The
Plenty of Food
Falacy

There is widespread belief that there is enough food in the world to feed every person on earth. This "Plenty of Food" concept is a fallacy for at least four reasons:

(1) Most soils on which the world's food crops are now grown are rapidly being depleted.

(2) The world human population is increasing faster than world food production.

(3) Pesticides are becoming more powerful and more poisonous every year to keep up with the ever increasing resistances which insects evolve by means of natural selection.

(4) As these powerful and poisonous pesticides are used, they add to the overall toxic pollution of the earth.

Whenever one calls attention to these issues, many political leaders, economists and religious leaders speak out against these population issues using a long list of dogmatic and erroneous arguments in favor of precepts which date back to the 7th century AD.

These arguments are both naive as well as persuasive and cause much confusion in the minds of people. "Look at all the surplus food in the United States alone, the farm subsidies which pays farmers not to farm their fields, and especially the waste. Look at the heavy dependence on meat from cattle which are not efficient users of the grasslands. Furthermore, if everyone would become vegetarian, people would be at a lower trophic level in the ecosystem and this would support a larger population." The tragedy is that even intelligent people become convinced by these "obviously logical arguments" and clearly without a proper perspective.

It is essential to take a careful look at these so called “obvious facts”. First of all, many of the worlds crops are grown on soils which are being rapidly depleted. The kind of depletion is loss of top soil which cannot be compensated for simply by crop rotation, such as alternately planting corn and alfalfa. Soil erosion can be caused by water or wind. Many of the worlds rivers are rivers of muddy waters, rivers of invaluable topsoil which can never be replaced. As soils become less and less fertile, the people there will become ever more desperate until the situation deteriorates into a desert, a process called desertification. Evidence for such erosion can be seen in Africa where millions are on the verge of or now in the process of starving to death. The process of endless soil erosion is now occurring in many nations around the world. The outcome will be inevitable: famine.

See Sudan Famine

It is not possible to feed most of the starving people in Africa, let alone the entire world. Paul Ehrlich in his book The Population Explosion, describes the futile attempts to feed famine victims in Ethiopia.

“Periodically, the severity of African famines has been brought home to citizens of the rich nations through television programs showing starving children in hideous refugee camps. The coverage usually brings outpourings of empathy and donations, often generated with the held of celebrities and rock music groups. Unfortunately, acute situations publicized represent the iceberg tip of a continent wide tragedy: chronic hunger, spreading and intensifying year by year.” He goes on to say "Even in peacetime, food aid doesn’t always reach its intended recipients. For food donations to reach the neediest famine victims, many things have to work right. Port facilities must be adequate, warehousing must be sufficient to store the food safely until it can be distributed, trucks and railroads capable of moving the food to the hinterland must be in working condition (along with their roads and railbeds). At the end of the line, there often must be four-wheel-drive vehicles available to take food to the more remote parts of the countryside where hunger may be most accurate. The entire system must function smoothly in a time of stress, often in the face of massive corruption in the distribution system.

The magnitude of the problems that can plague a relief effort are exemplified by the Ethiopian situation in the mid 1980s. There were lots of television pictures of Hercules transports flying in much-needed food. Unfortunately, however, a Hercules can carry only 21 tons of grain, whereas Ethiopia needed 1.5 million tons. Such mountains of grain can be carried only on ships, which may take months to reach Ethiopia from donor countries. Furthermore, at maximum capacity, Ethiopia’s ports can handle only 3,500 tons per day; so even if the ships were perfectly lined up so that they never had to wait for space, and port facilities were never broken down or left idle, it would take fourteen months to unload that much grain. Meanwhile about 1.5 million Ethiopians are added each year to the ranks of those to be fed."

What must be realized is that with all the fanfare and brooha by the media over air shipments of grain to Somalia, people will think that (1) there are solutions to African famines by the distribution food alone and (2) great progress is now being made in the feeding of these starving peoples. This is false, tragically false. No real progress is being made in relieving the overall situation in Africa, in fact their condition worsens every year at an exponential rate. The only thing that relieves a starving country of evidence of famine is the death of millions of people. Since they are usually non-white people, they are often ignored by the press in the western world, a press that is much more likely to fill the front pages with tabloid journalism about the sex life of some celebrity or politician.

There is also the common belief that there is plenty of food in the world to feed the entire world human population. Thus it could be concluded that the problem is primarily a matter of the redistribution of wealth. This is also false. Even if we could evenly redistribute the food throughout the entire world, not only would we have barely enough calories to survive, the entire human species would be suffering from malnutrition (unbalanced diet). And that sorry state of affairs would become worse as the world human population doubled in the next 30 years.

It has been estimated that if all insecticides were banned, world food production would be reduced by 50% within a year. Thus we must continue to use pesticides to prevent a world disaster. The difficulty which arises is the capability of insects to evolve mechanisms of survival while being treated with highly toxic poisons. Because insects can reproduce so often, they can evolve quickly. In fact one species of insect evolved a way to eat and metabolize the now banned insecticide DDT! The evolution of resistance to DDT by mosquitoes is well known. Recently there occurred a White Fly explosion in the Imperial Valley of California which was disastrous to crops. It was found that no known pesticide could effectively reduce White Fly infestations. For these kinds of problems, the chemical industry responds by developing ever more toxic poisons to be spread throughout our croplands. If only insects were affected by pesticides, there would be less of a negative ecological impact. However, ever increasing toxicity of pesticides are found to cause an ever increasing probability of health problems in people. Third generation pesticides such as pheromones that affect only insects, are too "expensive" and less profitable for the petrochemical industry. Thus we are relying on ever sets") of seventh century religious dogma and Victorian economic theories have a vice grip on our politics and unfortunately will bring our present civilization to a rapid and cataclysmic end. Most economists, politicians and religious leaders simply do not understand the awesome nature of exponential population growth. It appears that we must go through a world wide disaster of epic proportions, unparalleled in all history to convince the ruling powers of this fact.