Saturday, August 9, 2008

2050, 9 Billion and Counting

Water Risks


Gap countries=population+scarce food+scarce water



The current rate of births world wide indicates that world population will grow by half it's number to over 9 billion souls by 2050. This is another reason to try and shrink the gap. A post by Tom Barnett The Gap: where it's hardest to grow food and where populations grow fastest draws an obvious correlation between the Non-Integrating Gap states, and places where there are populations expanding amid areas of poor growing conditions. . It is a major challenge for the richer nations to confront this growing problem.

Steve DeAngelis of Enterra Solutions has written extensively on this problem and has spotlighted both the problem and what some are doing to try and get a handle on it.

Food and Water Shortages in the Middle East

Globalization and Economic Stability

Dealing with Failed States

Then one reads an article like this, where a state decides that world opinion counts for naught in a post heroic age. The Food Chain: Darfur Withers as Sudan Sells a Food Bonanza.

Fabius Maximus offers up an ongoing source of readings on the subject.

Food - articles about this global crisis.

Teach a man to fish, and you understand what we have done wrong in Haiti

There is no “peak water” crisis

I'll keep it short and observe that the stimulus for a growing population in the face of scarce food and water supplies is a basis human desire to reproduce one's self enough to insure survival of the family. As the network of globalization spreads more and more people live better and longer, the baby factory begins to slow down until like Europe and Japan it begins to reverse.
The challenge for the World is what it wants to do about what Paul Collier: Home page Professor of Economics at Oxford University calls, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It.

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