I heard a report yesterday that one-sixth (1/6) of the world's population, that's one billion people (1,000,000,000), are starving. You can read the story at Cash-Strapped Food Agency Struggles To Feed Poor or listen to it.
(can't wait to see what kinds of ads get thrown up in response to this by the auto-ad generator)
For reasons unknown to me and in ways similar to my experience re The Village: One Minute of Peace and Stonewall's Findings: Darfur, One Minute of Peace, and More...much, much more, my mind started traversing this information. In my case, from an ecological and evolution dynamics perspective.
What does it mean that 1/6th of the world's population, the recognizably bottom of the economy, are starving? To death?
Follow along with me, if you'd like:- There is now more food for those more financially (not economically, the two are different) worthy of surviving.
- But the recognizably lower classes tend to breed the hardiest individuals (it's that "good, peasant stock" thing).
- Members of the higher financial classes tend (as individuals) to be more infirmed and require more health services per individual than do the lower financial classes.
- One billion people, regardless of their geographic location or economic status, is a heck of a market to lose.
- Those one billion people may not make much of a financial dent if they suddenly go away but the support networks that keep them alive, should they go away because they no longer serve those one billion people, will definitely make a financial dent.
- I won't even get into the percentage of that one billion people that perform economically viable tasks that no one else wants to perform for various social, psychological, cultural, etc., reasons (think "illegal aliens working as domestics, nannies, ..." and although not quite the same you get the idea).
- So the technological aristocracies will have to find ways to breed non-technological peasantry...
- ...or create a technology that in essence becomes a slave class in order to fill the economic gap represented by the loss of one billion people. And they'd still get to have all that surplus food.
This post is to bring the situation to your attention in case it wasn't in your consciousness already. I'm hoping you'll do something about it. Something local is fine. As Regina Brett said, "When in doubt, just take the next small step."
(added at 11:47amET 30 Jul 09, while doing completely unrelated research, I found How Much Are Human Lives and Health Worth?)
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