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The Forum > Article Comments > Competing interests - food or fuel? > Comments

Competing interests - food or fuel? : Comments

By Mark Rosegrant, published 3/1/2008

Biofuel production and climate change present unprecedented challenges that will shape the world’s food situation.

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Aye, there is the rub.

Reminds me (I don't know why) of 'Corn for Oil' scandals much similar to our very own wheat for oil, AWB and 'Team-Howard' ignorance?

A bit flippant for starters maybe, but this is a very good article by Mark Rosegrant and deserves serious discussion.

I understand the Bush Administration has paid huge subsidies to South American countries so that they can clear their forests to plant corn - not to feed people, but to supply the 'gas-guzzlers' up north with biofuel.

Whose next?
Posted by Q&A, Thursday, 3 January 2008 9:53:05 AM
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Apart from second generation biofuels there is also electrification of transport (eg battery cars) and eating less meat to make more crop land available. However the main conclusion I would draw is that under current technological know-how the world has more than enough people. If the average citizen of the future should be entitled to drive a car, eat a full, varied diet and travel in planes then population must reduce. I don't think the current 'haves' giving up more and more for the 'have nots' solves the long term problem. When fuel (petro or bio) is $3 per litre it is the rich who will still fly and drive while recent gains by the poor disappear. Unfortunately some decades of turmoil may be ahead before the sustainability view prevails.
Posted by Taswegian, Thursday, 3 January 2008 3:51:43 PM
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An interesting article, though a couple of hard realities have been bypassed in the fog of words.
There was a suggestion of a possibility for less-developed regions, such as Sub-Saharan Africa, benefiting from food exports when the price of food products rise.
As things currently stand, these regions already have difficulties in producing enough food for home consumption. What opportunities for future exports in the face of already deteriorating water supplies and climates? And if they need to continue supplementing their own products from world markets, what economic prospects do they have for paying for such purchases?

The less-developed regions invariably have populations larger than they can cater for. And those numbers continue to expand. The article, by not factoring in such a multiplier of all those other problems it lists, gives little practical advice for avoiding approaching tragedies.
Posted by colinsett, Thursday, 3 January 2008 4:20:43 PM
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The author makes various references to the African sub Sahara
region. Fact is that this area has one of the fastest population
growth rates in the world and what they need is some good old
family planning, which millions of women do not have available
to them.

We have sent boatload after boatload of free food to the region,
the result being ever more mouths to feed. So cheap food is
clearly not the answer to their problems.

Yes, there has been a spike in wheat markets, but if the question
is examined further, its clear that alot more could have been
grown. Fact is that 12-18 months ago, when decisions to plant
were made, prices were so low, that many simply didn't bother
planting. Higher prices will encourage production, where as
if they don't cover the cost of production, why bother?

In the end, energy is energy, if for food or other uses. Its not
the role of farmers to subsidise the world's masses. Taxpayers
are quite able to do that.

What we now have, is a huge spike in food production costs.
Oil has skyrocketed, many fertiliser prices have doubled, so
have some common herbides such as Roundup, used world wide.
So the level of break-even cost has risen.

It won't affect first world consumers much, as the actual
wheat in a loaf of bread is a mere few cents. Its processing
and marketing that are the big cost items, not the ingredients.
Posted by Yabby, Thursday, 3 January 2008 7:07:18 PM
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I do not think this article appreciates the imminent effects of the fuel from food policies currently being implemented around the world.

The recent US Energy Bill mandated that about 150 million tonnes of corn be converted to ethanol, equating to approx. 12% of the worlds grain production. This will happen sooner that later if oil prices remain at current levels.
Adding the EU’s biofuel efforts and that of sundry other countries, it is easy to see the poor, particularly the urban poor, being outbid for their food needs. Those trading grain futures are already taking positions three years out at prices at least double those of two years ago.

This is now the only scenario until 2nd generation biofuels become a reality, perhaps in 5-10 years and hopefully producing biofuels cheaper than from grains.

Food shortages are the stuff of civil unrest, wars that spill over national boundaries, starvation and misery. Are the rich of the world prepared to knowingly cause the shortages?

