“Besides that, leaving too many poor people around this world without trying to eliminate their poverty is quite dangerous for future human security, and morally wrong.”

Providing more food for millions of poor people overseas is a totally incidental outcome to increasing agricultural productivity in Australia. Let’s face it, it is being done primarily for the export dollar. If you are concerned about eliminating poverty, the most important thing to tackle is birthrate, via family planning, education for women, provision of contraceptives and all that stuff. The cold hard truth is that with many poorer countries, supplying more food without this sort of aid is only going to take them into greater hardship a generation or two down the line. I am very strongly in favour of Australia increasing its input into international aid programs, but supplying more food isn’t the solution.

It seems to me that your argument is fundamentally flawed in a number of ways.

It would be a much better idea for you, me and rest of the rabble, to put most of our efforts into stabilising the demand on our resource base rather forever trying to increase the supply rate

Ludvig,
This is getting more and more off topic, After this post I will continue discussion at GMO PUNdit if you wish but not here.
Some quotes and links that address your points, mainly land productivity (efficiency)oriented discussions :

Plant Physiol, January 2001, Vol. 125, pp. 174-179
The Population/Biodiversity Paradox. Agricultural Efficiency to Save Wilderness
Anthony J. Trewavas
http://www.plantphysiol.org/cgi/content/full/125/1/174

Although increasing efficiency as a conscious strategy to reduce environmental impacts is virtually an article of faith for the energy and materials sector, it has received short shrift for agriculture, forestry, and other land-based human activities. Many institutions (e.g. green organizations) and strategies that would conserve species and biodiversity are conspicuously silent on the need to increase the efficiency of farmland use (Goklany, 1999). Either they do not understand the policy, or improving efficiency contradicts their desire to impose some less-efficient, supposedly ecological solution on agriculture. However, the consequence of less-efficient agriculture will be the elimination of wilderness that by any measure of biodiversity far exceeds that of any kind of farming system. It is the fundamental contradiction in current environmental arguments (Huber, 1999).

http://www.furcommission.com/resource/perspect999au.htm

http://phe.rockefeller.edu/SAF_Forest/

http://phe.rockefeller.edu/great_reversal/

http://phe.rockefeller.edu/encroach/

http://www.cnnet.upr.edu/ecologia/articulos/Aide%20and%20Grau%202004.pdf

Economist Indur Goklany has calculated that if we tried to feed today’s six billion people using the mainly organic farming methods of 1961, we would need to cultivate 82 percent of the earth’s land surface instead of the current 38 percent...Norman Borlaug contends that by improving the productivity of existing farmland, the new crop varieties, fertilizers, and farming techniques of the Green Revolution have saved 20 million square miles of wilderness since 1950. Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute has pointed out that about 16 million square miles of forest exist today. Forests are the first areas likely to be cultivated when farmland ex- pands (deserts and swamps are not nearly as inviting). “What I’m saying,” Avery told the Atlantic Monthly in 2003, “is that we have saved every square mile of forest on the planet.”

David I will check out GMO Pundit

To finish here then….

It seems that each and every one of your sources has just taken for granted that populations will continue to increase.

This has always totally amazed me more than anything else in my life – this enormous blind-spot with population growth - how people can put their life’s work into more efficient and higher productivity while never putting the slightest bit of effort towards stopping the demand from continuously increasing. I can’t help thinking that they must only be in it for the profit, or because their employers are in it for the profit and will keep employed for as long as they are happy. Thus, when those who are intimately involved with this continuous growth in productivity say that they care about helping the poor or about the environment, it immediately strikes me as highly dubious.

Nothing personal – just a broad overview.

I maintain that it would be an enormously better idea for us to put most of our efforts into stabilising the demand on our resource base rather forever trying to increase the supply rate.

Thanks for taking up the debate with me.

Thanks so much for a decent exchange and your suggestions Ludvig.
But wait, there is more:

The science magazine Nature has just published an article showing a probable link between (microscopic) water productivity in leaves (stomata) and macro-level amount of water that runs-off into rivers and catchments world-wide.

The interesting cause of this observed increased blue water, considered over long time scales of many years duration, is suggested by the authors to be carbon dioxide concentration increases in the atmosphere.

These cause stomata to close more tightly, and consequently allow less green water flow.

More details here.
http://gmopundit.blogspot.com/2006/02/higher-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide.html

QUOTE
"Measurements of stream flow around the world have documented an increase in the amount of water that runs off the continents and returns to the ocean1. This trend has been occurring since the beginning of the century, yet changes in precipitation over land do not sufficiently account for this increase. On page 835 of this issue, Gedney et al. identify an important contributor to increasing global runoff — decreased evaporation resulting from the influence of elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide on plant physiology"

Perseus. Thanks for the 'reality' check Re; my last post 12/02/2006.

Unlike your own 200 odd posts so far to OLO, my paltry responses do indicate a "...corrupted by the loony green left response..."

Tell me though in your considered expert opinion, why is it in my suburban smugness that I have lived in and experienced tropical forests - (PNG & Far Nth Qld) travelled through and stayed extended periods in your wet sclerophyl forests/savannah/dry rainforests/mangrove belts/various intertidal zones - (WA Pilbara, Gascoyne, Qld, 'Brigalow') working and living amongst ancient tribes, seen, worked in and been party to destruction of old growth environments (PNG, Tiwi Islands, NSW Sth Coast)- fragile marine coastal areas (NT, Qld, WA, Jervis Bay ACT) and yet fail to see the timeless logic and infinite wisdom of the economic rationalists/ and or scientists paid off by economic rationalists amongst these web logs etc?

Please do not denigrate my (or others posting) responses based upon your own experiences. Neither base a posters lack of education (specific knowledge)nor draw very long bows to make your own knowledge seem superior. Your responses indicate a familiarity, but you have a long way to go before wisdom hits you on the head my friend.

(Search Google if you must) my track record on some of the 'issues'.

After working for many companies, mining, forestry, over many years, it is only my collective experiences from which I comment. If my experiences indicate a negative context which 'appears' to be loony green left then you too have been sadly deluded by the grass from other side of the ideological fence.

Fortunately in reading your responses though they suggest you do in fact occasionally think outside the box - keep it up - the world needs more like you.
Remembering that 350 word limit blocks do not a discourse maketh!

If Australian science, and its application to agriculture, in this most-parched of inhabited continents can provide examples for other desiccated parts of the world, we should be congratulated. The article notes a number of proven ones, and some that seem optimistic.
Enormous improvements indeed are possible, and much greater application might be made of existing knowledge. But what limits should there be to unbridled optimism?
For instance the joys of "green water" seem to be unconfined. Yet the reality portrayed by Australia's geological history is very daunting. Forty million years ago the whole continent was vegetated, rainforest style. There would have been no shortage of "green water"; yet this did not prevent the development of narrow and edge-to-the-sun-leaved Eucalypt and Acacia vegetation. Id did not prevent sand dunes being swept right across the continent in the great dry around 20,000 years back. "Green water" might be useful, but the experiment being undertaken to quantify it is still running; and geological history demonstrates that it is limited.
The ascribing, to stomata and carbon dioxide effects, of increased river flows in recent years also needs to be viewed with caution. Maybe it is so, maybe not. The locals on the Atherton Tableland would have good reason to view it with skepticism in relation to rate of stream flow out of world heritage rainforest there.
Regarding water, we are currently living beyond our means.We should, as a first priority, establish a balance in water budgets for present population numbers and practices. By pursuing those desirable advances listed by the article, while at the same time doing nothing to help minimise growth in the numbers depending upon them, has a close parallel. That is, lowering the tyre pressure on a four wheel drive to see how much further from the shore it can be driven onto the surface of a salt lake before it founders in the underlying mud.