenue for your service (you're not selling a product). You're now a "farmer" that earns ~$100 per hour per month on each family (e.g. $50/month at 15 minutes every 2 weeks). Now scale.

Tichy 13y ago

If it is not sustainable, this saving of a billion lives might have come at the expense of killing several billions of future lives.

philwelch 13y ago
Meanwhile, economic development leads to dropping birth rates. The entire first world is below replacement birth rate. So it's not a Malthusian catastrophe, it's just a question of increasing yields and developing the rest of the world into a higher standard of living before we run out of runway.
- Tichy 13y ago
  Do you know why ecvonomic development leads to dropping birth rates? Is thast really a law of nature? And what if economic development doesdn-'t keep up?

vsbuffalo 13y ago

> But the genetic specialization has weakened the previous genetic diversity of food. This is indeed true, but all crops we eat have lost diversity. Domestication implies selection on domestication traits, which means that there will be a drop in diversity. This is why we eat corn and not teosinte, large delicious tomatoes rather than tiny tomatoes, etc. We have selected on variability for certain traits to give us better crops. > Rendering our food supply more brittle, because we've created plants which need a very precise, artificial environment filled with external inputs. This is just farming. Agriculture by definition is changing landscapes by adding external plants, and tendering them. This has not made our food supply more brittle, but has allowed a degree of specialization that has allowed us to feed more mouths with less inputs. > Now, we've added GMOs, which have decreased genetic diversity even more. (Massive monoculture plantings all with the same genes, with even more artificial needs.) GMOs have nothing to do with diversity. You can breed varieties, crossing wild populations with domesticated ones, and then add in a transgene at the end. This doesn't undo the diversity you've added through wide crosses beforehand. We grow monoculture crops because we need consistency for consumers. Look at apples: sure we could have apples that are all genetically different in an orchid. But traits like flowering time, color, taste, texture would be all different. Consumers would eat less apples because many are just gross, and this would lead to huge wastes in agriculture. There's a reason we do monoculture. > The reason sexual reproduction succeeded was it creates as diverse of a genome as possible. By reducing that process, and substituting what we think of as "better", and then making it so 80% of our food supply shares the same genome, we're really setting ourselves up for a fall. See above. But also, all organisms experience such risks. Even diverse ones. This is why extinction happens. Modern molecular breeding techniques greatly alleviates this because we can see which varieties confer resistance to a pathogen or pest, and then breed in those select traits. We maintain consistency in product but add borrow diversity from resistance loci. Borlaug's success was very simple: no GMO, just simple breeding techniques. He bred for semi-dwarf traits, which allow most of a plant's energy to go towards creating grain rather than vegetative mass. How is this inefficient? Why would it be more optimal for us to dump fertilizer and use agriculture space and have it go towards vegetative mass rather than something that feeds people? I agree agriculture is not great for land, but our best option is to make it as efficient as possible. I suggest you study breeding and agriculture if you wish to argue on these topics. These incorrect views spread very harmful misinformation around.

dredmorbius 13y ago

Ah, not Borlaug again. You're doing him a disservice. He's a valuable reference both for what he's done to address a pressing problem, and for what the consequences of those actions have been. Borlaug himself addressed the issue of population and the needs to control it ultimately, quoted directly in the Wikipedia article: Besides increasing the worldwide food supply, early in his career Borlaug stated that taking steps to decrease the rate of population growth will also be necessary to prevent food shortages. In his Nobel Lecture of 1970, Borlaug stated, "Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace of the 'Population Monster' ... If it continues to increase at the estimated present rate of two percent a year, the world population will reach 6.5 billion by the year 2000. Currently, with each second, or tick of the clock, about 2.2 additional people are added to the world population. The rhythm of increase will accelerate to 2.7, 3.3, and 4.0 for each tick of the clock by 1980, 1990, and 2000, respectively, unless man becomes more realistic and preoccupied about this impending doom. The tick-tock of the clock will continually grow louder and more menacing each decade. Where will it all end?" And yes, he later said he thought that 10 billion people could be fed (though that doesn't address other needs of those 10 billion and whether or not they can be adequately supported in other ways. My own sense is that long-term sustainable population in a post-carbon world is likely on the order of 0.5 - 2 billion, though I'd allow for halving or doubling that depending on other factors. Remember Eric Sevareid's Law: The chief source of problems is solutions.

austinz 13y ago

At the least, we buy more time to develop more sustainable technologies and/or implement humane population control to arrest and break world population growth, because: - the possibility still exists that we can have these things and a soft landing, - the alternative was millions of people starving to death in the short term - a natural course correction, but still a horrific one. That being said, realistic (technical, political, etc) proposals for humanely arresting population growth are few and far between. China is pilloried for its (often monstrous) population control policy, but the Chinese population has stabilized. What sort of policy are we proposing for the countries with the greatest population growth, those with few economic resources, rather weak governments, and reluctant, justifiably suspicious populations? Look at global warming - how effective has the "you'll have to suffer slower economic growth, but it's for the sake of the entire world" argument been in the eyes of developing countries? Why would it be any different here?

philwelch 13y ago
First world countries have near or below replacement birth rates. So help the rest of the world develop to that level of wealth.