Just as mice plagues are built on a period of plenty, the urban poor have built their numbers through migration and reproduction on the back of cheap, available food.
Are we prepared to emulate the cycle of a mice plague and so demonstrate we are little better than the apes we evolved from?
Posted by Goeff, Thursday, 3 January 2008 10:18:17 PM
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Last year, wheat, corn and soybean prices rose to record levels and vast tracts of land are being cleared for corn and palm oil plantations to feed the biofuel industry.

Bio-fuels are being touted as the new panacea for global warming. This fuel is being introduced without much thought about the wider implications.

The following article from India says it better than I can.

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2008/01/04/stories/2008010450970900.htm

Like the author says, “It is the foreign companies that will gain … and make a lot of money at the cost of the country’s food security.”
Posted by Q&A, Friday, 4 January 2008 6:05:18 AM
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This idea of trying to convert grain into fuel as environmentally friendly is rubbish. It is nothing more than the developed world being addicted to their automobiles. Forget it, it changes nothing. Get out of your car.
Posted by Porphyrin, Friday, 4 January 2008 2:18:05 PM
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Q&A, farmers should be beneficiaries as well. The price of wheat and other produce has been static for too long, and now there needs to be some catch-up for the inflation thats been going on around them. Until this last season wheat prices were the same as 20 years ago, but the price of, a tractor doubled, a farm ute has tripled, and thankfully I have forgotten what fertiliser cost then,it may be too much to bear.

Our farmers have been living in a first world economy getting third world prices. Something needed to happen to put some profitability back into farming, otherwise production was set to decline at a time while population is still growing.
Posted by rojo, Friday, 4 January 2008 4:01:02 PM
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Yeah rojo, I agree with you 100% about the farmers needing to be beneficiaries as well.

I understand all too well, myself having a strong connection to rural and regional Australia – with special regard in water resources and land use management. City folk don’t really appreciate the struggles people on the land go through, and will continue to go through.

You talk of inflation, it is going to get worse before it gets better – that is a given, regardless of who won the last election.

It is tough … and our political and business leaders (from all sides of the fence and all corners of the globe) are the ones that are going to have to deal with it because … the impacts of climate change is going to cost everybody – somewhere, somehow, sometime.

What is tragic? The people who deny that global warming or climate change is happening are going to be the first to complain that not enough is being done to curb the rising costs to the economy, community and environment from the very effects that they deny is happening in the first place.

This is why I am also in full agreement with Goeff when he says; “Food shortages are the stuff of civil unrest, wars that spill over national boundaries, starvation and misery. Are the rich of the world prepared to knowingly cause the shortages?”

I would add that the major cause of food shortages will in large part be due to unsustainable development and (mis)use of our finite resources.

The rich will do ok; the less well off will suffer ... there really does seem to be a dilemma in this scenario.
Posted by Q&A, Friday, 4 January 2008 7:39:03 PM
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Q&A, you raise good points, and so does Geoff. My current thoughts are that a growing population need an expanding food supply, and productivity(on a world scale) wasn't going to keep up at current prices. In that scenario people starve when a shortfall occurs. At least with bio-fuels there will be a stockpile of grains which can be diverted for food when need arises. The biggest issue is mandated fuel which would basically not allow this to happen, because the fuel must be produced no matter the cost of feedstocks. Currently the price of wheat is beyond the viable cost of ethanol production, and I believe corn is break even.
From memory half or so of grain production is used to feed animals, so I guess in the end it'll come down to spending our money on non-pasture fed products(chicken/pork) or fuel at increased prices.

I certainly don't know what the answer is for the poor, only that western production can't continue at prices they can afford. Unsubsidised production anyway.
Mandates will have to go once they've served their purpose of getting the industry started, we do need a way to encourage surpluses of grain that won't crash the food market.

A really big concern I have is the use of fertilisers whose production is heavily reliant on natural gas, and our other minerals are of finite supply. I'm not sure our current uses are factoring this in.
Posted by rojo, Saturday, 5 January 2008 11:50:54 AM
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Given the potential severe impact of food shortages, suggests that we should clearly understand the needs for the other interest(fuel).

