All we need is food!

I am now unashamedly homophobic. This document about global food security on the John Innes Centre website makes me wonder how stupid can we possibly get.

How can perfectly reasonable human beings think that food is our only problem? How can they NOT realize that food is the problem? I don't mean shortage of food, but the easy availability of food. We think that by increasing food production we can sustain a larger human population on earth. Human beings don't just need food. Once they have enough food to survive they want other things. First, food production has some environmental cost then the higher desires of human being have higher environmental costs. Once we have food we are not content to walk, we want cars, trains, airplanes etc. (Maslow's triangle). And what about habitat? When human population increases where does it go? It encroaches upon the habitat of other species. It replaces the wild species with domesticated ones and if any wild species poses a threat to the domesticated ones then it is killed off.

So I think that all programs to increase global food production should be stopped. Instead, available resources should be spent on educating people and making them realize that there is a limit to the population that can be sustained comfortably on this earth.

I am not saying that the clock should be turned back on all the technological progress we have made since the discovery of fire. It is this technological progress which allows us to know about our environment and also to know when something is not right about it. We have the knowledge but not the will to act according to that knowledge.

We are unwilling to question the right of people to have children. May be this is a social or cultural thing but this is one right people have to question in their fellow human beings. My suggestion is the the right to have one child should remain unquestionable but we should be forced to think a lot before deciding to have second and subsequent children. Like it or not, people can only be made to think in terms of money and comfort. So their money and comfort should be used as a tool to make them think. If the child support for one child is 1 then for two children it should not be 2 but 1.5. For three it should be 2. What I am suggesting is a method of diminishing returns. Parents should be allowed, even encouraged, to have a tubectomy or vascectomy if they want to so they do not have to worry about having children by accident.

Something more worrying comes to my mind. And that is that scientists know that an increasing human population is not sustainable but they deliberately keep quiet about it. They even exploit the emotions we have for human life to get science funding agencies to fund their research. And funding agencies exploit the same emotion to keep the politicians happy. Politicians play the same game to keep the voters happy. Someone has to break this chain and say clearly that further population growth is not sustainable and that we should stop all efforts to increase food production and focus our efforts on education which I think is the best way to control our population growth.