pstarr wrote:I've said it here a hundred times. People will flock to cities and bread will be shipped in by rail.coyote wrote:I wonder what the effect of peak oil will be on this issue. My intuition has long told me that the plunge of energy availability would launch the greatest scramble to "develop" resources the world has ever seen - forests included. But certain things have been trending slightly away from that: for one thing, the world is catching on to the ethanol/biofuel scam much more quickly than I would have thought possible. I always figured people would do anything to get their fuel, but maybe not if that fuel is competing with food. For another thing, Heineken and others are reporting that timber is doing poorly because of fuel prices. Timber is an energy-intensive industry, and the runup of fuel prices may ultimately make it more difficult for developers to even get at some of the remoter regions of the wild.
Things like these give me some slight hope. If some of the forests can survive this century, it will mean the world to our descendents.
Think Lagos, Mexico City, Cairo, Calcutta. The teeming masses will leave the countryside alone.
I am seeing it already here in Humboldt Co. Country land is getting cheaper and city land dearer.
The woods will heal.
Exactly, this is already happening in a very big way.
A leading Ghanaian food and agriculture expert blames his fellow Ghanaians for any hunger the country is suffering under.
Read this:
linkGhana's 'hybrid' rice dilemma
Take a drive around rural Ghana and large swathes of the country appear green and fertile.
So you might then wonder why Ghanaians spend between $200 and $300 a year on imported rice. [...]
In Kumasi's central market there is no shortage of rice.
Women sit behind 50kg sacks of rice marked "Produce of Thailand" or "USA Grain".
Ghanaians in the cities seem hooked on the imported longer grain and prefer their aroma.
But their prices have gone up by around a third since the beginning of the year, so tastes may change and local rice could be on the rise.
There may be promises of aid and assistance for farmers, but Mr Dartey says the workforce needs a total change of attitude - an end to the mentality of waiting for help from outside to fix a problem.
[b]In some cases he says Ghanaians are hungry because they choose to be hungry.
"The whole hunger problem is an attitudinal problem.
"You plant this, you have your harvest and you have your rice to eat.
"If you refuse to plant and you stay at home, you have no rice and you have no choice than to beg."
The potential in Ghana is huge, but working on the land is going out of fashion as people stream from the villages to the cities.
To solve the food problem someone will have to convince them that they'd be better off moving in the opposite direction.[/b]
[Nobody in the West would dare to say that many Africans are hungry because they "choose" to be hungry. So let's leave it to the Ghanaian expert to say this.]
Everywhere in the South people are abandoning farmland, and that's what will make agriculture far more productive than many of us can imagine.
In your average sub-Saharan African country, yields for basic crops are only 25% of the world average. 40% of what's harvested gets lost due to inefficient handling and storage. All this is due to a lack of basic farming knowledge, of a lack of access to even the most basic inputs, and to a lack of very basic infrastructures. This keeps small farmers inefficient and they migrate to the cities en masse.
So you can imagine that once the country-side is left to large-scale, efficient farmers who do use basic inputs, yields will increase tremendously.
That's why there will never be a food problem in the future. The more small, inefficient farmers in the South leave the country-side, the more potential there is for a rapid increase in output.
This is what happened in Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries: people abandon villages by the millions, leaving only a small number of big farmers to work the land with scale-advantages and much more efficiently. The result is a spectacular rise in productivity.
The same is now happening all across the developing world.
Add that urbanisation and migration to the cities slashes fertility rates from 7 to 2 (a quasi-universal trend observed both in history as well as today, from India to Congo) and population declines might be expected far faster than many imagine.
I mean, these trends are known fairly well amongst agriculture and development experts, but the public at large is stuck with this type of idiotic reports which says there's not enough land to produce enough food and fuel for a growing population.
While the reality is of course the opposite: there will be more and more land available for more and more efficient agriculture to feed and fuel a population that is rapidly decreasing its fertility rates.
I usually get told off for thinking TOO FAR AHEAD 