The mainstream view is that man produced CO2 is causing warming and will continue to severe degrees. That is not what the reevalauted data, new data, and other technical assessments are indicating. The problem is that it takes some techncial fluency to cut through the volume of articles, movies that have proliferated to understand that there is nothing out of the ordinary that doesn't line up with naturally occuring historic cycles.

It seems hard to believe that these all spawn from a few sets of bad data that have proliferatd and been cited in so many other articles that it creates the appearance that a huge amount of novel techncial work solidly supports the theory.

Bottom line, is that if we jump on a CO2 warming bandwagon without letting the current accurate techncial assessments come out showing that the warming impact is minimal(at most) and potentially cooling as we enter a new solar cycle, it would be a disservice to millions of poor people in this world, and could almost be considered criminal. Note the incongruity of all this is that the opposite issue (cooling) may be the concern we should be thinking about.

Lastly, a potential use of public dollars for CO2 sequestration is a waste when such funds could be applied to cleaning the environment or other areas with real benefit to the human condition.

On a personal note, I have an engineering degree and have spent a lot of time reading up on this. I at first, believed the warming hypothesis(early1990's??), but it was from an uninformed technical position. I believed that the researchers had to be doing accurate work and must have been using acurate data. However, and possibly because I can understand some of the obscure analysis, I started reading the "rebuttals" and this is an amazing story for somemone to lay out for the public in as entertaining a way as the Al Gore movie.

Note: A good site on this topic is http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/
Posted by Garacka, Saturday, 5 January 2008 1:04:43 PM
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Have you noticed that believers in global warming (or anthropogenic climate change) also tend to be believers in "acid" oceans, peak oil, and alternative energy (wind turbines etc) They probably also tend to eat mung beans and lentils. Not that there's anything wrong with mung beans or lentils- very healthy...
Maybe Al Gore could use some...
Now they may have a point about "peak oil", although the "Economist" reckons that the present price of oil is more about global politics than actual oil shortages.
I'm wondering whether there is some linkage there.
Anyone like to comment?
Posted by Froggie, Saturday, 5 January 2008 3:27:27 PM
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Yabby, increased grain production will be from more marginal land increasing the prospect of crop failures/shortages, with the urban poor the losers again.
Also I don’t think China and India, our two largest wheat producers, will/can respond to price signals to the degree you will in Australia.

Anyway, what will stop the rich countries mandating even greater tonnes of grain to be converted to fuel?
Indeed, if oil stays above US$100 biofuel producers will not need a mandate to source grain at price levels out of the reach of the urban poor.

We must advocate a halt to this conversion of grain to ethanol, soyabeans to bio diesel and instead encourage the rich countries to pull out all stops to find a way to satisfy their need for energy security with second generation biofuels.

A ‘stop’ is that the second generation biomass will be most economically sourced between the tropics where photosynthetic activity is greater and growing season longer than in the rich EU/USA.
To develop this energy source will need First World money and expertise and would indeed contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gasses but as it is not in their own backyard, it would not provide secure energy to the rich, nor the control to enable them to amass greater riches.

So the rich will convert food to fuel, the urban poor will starve and my questions from my previous post remain
Posted by Goeff, Saturday, 5 January 2008 3:35:58 PM
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Froggie, I think you'll find that the speculators, as with oil,
have already moved into the grains market, making things look
worse then they are. If shortages are what people are concerned
about, they are free to store extra, but of course nobody wants
to wear the cost.

Alot of our situation right now, is due to the huge subsidies
paid by the EU, US etc, which kept world grain prices artificially
low for years. Corn farmers in Mexico went out of business,
Indian farmers committed suicide en masse. Alot more food can
be grown in the third world itself, if prices cover the cost
of growing it, which recently they have not. I see Afgahnistan
is screaming for wheat and complaining about cost. Well of
course their farmers stopped growing wheat and switched to
poppies, which are far more profitable.

Geoff, I'm not quite sure which urban poor in which areas
you are thinking of. As Rojo notes, most grain is actually
fed to livestock, not directly to people.

Perhaps some of the urban poor, working in low wage
factories to produce goods for the West, will have to
be paid a little more, to cover their rising food costs.
Western consumers have had a dream run of cheap goods
for far too long.

