One looks at the world and sees different things.
In articles such as this I will make you look at things in a different way. Though if you’ve already thought about things in this way you: Have a sick mind / Have an open mind / Have too much time on your hands.
It has been in the news a lot lately. Global problems. There’s a fair few of em. Global warming, I don’t like this, but I don’t object to it as much as you’d think as this is earth’s way to solve its problems.
No, the problem I’ll discuss in this post is one closer to us. It’s a two fold problem. Supply and Demand. Simple.
But this isn’t about a simple resource, it’s about all resources.
This article will be about supply and demand. And I’ll throw in some human characteristics along the way.
According to NATO over 800 million people are living below poverty standards. With a total of 6.6 billion people now inhabiting this world that’s 1 in 8. Ergo: 800 million people go hungry every day. And that’s just the poor ; every year a fair amount of land is stricken by some sort of natural disaster creating a local shortage in food. Looking at this in terms stated above, the demand outstrips the supply. The demand for food. The demand for other resources generating wealth for the individual.
This is due to 2 facts.
- The earth has a carrying capacity, this is a finite amount. Though factoring in technology this is not a fixed number.
- People don’t generate a homogeneous distribution of resources gotten from said carrying capacity
The demand, in fact, does not outstrip the supply. It’s in the field of distribution and logistics that we come up short.
Now, I’d like to believe that we can strive to rectify this situation. And some of us are. Without the World Food program and other programs of similar nature we’d have a whole lot less hungry people simply based on the fact that there’d be a whole lot less people.
But, we live in a capitalist world filled with people who have a deeply ingrained instinct of taking care of #1 first. Up to a point you can’t really blame a lot of people. Because while we may not want for anything now, I’d personally like it very much to have some insurance that I’ll not want for anything in the near future aswell. Building up a buffer is natural. But while we build this buffer we neglect to help these 800 million people who suffer every day.
Based on Carrying Capacity, Population, Western inability to give up comfort and its ability to concentrate on its own fairings (read: ignore others). We are faced with a problem.
Because while we may only have 800 million people living under the poverty line now . . . . The current population growth will double the Earth’s population in 40′ish years. And most of these people won’t be born in the plush west. Now, there’s many different prognosis on what the wealth distribution of these people will be . . . . but let’s just say most of ‘em aren’t rosy predictions.
Here’s the Question:
What do we do about this.
This post is meant to make you think and I want to hear your reactions
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Disclaimer: Facts and figures have been researched but they will vary with different sources. Due to wanting to write a short concise post I didn’t go into idiotic amount of detail and so: some things are generalized. In these posts gaps have been left intentionally, some of these are there for you to point out, others to ignore. Some of them are there for you to hook an opinion on, some of them are just there because I didn’t see myself putting them there and others because I’m woefully unaware of them.
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Quote of the day:
This isn’t one of those things involving ethics, is it?
I don’t do Ethics. It upsets my stumoch
. Ah, good fun
