Quite a good article. It's one of the first by an anti-pop to mention the population crisis in Africa rather than say, Adelaide, Roma or Bendigo.

Food prices are a major problem in Eastern Africa due in large part to corruption and the basic fact that there just isn't enough of it. Of course if we eliminated greed from food markets in Russia and some other eastern European nations who won't export their food until extortive prices are paid or food is used to leverage business deals, then we would fix part of the problem.

While population growth is slowing in Europe, America and Japan, it's stubbornly high in Africa. While we battle with a shrinking young adult tax base and problems caused by an ageing population, Africa will continue to struggle to feed itself.

The problem with the author's analysis is that she just assumes that whatever government does automatically produces better outcomes than would otherwise obtain. She takes no account, and makes not attempt to take account, of the downsides of governmental action, and ignores the question whether these might be worse, in her own terms.

For example, if it were true that government could, by adopting policies, ensure greater abundance of food *with no correspondingly worse downside in its own terms*, why not just collectivise agriculture? There is no excuse for the author's intellectual dereliction in adopting this line of reasoning, since we have just come through a century in which it was tried, at the cost of tens of millions of deaths. And here she's urging political decision-making, central planning, bureaucratic administration, and forced property redistributions as the solution, without in the least addressing the bleeding obvious objections to his criminally culpable policy prescription.

The author also takes no account of the fact that the biggest single factor restricting food production worldwide is government. It has reached the stage now in Australia where much ordinary agricultural activity is illegal. Our agricultural lands are only so because earlier generations changed them from their wild state to make them produce food. These actions, perforce, displaced native vegetation and native animals. But now these are converted by arbitrary fiat into holy cows. The supporters of native vegetation laws, in other words, would rather humans starve than that over-abundant native grasses be cut. That's the level which the anti-human superstition of the environment movement has reduced us to.

And these restrictions are happening all over the western world - the most agricultural productive nations in the world. Socialism is still killing people by the millions.

The problem is not a shortage of food, it's an excess of government and a shortage of freedom.

What we need to do is stop propping up peoples who have overpopulated their bit of the world, & stop giving money to NGOs so they stop wasting our money on hiring consultants, to advise them on how to get more of it.

Maybe if we stopped burning food to fix a non-existant climate change crisis, there would be more food available and lower food prices?

Grey beat me to it! The reason there is a food shortage is because areas that were used to grow food are now being used to grow biofuel. And the reason for that is the government subsidises biofuel farming, driven by daft self-imposed imperatives to 'do something' about global warming -- a natural and highly beneficial process which is being demonised by the self-loathing anti-humanites of the Green left. So two of your 'Trinity' are nothing more than apocalyptic panic and its natural consequence.

When Governments are complicit and Giant Corporations make offers to Farmers they can't refuse, you create a crisis. This scenario is playing out right now here in our country and the groundswell of disapproval has begun.Coal,CSG,iron ore,etc...are far more profitable to both Govt & the Companies so FOOD production will inevitably suffer. We must legislate No Go zones which protects agricultural land. Its the only solution.

Maybe the author should tell her colleagues in Greenpeace to stop destroying experimental crops which were being developed to feed developing countries. The millions of dollars that act of lunacy cost could have been used feed a large number of people.

Giving 'women finance to develop small farms' as a solution to the food crisis is surely some kind of oddball salvo in the gender wars rather than a real plan of action? Surely she cannot be serious? I note that the far left always enourage the return of Communist agrarian labour as the solution of the worlds food ills. I guess we can all plant potatoes in the field every day while we sing our revolutionary songs and praise Bob Brown.

The main pressure on food supply is the growth of China and India and their demand for protein. NOT imaginary weather events.

A great of example of the far left Crises creation machine in action.

Shows how one can make a good living these days with a strong grip in ideology and no grip on reality at all.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12774#220546

Cheryl, this article & your well intentioned but illinformed response to it ARE the problem.