You won't stop the crops for energy story. Already in
my district, people are building their own biodiesel
plant, growing canola and mustard to create biodiesel.
Never underestimate farmers in eventually helping themselves,
if they get screwed by the marketplace for long enough,
as they have been in the past.
Posted by Yabby, Saturday, 5 January 2008 4:20:51 PM
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The conversion of land for biofuels will prove to be a bigger problem than CO2 itself.The price of oil will continue to rise with another 900 million Chinese,hundreds of millions of Indians etc still waiting to join the industrial revolution.

The real influence of CO2 is just conjecture.The rate at which we are using fossil fuels will see a need in the near future to replace them.Pop control is basicly ingnored.The power of Multi-Nationals will see more land used for fuel and hence more world instability with increasing numbers of poor.The biofuels will never provide enough for our wants.

It will be interesting to see if the Oil campanies either try to stifle and then own and control the development of solar energy since they don't yet own what comes from our Sun.We could see Govts taxing solar cells on our properties.Now that could be construed as daylight robbery as in the past,when people in England were taxed according to the number of windows they had.You will see proof of this in many old buildings where to this day,you see windows bricked up.
Posted by Arjay, Sunday, 6 January 2008 10:54:02 AM
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Geoff “Just as mice plagues are built on a period of plenty, the urban poor have built their numbers through migration and reproduction on the back of cheap, available food.”

Highlights the elephant in the room, the problem of demand for food has a strong, positive correlation with the world population.

The solution is not a carbon tax and the “socialism by stealth” hiding behind the climate change lobby.

The solution will only be found in resolving the address population growth and reverse it to population decline.

I would note, a few might obviously observe the reversal of commercial and economic “growth” inherent in that suggestion (vis economic recession and deflation) and my response, a modest world population, living fulfilled lives, is infinitely better than apparent wealth created by economic growth founded on starvation and misery.

Certainly the spirits are out of the Pandora’s box in terms of bio-fuels. We cannot put them back. What was once considered as food stock now has a new market to compete in and the consequences are obvious and unavoidable.

I am certain additional alternatives to fossil fuels, which do not divert from food stocks, will emerge as creative and innovative individuals play with the possibilities but the risk is their innovative energy will not produce results in sufficient time to prevent widespread famine.

Global warming and carbon emissions are diversions from and consequences of the fundamental issue of population growth.

Famine is a function of insufficient food to support a given population.

In food market terms:

a lot was done to address and improve the food “supply” side of the equation in the 20th century.

Curtailing world population numbers is to merely put the same efforts into containing and reducing the demand side of the equation in the 21st century
Posted by Col Rouge, Sunday, 6 January 2008 11:47:17 AM
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Col: "The solution will only be found in resolving the address population growth and reverse it to population decline."

Do you have any suggestions on how you might curtail population growth apart from removing the baby bonus, nuking or starving them?
Posted by Q&A, Sunday, 6 January 2008 3:34:15 PM
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*Do you have any suggestions on how you might curtail population growth apart from removing the baby bonus, nuking or starving them?*

You start by finally addressing the question of giving every woman
on the planet, access to family planning.

Your big problem will be the Vatican. They will fight you all
the way, deny that we have a population problem and move
heaven and earth to stop you doing that. Their lobbying
tentacles are enormous, they want to outbreed the muslims
after all. Their influence goes right through the third
world.

But in the end, its going to be that, or its back to
genocide and similar, where nature will sort it all out.

Kind of sad but true.
Posted by Yabby, Sunday, 6 January 2008 7:04:36 PM
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Yabby, the urban poor I refer to are the millions, perhaps billions of people crowding around all the cities and towns of the third world. Their carbon footprint and food demands are perhaps 1/50th of ours per capita.

Your later post regarding nature taking its course worries me. Australia is sitting here with plenty of land to grow food. When ‘nature’ takes its course, the stronger take over the weak and guess which camp we will be in. Our precious lifestyles and cropland, expensive from high grain prices, may depreciate somewhat.

Wouldn’t it be better to halt ‘fuel from food’, keep the peace in the world for a while longer and help satisfy non fossil energy needs of the world by developing our north as a source of second generation biomass energy ASAP.
Posted by Goeff, Sunday, 6 January 2008 9:27:07 PM
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Goeff, I would remind you, that Australia hardly matters, when it
comes to the global scene. Our major crop wheat, is around 10-20
million tonnes, compared to global production of 600 million tonnes.

