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longhalloween wrote: »

Is it? There's plenty of farming land in Ireland that's not being used to it's full potential. Presumably the same situation exist in other areas.
There was plenty of controversy over EU 'Food Mountains' a few years back and many studies claim that us in the first world throw out 1/3 of the food we buy.

Or is the problem just that the people who need the infrastructure and planning to develop proper agriculture are the least well off and are living the most inhospitable areas. Therefore they starve while the rich eat to excess.

The food mountain thing is true, and I'm not going to pretend that I know the ins and outs of it but it's mainly a mis-management. When I was typing my last post I knew someone would bring it up and I while I don't know why we can't sell our excess, the truth is still that demand for food is becoming unmanagable. In terms of calories, meat eating puts a lot of stress on food demand. Speaking loosely, if you feed a chicken to people, you're going to have to feed that chicken about 10 times as much as you're going to get from it. So feed people meat instead of grain and you're using up 10 times as much grain. Predominantly vegetarian countries, such as those in Asia, are becoming far more dependent on meat. And it's a bit off topic, but people are also demanding more exotic foods, requiring food to be flown over great distances.

There are two proposed ways of starting to tackle it: on a country by country basis (i.e. the rich countries sit tight and let the poor ones deal with it themselves) or on a worldwide basis (which while it's a far nicer, compassionate sounding plan, it is slightly less realistic). As you might expect, a lot of African nations support the international idea while America supports the lets-look-after-ourselves idea.

Irish population itself isn't much of an issue (although the fact that many people's diets include processed foods and two or three portions of meat is), as there seems to be a trend that the more developed a country becomes, the more women's education and opportunities increase and the more birth rate drops. This is thought to be because there are less accidents due to misuse/absence of contraception, women are waiting to have children after they're content in their careers, and a myriad of other contributing factors. However while it might be best to tackle the issue on a country by country basis, it's certainly always worth bearing in mind the worldwide situation. Which is that the world is overpopulated with regards to food supply. Hopefully we'll find some GM crops to increase production in poor countries, which would bring income into the area, lower the birth rate and somewhat ameliorate things.

Or I'm pretty stressed out over exams and am blabbing for no reason.