This ball, our ball.
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—
nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
Were the Bard alive today, he would be not only be castigating us harshly for having done so much damage to our planet but also for doing so little to repair it save for the efforts of a few thousands of enlightened environmentalists. Sadly, not many politicians have joined the fray, with most playing servants to multinational interests.
"By God, what have you done?", would say the Bard.
Global Food Crisis: Socrates is reputed to have said that the best sauce for food is hunger and a few millennia later in 1798, English economist Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, earned posterity for his prediction that population would continually increase faster than the food supply, causing chronic food shortages.
"Hell is empty, and all the Devils are here."
Since 1950, the earth's population has risen by more than four billion people, to 6.6 billion and UN projections put world population at 9.2 billion by 2050. The world currently faces a food crisis before the full impact of climate change and a 42% rise in population.
"And oftentimes excusing of a fault Doth make the fault the worse by the excuse."
Historian David Christian writes that just to keep their bodies functioning, humans need about three thousand calories of energy a day. Ten thousand years ago, there may have been six million humans, each consuming at least this much energy, but not much more. Today, there are one thousand times as many humans (more than six billion), so we can be sure that our species now consumes at least one thousand times as much energy as we did ten thousand years ago. At the same time, each modern human consumes on average about fifty times as much energy as our ancestors did ten thousand years ago. If his figures are correct, they suggest that, as a species, we now consume about fifty thousand times as much energy as our ancestors once did. They demonstrate a control over energy that no other species can match. The equivalent graph for chimpanzees (or, for that matter, for any other nonhuman animals) would show no significant change in either total or per capita energy consumption over the last one hundred thousand years or more.
"They have been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scrapes".
Professor Jeffrey Sachs, UN activist and head of the Earth Institute at New York's Columbia University, in his recently published book - Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet - recommends a target population of no more than eight billion by mid-century compared with the UN projection of 9.2 billion. For that to happen, a focused effort is required in the poorest parts of the world, mainly Africa, where fertility rates are higher than elsewhere. Two out of three inhabitants of Sub Saharan Africa are under 25 years of age and in India, population rose by 21.34 % between 1991 - 2001. The developing world has five-sixths of the world's population. As developing countries continue to develop, led by India and China, there will be an acceleration in the attrition of the world's natural resources. The change in food diets in prospering Asian countries is one reason for the rapid surge in food prices. Sachs forecasts that in the 21st century, the world's economic center of gravity will shift to Asia which will produce more than half the world's income. US dominance will end. He says that America traditionally has sought to protect its way of life through militarization but he argues that any US desire for global stability at this point would be better served by spending on foreign aid. Sachs says that in the past half century, the U.S. has spent $17 trillion on its military, $2.3 trillion on aid.
"There's many a man hath more hair than wit."
Sachs wrote in Time Magazine in March, that to make the right choice, we must understand four earth-changing trends unprecedented in human history:
* First, the spread of modern economic growth means that the world on average is rapidly getting richer in terms of incomes per person. Moreover, the gap in average income per person between the rich world, centered in the North Atlantic (that is, Europe and the U.S.), and much of the developing world, especially Asia, is narrowing fast. With well over half the world's population, fast-growing Asia will also become the center of gravity of the world economy.
* Second, the world's population will continue to rise, thereby amplifying the overall growth of the global economy. Not only are we each producing more output on average, but there will be many more of us by mid-century. The scale of the world's economic production by mid-century is therefore likely to be several times that of today.
* Third, our bulging population and voracious use of the earth's resources are leading to unprecedented multiple environmental crises. Never before has the magnitude of human economic activity been large enough to change fundamental natural processes at the global scale, including the climate itself. Humanity has also filled the world's ecological niches; there is no place to run.
* Fourth, while many of the poor are making progress, many of the very poorest are stuck at the bottom. Nearly 10 million children die each year because their families, communities and nations are too poor to sustain them. The instability of impoverished and water-stressed countries has ignited a swath of violence across the Horn of Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. What we call violent fundamentalism should be seen for what it really is: poverty, hunger, water scarcity and despair.
"The quality of mercy is not strain'd."
The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), which is based in Bangkok, said in its annual report:
"Chronic neglect of the agricultural sector in Asia and the Pacific is condemning 218 million people to continuing extreme poverty, and widening the gap between the region’s rich and poor. Governments must show greater political will to address decades of policy neglect and failure in the agricultural sector," said Noeleen Heyzer, UN Under-Secretary-General and the Executive Secretary of ESCAP. "It is simply unacceptable that at a time when the economic growth of Asia and the Pacific has surpassed all expectations, we are not doing all that we can to improve the lives of more than 200 million people living in such poverty."
"Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults."
An example of human ingenuity in the area of food production, is the work of 94-year old American, Norman Borlaug. In an age when so many genuflect at the altar of vacuous bimbos like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, we still have in our midst a remarkable man, now unknown to most of the world, who is said to have "saved more lives than any other person who has ever lived."
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on,
and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."