There are solutions for the third world, but its up to them to
start to adopt them.

1. Things like family planning. It hardly exists in sub Saharan
Africa for instance.

2. Food production systems such as permaculture, which are far
more sustainable then Western agriculture. The third world have
the land, the labour, all they need is the knowledge and the will.

Don't forget the old saying" Give a man fish and you feed him
for a day. Teach him how to fish and he'll probably spend all
his time on his boat, drinking beer with his friends"

I hope you get my drift :)
Posted by Yabby, Sunday, 6 January 2008 9:52:52 PM
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The corollary Yabby: Muslims want to outbreed the Catholics?

Yabby, this is shaky – China and India are not Muslim or Catholic states and just look at their populations and stage of ‘development’.

“Family planning” is important, not just for every woman though. Really, this is hard to do in a patriarchal society – the men have just as much responsibility.

A good look at this 2005 study does put things into perspective.

http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/pop_challenges/Population_Challenges.pdf

Your last post: Yes, education is the most important. In terms of ‘developed’ societies:-

The better educated; the more developed.
The more developed; the more prosperous.
The more prosperous; the lower the fertility rate.

Of course, this is easier said than done.
Posted by Q&A, Sunday, 6 January 2008 9:58:12 PM
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Yabby,

Most grain may indeed be fed to animals in Australia, but this is not the case worldwide. According to the Earth Policy Institute

http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators/Grain/2006.htm

about 60% of the world's grain harvest is eaten directly by people, 36% is fed to animals, and the rest is used as fuel. This is only 3-4% now, but is growing at 20% per year. Up to a point feeding grain to animals is not wasteful, because, with uncertainties about weather, crop diseases, etc., it is necessary to plant more grain than will be needed for human food. If you get lucky and there is a big harvest, you feed the surplus to animals. If you are less lucky, you slaughter most of the animals and eat the grain yourself. It is worth noting that world grain production per person peaked in 1984.

I agree with you entirely about the negative influence of the Vatican. They are an important cause of human misery and mass extinctions.
Posted by Divergence, Monday, 7 January 2008 10:01:00 AM
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In this subject it is the scale of the problem stupid !

There was an article about what was needed in the US for biofuels,
mainly ethanol.
I did a back of envelope calculation adjusting for population.

It turns out we would need over 6000 ethanol producing factories
to supply Australia with a minimum of fuel.

Don't argue about the 6000, it may be 5000 or 7000 who knows for sure
but that is the scale of the problem.
Can you see it happening ?

The biggest problem is the governments refusal to discuss the coming
liquid fuel problem. I believe they understand it well enough but are
not prepared to be put in a position to admit that they have no
solution.

There is only one solution, electric transport and public transport.
In the meantime, government petrol rationing.
I doubt we have more than five years before we see it.
Posted by Bazz, Monday, 7 January 2008 11:14:38 AM
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*the men have just as much responsibility.*

Yup, but its always the women left holding the babies. In the
third world you are not talking about rights, but about survival.
In Africa rape is commonly used as a tool of war. So you need
to empower women to make choices about their lives.

If you want an understanding of how things go in Africa, Redmond
O'Hanlon's "No Mercy" about his travels through the Congo, is
a real eye opener. Commit murder and you get one week's jail.

As to food, today on Bloomberg, they were speculating if oil
would reach 200$ by the end of the year. Already the first bets
are being laid. The thing is, our population rose from 1.5 billion
to 6.5 billion on the back of cheap oil. Oil is involved in every
step of the production process. People will not bother to grow food,
unless they are compensated for their costs. So whichever way
you look at it, expensive oil means more expensive food.

To feed the third world, they have to start looking at other alternatives
to Western food production methods, based on oil.

Things like permaculture work extremely well and don't need
all that oil. If the third world want to surive, they will have
to learn to help themselves a bit more. We've led them up the
garden path a bit, with our oil based technologies.
Posted by Yabby, Monday, 7 January 2008 8:53:27 PM
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Q&A “Do you have any suggestions on how you might curtail population growth apart from removing the baby bonus, nuking or starving them”

Well the baby bonus is a pointless Aussie sideshow which has no real “global impact”

As for nuking or starving them.

