Quick Thought 4 - GM Foods and Overpopulation (with a splash of Global Warming)

You might be thinking, hey, what the hell have those two things got to do with each other? At first glance, sure they look apart, but they're actually closely tied to each other. The problem is simple: There are too many people for the habitable land on earth. Even if you don't believe that, 9 billion people will definitely be too much. There are two things that have driving this massive population spike: little access to contraceptive and a food surplus. The food surplus though is the main issue. An excess in resources allows expansion, a bigger excess faster expansion. Our farming technologies flew way ahead of our population, driving it up. The thing is though, that growth can never last. Nothing can grow forever. And that is exactly the problem we have at the moment. Not enough land for the people, and certainly not enough land for the food.

As humans do, some smart scientists hit upon the idea of GM foods. Perhaps not intended for this use, but damn useful nevertheless. So, you think we would at least have started to solve half of the problem. GM allows for crops to be grown in different climates, produce more productive harvests, become less susceptible to diseases. However, this isn't the case. Because now we get protests about GM.

Now, I do try to look at all the possibilities when I look at these issues. But really, if you test well enough, and only make small changes, there is virtually no risk for GM. Putting one potato's genes into another potato is hardly going to make a killer carrot.

But what does get me about this situation is that a large proportion of people who are against GM foods are all for the right of the "unborn child" to the extent where they do not accept that we have an overpopulation issue. Come on guys, surely you can see that there's an issue here. Cities becoming more crowded, more squatter camps everywhere. The people in poorer countries across Africa multiplying like rabbits. And there simply isn't the food to feed them, if you don't use GM, because there isn't the land to feed them.

This is where that little splash of global warming comes in. Taking the average estimate that the world will warm by about 4 degrees, we actually have a lot more to worry about than a bit of low-lying land being lost. Because, with higher temperatures around the equator, Africa will become uninhabitable. Europe will mostly become uninhabitable. the US, China, Mexico, most of Brazil, all uninhabitable. The land that you gain will be Norway, Canada, Russia&Siberia, Antarctica, parts of Australia and parts of pacific islands around NZ's area becoming more habitable. Now, have a look at the below map:


Green is habitable. Yellow is desert, brown is floods, drought or extreme weather. Red is land lost due to rise in sea level.

So, can you see how much less land there is available? Remember that anything at the top or bottom of the map is stretched. So, less land for food growth, and time needed to get it all started.

Here we now have a triple-whammy: Global warming, no more surplus food, no more surplus land. It's simply not going to work unless we do one of two things:

- Control population
- Use GM to our advantage.

If you want organic food, you must have less population. If you want more population, you must have GM food. To me, at least, it's that simple.


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Next Quick Thought on the origin of the Universe. Hey, why not go overly complex?