The starving Africans problem began when the loony left began meddling in it, ousting the old colonials, replacing them with corrupt communazi regimes.

http://www.rense.com/general32/americ.htm read it all, but pay particular attention to #11 & #43.

Note our own back yard where comrade Whitlam GAVE independence to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_New_Guinea & it has been a dysfunctional, foriegn aid dependent, failing state ever since.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12774#220556

Peter Hume, correct,

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12774#220558

Hasbeen, also correct, we give them money & corrupt leadership divert it to their swiss bank accounts, we give them food or any other material aid & corrupt leadership steal it then sell/swap it for money or guns, we somehow manage to provide food/water without it being stolen & they breed leading 10 times the number of starving Africans next drought.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12774#220577
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12774#220595

Grey & Jon J, also correct.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12774#220643

Tectonic Shift, i sort of agree with this but please don't tell me you are another RED/green pretending to care?

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12774#220644

Atman, spot on, BTW, China has also done more to destroy its food production with environmental rape than any other nation on earth.

When "mother nature/lady gaia" dams a river for you because it rained after all the trees were chopped down & half a mountain side falls into a valley you have to wonder about how "green left politics is working for them.

Of course there is a food crisis in Africa. All those women popping
out 6-8 babies, no family planning for hundreds of millions of them,
what to you expect?

The price of food is hardly high. Let me see, wheat at 250$
a tonne right now, with high oil and high fertiliser prices, drop
it much more and it won't be worth growing the stuff.

Most Australian familes could not afford to feed 6 children, so
why African women should be able to do so and you then wonder why
they cannot, is hardly rational.

Give those women the same family planning choices as 1st world women
have. Right now they don't have that choice. Most can't even afford
family planning.

Now thats a topic that the G 20 should be discussing, not how to
mine our agriculatural land for unsustainable farming, because women
keep popping out babies, many of them unwanted.

Yabby,
Spot on. Instead of the UN and NGOs organising food during famines, they should be organising family planning and contaception during the good years. It has been shown that education here can produce a dramatic reduction in birthrates, so this needs to be pushed.

I believe climate change is a natural and normal aspect of our enviroment and droughts will come and go. Improved medical services and over population has more to do with famines than any other aspect.

For those that believe in AGW, take note that a reduction in population will lower carbon emmissions. This seems never discussed.

Hi Formersnag.
I plead NO pretence... just realism.
Your Red/Green reference is misplaced too. My thoughts about that Party would make your hair curl !!

The thing we’re really starving for isn’t food so much as ... history.

The notion that small-scale subsistence farmers using so-called ‘organic’ methods and ‘natural’ (non-GM, non-hybrid) seed varieties can outperform high intensity farming isn’t just wrong, it’s lethal. Only the most blinkered ideologues could urge hungry people to take up a farming methodology which requires five times more land than modern methods. If you want to over-exploit ecosystems and ensure famine, that’s certainly a great way to go about it: require poor African nations to grow food using 17th century technology.

It’s true that small-scale farms in poor countries are struggling to feed their populations. That’s because small-scale, low-tech farming is inefficient, expensive, unreliable, and 100% certain to degrade soils. Modern farming techniques are sustainable, and low-cost -- just compare agriculture today with agriculture in 1950, 1850, 1050. Yes, food prices are rising, and the largest single price driver so far in the 21st century is subsidies for corn to support ethanol production. I think that’s what you call an ‘own goal’.

And yes, world population continues to increase ... but the RATE of increase has slowed dramatically since the 1960s — it’s expected to peak at around 9 billions by 2050, and fall thereafter. That’s a conservative estimate; the faster we develop modern farming techniques in Africa, Asia and South America, the sooner world population will stabilise, then decline. It’s not speculation: it’s already history in China, Pakistan, Mexico and India, and the transition has taken only a few decades. Population growth is already negative in developed countries, despite increased life expectancy; it’s the poor ones, without reliable access to plentiful, affordable food, where overpopulation and famine go hand-in-hand.