Doing nothing about population growth and misdirecting research and development minds and resources into fatuous climate-change agendas is like “fiddling whilst Rome burns”.

Sooner or later nations will have to decide, maybe in exchange for the development handouts or world bank funds, to use cheap mass-produced contraceptives in their food and water supply (obviously produced by the libertarian capitalist pharmicists who acknowledge opportunity in freely supplying the market) or, maybe the nations with exploding populations will introduce the same "social policies" which China has used.

Either way, doing nothing will leave them with your other options, to nuke their neighbours or let their populations starve.

Of course, curtailing the Church of Romes influence would also help, as a political elite, they have had far too much "centralised dictatorial power" and influence to peddle an agenda which really only serves their own ends and against the interests of individuals be they the catholic faithful or heretics (like me).

Whilst the educated and able western economies have run, for the past 40 years of post baby-boomer blip, with stable populations, the less educated third world have been breeding like bunnies, blissfully ignorant of the realities of their own sustainability.

Sooner (more than later) the reality will no longer be avoidable and the elephant in the room will trumpet its existence. I trust it willnot be you it stamps on.

Now Q&A I have made suggestions so

what are yours – or is your limited vision exhausted from nuking and starving?

Oh strategies like conventional war and pestilence have worked well in the past and seem to do a reasonable job, if the civil attrition and AIDs in Africa is any guide. However, I don't think even you were thinking about suggesting them again, they are "old hat", hardly "innovative".
Posted by Col Rouge, Monday, 7 January 2008 9:20:51 PM
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Col Rouge, are you not capable of reading more than 1 post before or after?

On the other thread you refuse to engage and repeat your posts verbatim like a ranting troll.

For your personal clarification;

At the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, 179 countries agreed that population and development are inextricably linked, and that empowering women and meeting people's needs for education and health, including reproductive health, are necessary for both individual advancement and balanced development. The conference adopted a 20-year Programme of Action, which focused on individuals' needs and rights, rather than on achieving demographic targets.

Advancing gender equality, eliminating violence against women and ensuring women's ability to control their own fertility were acknowledged as cornerstones of population and development policies. Concrete goals of the ICPD centred on providing universal education; reducing infant, child and maternal mortality; and ensuring universal access by 2015 to reproductive health care, including family planning, assisted childbirth and prevention of sexually transmitted infections including HIV/AIDS.

Col, you have obviously not kept up to date on what is happening, either here in Australia (we have agreed to this Programme of Action) or indeed the rest of the world.

Population is an issue that must be addressed … but it is not going to happen overnight (unless you want to nuke or starve them).

Our goals are to;

• Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
• Achieve universal primary education
• Promote gender equality and empower women
• Reduce child mortality
• Improve maternal health
• Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
• Ensure environmental sustainability
• Develop a global partnership for development

Btw Col, this last one IS NOT about "centralist government" or "socialism by stealth" - your inane and boring mantras.

Seriously Col, if you want to know how these goals are being achieved (some better than others), go to the UN website – you might learn something. If you can’t do that, go and take your anti-rant medication.
Posted by Q&A, Tuesday, 8 January 2008 11:53:23 AM
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Q&A, the UN might well have all sorts of noble goals, but at the end of the day
they still accept a human population of 9 billion as a given. Most of those
extra people will be in the third world.

All these noble goals, all these planned rights, but why don’t third world women
have the right to an abortion in the first trimester? After all, its accepted in the
West and huge numbers of third world women die, due to illegal abortions.
So much suffering, for no good reason.

I remind you that a lot of family planning clinics were doing great work in
the third world, until along came the Bush regime and any clinic that had
any connection with abortion, had their funding cut. Abstinence was going
to be the way to solve all this, just like the Catholics believe. Ha!

AFAIK the Vatican still have their little spies in the UN and anything that
remotely looks like abortion rights is quickly canned, due to their lobbying
efforts. So in this regard, the UN continues to act like a toothless tiger,
full of great intentions, but rather useless on the ground in achieving results.

