Reddit mentions of Food Rebellions: Crisis and the Hunger for Justice

> The reason it takes so many acres to feed one person is because people demand a variety of food and products.

No, the reason it takes so many acres is that modern farming techniques have forsaken efficiency of land for efficiency of labor. Non-mechanized farming is far, far more efficient in terms of land than mechanized farming is. I suggest you read Farmers of Forty Centuries to get an idea of the incredible amount of food that can be raised on small areas of land.

> Aren't you effectively supporting the argument you are arguing against?

The argument I'm supporting is that a human can live well on less than an acre. Since growing grain by row cropping is inefficient in terms of land, and then feeding those crops to animals to get meat is inefficient in terms of calories, and that still yields more than enough calories for a human to live well on, I think this supports my point quite well.

> Would this level of production of wheat (An average of 42 bushels of wheat per acre per annum in the USA) be possible without fertilizer, irrigation, intensive farming and industrial agriculture.

Yes it would, absolutely. But it would take a lot of human labor. The miracle of conventional farming is that is produces high yields with very little human labor. But in terms of output per acre, conventional farming cannot outperform labor-intensive farming. I refer you again to Farmers of Forty Centuries.

> So?

Ok, so you choose to brush aside the risk. But that doesn't mean there isn't one.

> I fail to see you reference the massive ecological damage caused by many standard crops

Um, that's because we weren't talking about those. Just because I say that GM crops have risks associated with them doesn't mean I'm claiming that all other crops have no risk. How did you make this logical jump?

> And the grain that the USA produces sustains many countries people and livestock, it's not just going out there for no reason it's keeping many people fed.

Many people were keeping themselves fed until subsidized American grains got dumped on their markets and bankrupted all the local farmers who couldn't compete with tax-supported cheap grains. There's more to it than just keeping people fed. Check out Food Rebellions for a very interesting look at the modern food system that discusses many of the complexities that tend to get glossed over by high-level analyses like the ones you seem to have read.

An overnight switch to a libertarian policy wouldn't really be a humane switch for the masses of humanity as we are so deeply entrenched in the current system- some sideways digging needs to be done to ultimately get us out of this hole.

People are in desperate need for assistance both in the United States and internationally, however how that assistance is administered is the important issue at hand. Creating economies and classes of people whose entire existence is dependent on charitable donations isn't a precedent we should be supporting. Those donations are all too often inconsistent as money runs dry or interests sway. There is a lot of evidence that the food donation models implemented in Africa over the past 40 years have actually caused more people to die of starvation than who would have otherwise. This is due to farmers using their savings to grow one year, only to go bankrupt because no one bought food due to the donation. The next year they couldn't afford to grow food and the donations didn't show up.

For more on this consider reading Food Rebellions.

Furthermore, it needs to be accepted that we are 7 billion people with 5 billion jobs. Those jobs are quickly being automated out of existence in all economies both first and third world. We face a future where even less jobs will exist and divisions of wealth will be aggravated to further extremes if no change is made to the system as it stands. It is necessary for a larger portion of our population to have a greater vision into the coming decades so as to better direct ourselves as a global population. The mass adoption of technology needs to be questioned philosophically more than any other concept in our time. Technology is incredible, but like anything it can be a two edged sword if wielded improperly.