India or rather its media and polity have achieved the impossible. For once, they made Bush sound smarter! Dubya made some boring statement that India and China are putting pressure on Earth's resources and surprise, some nutcases like the Defense minister have managed to get their 15 minutes of fame on the idiot box.
How difficult is it to grasp the fact that a billion people eating more and crucially producing less food, will put pressure on the prices? Really, isn't India, one of the world's most under-performing nations in agriculture? yeah, this year we might have a bumper crop. But what is the threshold for bumper anyway? India, right now has bans on the export of many food products. Obviously it isn't helping the global food prices.
And isn't it also true that India's changing food habits will have its consequences? For starters, Indian children are among the most mal-nourished in the world. We ofcourse want that situation to change and hence will inevitably consume more and diverse crops which India may or may not produce enough itself.
Indians are also abandoning vegetarianism pretty fast. When a billion people take to the habit of regularly eating stuff that high in the food chain, there'll be a crisis. