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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

*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.