How many hundreds of millions of women still don’t have access to family
planning or abortion services? Why should they not have those rights,
as Western women do?

You mentioned China and India. China at least has done something about
their population growth, when they realised that they had little option.

India once had a huge programme at offering women the option to have
their tubes tied. IIRC it was eventually canned, when a Catholic became
the health minister. Do not underestimate the lobbying ability of the
Vatican.

Its all very well talking about teaching men responsibility, but whilst you
do that over the next 100 years, third world women will continue to be
treated as chattels, and be forced to pop out babies ad lib. If they are
raped, they can’t even have the foetus aborted. So where are their
rights? The toothless tiger ignores all that for obvious reasons.
Posted by Yabby, Tuesday, 8 January 2008 1:11:29 PM
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I agree with you Yabby, the UN does have issues (veto by the USA Bush Administration does not help).

However, that is what the world has and that is what the world has to work with - for all sorts of good reasons as you acknowledge.

Aside:
To address the issues of the UN (whilst off-topic) is for a world-wide groundswell from the bottom up to encourage member states to change the structural procedures so that more can be done. Dilemma? you then face the accusation of a "world government".

The UN is damned if they do and damned if they don't. I prefer to support them in what is quite obviously difficult times. Unless we do, the whole world will spiral down into anarchy and I don't think any of us want that ... well, except for the fundamentalist extremists from all sides of the politico-religo spectrum.

"but why don’t third world women have the right to an abortion in the first trimester? After all, its accepted in the West and huge numbers of third world women die, due to illegal abortions. So much suffering, for no good reason."

Absolutely agree, answer lies in religious dogma (as you have alluded to) and a patriarchal society as I have already mentioned ... and not mutually exclusive either.

"You mentioned China and India. China at least has done something about their population growth, when they realised that they had little option."

Need I say more?

Look Yabby, it's a hard road but you hit the nail on the head when you mentioned education. It will not happen overnight, but we must persist.

Btw, the world can support 9 bil (it will have to by 2050 anyway) but it can only do so if we (humanity) 'develop' in more sustainable way - dumbnuts can't see that.
Posted by Q&A, Tuesday, 8 January 2008 2:08:03 PM
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Q&A Goals impact on population decline

Against each “goal” I assess its effect in reducing population numbers (in CAPITALS to make reading easier not to shout).

Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger NEGATIVE

Achieve universal primary education INEFFECTUAL

Promote gender equality and empower women INEFFECTUAL WITHOUT INVOLVING MEN

Reduce child mortality NEGATIVE

Improve maternal health NEGATIVE

Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases NEGATIVE

Ensure environmental sustainability IRRELEVANT

Develop a global partnership for development DUH!

Oh the last, well any wally can string a bunch of weasel words together, typical public official / bureaucratic trick, fill up the page with meaningless platitudes and “non-quantifiable” objectives.

So your own stated “goals” are, IMHO, a total wank and more likely to increase burgeoning third world populations, not reduce them.

I guess your “population summit” was attended by the usual tossers and bureaucratic hangers-on who one generally finds suckling off the public teat.
.
As for “agreed that population and development are inextricably linked”

Development is about “quality”

Population is about “quantity”

I am interested in my life quality, it is being threatened by the curtailment of my disposable income into nebulous carbon taxes, which will increase my cost of basic living, thus reduce my disposable income and discretionary “life quality”.

The best way of preserving and further developing our “life quality” is to limit the “population quantity”.

Sure some “national economic growth” will be curtailed, so what. Better a small population living well than all of us starving along side the third world unregulated population explosions.

As for my repeated references to “Socialism by Stealth”,

you would have also seen my reference also to “Socrates and Carthage” on another post.

But it has obviously gone right over your head.

I guess you prove how subtlety is always wasted on the obtuse.

Yabby, as usual I concur with your analysis and reasoning.

Q&A “Btw, the world can support 9 bil”

But not quite as well as it would support only 4 billion (fewer carbon gases too).

You might aspire to be limited to the “lifestyle” of some third world hunter-gatherer but I do not.
Posted by Col Rouge, Tuesday, 8 January 2008 11:02:42 PM
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