What’s driving down population growth? Modern high-intensity farming, which lifts poor subsistence-farmers into the cash economy. What’s the best way to address climate change? Use land efficiently, and reduce population growth. How? Look at history!

The “10 countries ranked most vulnerable”: in 2000 they contained about 320 million, lots of them vulnerable.
In 2011, they hold about 400 million, even more vulnerable.

Whether they want it or not (and a great many do not), the women in these countries have about 6 or eight babies as a normal course of events; that is, if they do not die in childbirth, suffer fistula from pregnancies at too early an age, and so-on. Counting the good and the bad outcomes for the mothers, their total fertility rate is about 4.5 children for each and every female.

In spite of disease, malnutrition, war, lack of access to safe medical and living conditions - the rate of natural increase for these countries still averages about 2.2 per cent. If they can keep that up, then their populations will double in about a generation - another 400 million to feed and educate.

It might help them a bit (actually a lot) if the folk developing “Strategy development, campaign design, training and capacity building” factored this fundamental impediment into their concepts instead of turning a blind eye to it. Australia is going backwards in regard to economic and social issues, health, education, etc., and that is in spite of each woman having less than two children with the fostering and support they need for the period from birth to age of employment.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12774#220649

Yabby, WMD, a women's movement delegation of femiNAZIS, fauxMANistas & butch dyke "sistas in da hood" is the last thing Africa needs now. Teaching girls how to hate themselves as well as the men who love them, destroying the family, tribe, religion, world is the last thing those people need. Meddling from more loony left, social engineers, god save them from that.

How about educating the boys & men about how difficult/expensive it is to raise, pay for a small tribe of their own children, give them condoms for free by the carton. Give them education in low technology infrastructure they can build for themselves like a stand alone composting toilet that does not need an entire sewerage system.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12774#220662

Banjo, also correct.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12774#220665

Tectonic Shift, good to hear mate, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/at-last-a-thorough-probe-into-what-drives-the-greens-machine/story-fn59niix-1226095160826 have you read this book? i can thoroughly recomend it Bob Brown's really RED communazi party is the worst in Australian history.

Australian farmers lead the world in sustainable farming practices & getting more food per hectare, litre of water, kilo of fertiliser, etc. And of course it was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_Sanders who saved the Franklin River, not the closet communist econazi.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12774#220681

donkeygod, i hear you, but China & other modernising Asian nations are the only that ones fitting your profile.

South America, catholic, breeding like flies, India different religions same problem, Africa, Middle East, other Muslim nations all breeding like flies. Apart from 1st world, modernised nations, all breeding way too fast. Don't forget Polynesia either, they keep arriving here because their literally is no room left on their islands, which are NOT sinking beneath the waves, just overcrowded.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12774#220685

colinsett, true but our problems have the opposite cause, too few of our own children, filling jobs with migrants is infinately more expensive than breeding, training our own children.

Think on this everybody, between 1945 & 1965 our birth rate was MUCH higher & we took a tsunami of British & European migrants as well. Despite all this population growth our governments built infrastructure, trained enough apprentices at TAFE, professionals at UNI, etc.

There will not be as much death by starvation as many here imagine.
In times of food shortage malnutrition reduces fertility.
It also takes many young children.

Donkey god:
Industrial scale agriculture is ending.
Yabby referred to the increasing cost of fertiliser, and that is the key.
We are running short of superphosphate, the main source now is in Morocco.
Other fertilisers are made from oil and natural gas.
At the current rate at which NG is to be exported we will not have
enough for our own use.
The cost and availability of fuel will end industrial agriculture and
the long distance transport of agricultural products.
We are soon to revert to the type of agriculture that we practised
in the 18th & 19th centuries.
The African woman farmer will have a lot to teach us.

All these schemes of helping those poorer countries will come to nought.
We have already entered the era of zero growth and we no longer have
the ability to fund projects such as those proposed.
In case you have not noticed both the US and Europe have run out of
money and are now going into hock to China.
Why is it so ?
Simple really, the high cost of energy has eaten all their GDP.
Guess what you repay debt and interest with ?