fractalnavel

more mining - something my brother sent on (some comments follow):

Report: Little progress toward halving world hunger

Wednesday, December 8, 2004 Posted: 1335 GMT (2135 HKT)

ROME, Italy (AP) -- The number of hungry people in the world has hardly budged in the eight years since nations pledged to cut the number in half by 2015, a United Nations agency said Wednesday.

The target of cutting the number of undernourished people in the developing world in half by 2015 is still within reach, the Food and Agriculture Organization said, contending it would cost countries far less than the amount it would gain in extra productivity and income.

Though the number of hungry people in developing countries fell in the early 1990's, that trend was later reversed, the Rome-based agency said in its annual report on world hunger. By 2000-2002 the figure stood at 815 million, just 9 million below the 1990-1992 estimate.

The report drew said the present levels of hunger cause the death of more than 5 million children every year -- or one child every five seconds.

Governments set the goal of halving the undernourished people by 2015 at the U.N  World Food Summit in 1996, using the period 1990-1992 as a baseline.

Wednesday's report said hunger and malnutrition cost around $30 billion in direct medical expenses each year, with estimated indirect costs due to premature death and disability ballooning into hundreds of billions of dollars.

The report blamed the recent rise in hunger levels largely on reversed gains in the world's two most populous countries, China and India, with the number of undernourished people in other developing countries holding steady.

All but one of the 16 countries with the highest levels of hunger are in sub-Saharan Africa, with many suffering from food emergencies, the report said. It said that the number of food emergencies each year has more than doubled since the 1980's, much of those because of wars or economic failure.

The report argued that fighting hunger was a good investment, saying the global costs of achieving the target pale in comparison to the price of not acting.

An annual increase in funding of $24 billion is needed to reach the hunger target, the agency estimated.

Hartwig De Haen, of the agency's economic and social department who oversaw the report, said the target was "ambitious but still feasible."

discussion:

me:

"feed the hungry". what about the ongoing population issues ? food is a stopgap, if that. or are we just growing a human time bomb ?

bewildering - what should be done ? and the mention that china and india have regressed in this. this is where your offshoring dollars are going. the growing polarization of haves and have-nots is _not_ benign, especially in those countries with already borderline have-nots.

craig:

 So what does this mean? --

The report argued that fighting hunger was a good investment, saying the global costs of achieving the target pale in comparison to the price of not acting.

What is the price of not acting? More of the same it seems to me, millions of deaths a year. If we invest in feeding them the populations will just grow faster than it does now since more of them will stay alive for the head counts. The Sam Kinison rant does have some value. Like that Mindwalk movie, think in a systems viewpoint and not focusing in on one particular part of the tree, like the bark, a tree is much more than it's bark. It's not simply that people are starving because they lack access to food, it's much broader than that. Solve the issues leading up to the hunger and the problem diminishes. Just as increasing airport security and bombing mudhats doesn't solve the terrorist problem. If anything it just exacerbates it. Reminds me of this show this funny show on cable I watched last night. A black couple are in marriage therapy and he complains that she controls him so much that he feels emancipated, then corrects himself rather emasculated. Cracked me up. Anyway it's hard arguing systems theory when someone is starving to death. Tough call.

me:

clearly, any "solution" will need to be more comprehensive than just daily feeding.  "price of not acting" - a moral judgement, i think.  "investment" - ok, let's think of this in cold terms such as roi.  what is the opportunity cost of not feeding ?  i dunno; what happens if you stop feeding your fish ?  what is the universe getting from continents full of starving people ?  they aren't even contributing to the pyramid phenomena i mention now and then.  even their genes are isolated.  so, they are like pets, not even livestock.  poor pets, at that.  hell, no one even wants the resources or land they occupy, in most cases.

 

some roi may be had simply from the effect on economies of producing material and shipping it, etc.  but we may as well be dumping it in the ocean. or investing elsewhere, where at least we will get returns not only from the production side, but the consumption side as well.

 

so, say we continue to feed our fish, cleaning the tank every now and then, what have you.  how long will it be until speciation occurs ?  will we ("we"?) end up with some sort of dependent post-human species ?  it would be some odd "park", along the lines of antarctica, where the natives have no say, shared by all the world.  of course, by that time we may need the space for other reasons, and the starving may be on a few reservations, then moved out altogether.  they will have disappeared, leaving no legacy at all.

 

of course, roi might be maximized if we could (ahem) "improve" the lot of the starving to the point where they could be subsumed into the consumption and support pyramid, maximizing available resources, as it were.  but this probably won't happen until after the east asian markets are saturated.  then there's west asia.  it will take some time to get to africa.  not sure what's happening to south america.  as for the pockets of extereme poverty scattered among the more prosperous regions, one would think it would be easy to remedy that comprehensively,not just with food, since they are surrounded by abundant relative resources.  but the marginal roi is nearly non-existent.

 

compassion (indirect reciprocity?) is not sufficient motivator, it seems.

 

from the perspective of those starving, of what use is a survival instinct ?  how much initiative are they ("they"?) taking to continually improve their lot ?  even with the desire, there may not be either the ability or the opportunity.  so, use the human noggin for a bit: their survival instincts thus only achieve further human suffering, generation after generation.  is that "survival" ?  unless, of course, it's merely dna propagation we're talking about.  so, might it make sense for these folks to engage in a type of mass self-inflicted euthanasia ?

 

of course, this entire discussion applies to human existence in much of the rest of the world, in any condition.  why "be" at all ?

if i e-mail, i don't post; if i post, i don't e-mail. ah, the heck with it, e-mail mining it is: