They won’t be fed.

Forget the global warming nonsense and other excuses. The only solution is to seriously cut population NOW. Sending food, and money, to populations that are continuing to grow must stop. Let natural selection occur; the population will soon decline. Keep off TV footage of fly-covered, rib-showing children who should never have been born. There are too many tender hearts clamouring for more expensive but ineffectual foreign aid. ‘Aiding’ Third World countries merely encourages breeding.

For Australia, start protecting our land from purchase by foreign governments. Cease the nonsense of turning owners off huge tracts of farming and grazing land to establish national parks. The same applies to the fishing industry and marine parks. Stop telling farmers that they cannot clear land to produce more, just because of the fantasy that this will somehow control the climate.

Protection for Australian farmers and producers is also necessary. Globalisation has failed miserably; it doesn’t even help the poorer countries the lying global barons said it would.

Finally, stop voting for the wimpy politicians we have now. We can count on the fingers of one hand the number of Australian politicians who are prepared to do the right thing by Australia, and stand up to, or ignore completely, the would-be world rulers in Europe and the corrupt United Nations.

It is not Australia’s responsibility to ‘feed the world’. We should be growing and storing; exporting only surpluses, and not making a few people reach. We should also be spending more on defence (instead of mucking around in places like Afghanistan) to protect what we have, simply because we cannot help people without the sense to control their populations, but we should be able to defend and retain what we have if push comes to shove.

And now factor in the price of fuel.

Predictions of $200/bl (and increasing), in a few years time.

OK may be wrong on date but it will happen as we have used up all of our cheap oil and consuming three times what we are finding.

And what feeds our tractors or ships, for import/export?

Paul Erlich in the late 60's warned that we were in danger of starving due to population pressures. We're still here. Yes, the world population is increasing but it has been since the world began. Does it automatically mean we will starve? I think not.

Food production has increase astronomically over the last 100 years for many reasons. It is not the problem. The problem is DISTRIBUTION. Australians and Americans throw away more food in a day than people in other countries have to eat in a week. Don't believe me? Have a look in any school or food court rubbish bin.

In countries run by military governments, the people are starving for two main reasons: Military action is destroying their farms and killing the males of military age; and, food which is sent to the country to aid the starving populace, ends up in the hands of the military and the favoured elite - not in the mouths of the people it was intended for.

America uses more fertiliser each year on its golf courses than is used in the entire third world for crops. Biotech companies are patenting seeds and introducing crop monocultures into less developed countries in the name of food security. US food security that is - but that is another topic for discussion.

Developed countries have a very low rate of population growth so if we wish to reduce world population growth let's help underdeveloped countries to develop.

Saying that population is the problem for food security is a red herring (if you'll pardon the food analogy). For every mouth that is born there is a brain and two hands. These can be, and have been used to achieve solutions to any problem. The real problem is government selfishness, and corporate greed especially by the biotech and agribusiness mega-corporations. Rather than talk about limiting world population (which reduces a human life to a mere number), we should be talking about limiting the size and power of corporations - and possibly governments!

Did you ever stop and ask yourself seriously why we are still here, MichaelB?

We are here, and so are many 'Third-Worlders', because Norm Borlaug agreed with Paul Ehrlich, in that population growth was starting to outstrip food production. So, Norm being the practical man that is, decided to buy us all time, increase food production worldwide so that everyone could get their act together. He has since noted that while his 'Green Revolution' was a success, noone has gotten their act together on population. All the stats from the FAO on global food production per capita since the 1980's have pretty much plateaued or slightly decreased. Given the rate of population expansion at the present time, the rate of food production increase is not matching pace.

The problem is not just distribution. Food goes off, it needs to be consumed seasonally, some needs to be consumed almost immediately or it uses a lot of energy in terms of refrigeration and transport etc. For your 'distribution' solution to work, our current food distribution systems and energy usage would have to increase quite significantly. Yes, starving countries are affected by the politics, but that is a local effect.

You talk about not worrying about population, as if that's some sort of totalitarian numbers game. Yet your solutions would require large scale rearrangement of the political landscapes to accomodate these strucural distribution and rationing type systems, to avoid all that nasty wastage and allow population increase.

Having population policies and at least allowing people to regulate their own fertility and have easy access to contraception is the least totalitarian solution by comparison.

Think on this: centralised governments and non-democratic systems have never been able to avoid famines, in fact they tend to exacerabte them by not allowing the free and unrestricted movement of food by trade.

You greatly exaggerate the problem!

The world can never really be overpopulated for very long-- the population of the human race at any given time is more or less at the correct loading for the food available for that time. The reason why is *very* simple, in fact it is so simple and so obvious that people can't see it! Basically there is a controlling feedback loop: if people don't get fed then people will die, people dying increases the amount of food per person for those whose are left alive. So people will die from starvation until there is enough food to support the remaining population. ie: the environment naturally controls the world's population. Simple, isn't it?

Ultimately, this means is that the population can *never* be more than 3-5 weeks out of whack with the amount of food available within a given area-- cause that is about the maximum of how long you can live without food. Now, considering that homo-sapiens has been around for 250-350 thousand years and 3-5 weeks is just a blip in comparison we can safely say that the world has never, is not, and will never be over populated!

The problem with the above argument, although technically correct, is that generally people don't like the idea of people starving to death on mass. It is anathema to them (me included). So others will (sometimes) try to reduce the amount of pain and suffering by diverting their own resources to aid people who are starving. When we in the west do this to people in developing nations some people make a big song and dance about how bad things are, that the system broken and the future state of the world is all doom and gloom--like this article did.

However, close inspection will show that things are not really all that bad. Whenever there has been starvation in the last hundred years it hasn't been because there is a *global* shortage of food. ... continued below......

NEWSFLASH

Relax, human population will not reach 10 billion by 2060. More like 3-4 billion is my private estimate.

Here's what happens.

When a species, any species, encounters favourable conditions populations expand. When conditions turn unfavourable population contracts for the simple reason that death rates exceed birthrates.

We humans are no different from any other species and will undergo the same process. When resources prove inadequate to support population levels our population will contract.

If you think the 20th Century was bloody welcome to the 21st.

MICHAEL B and others who think you can forecast anything, be it population levels or food production, simply by extrapolating current trends should remember the following doggerel attributed to Cairncross:

A trend is a trend is a trend. But the question is, will it bend?

Will it alter its course through some unforeseen force and come to a premature end?

The answer almost always is “YES!” We just don't know when.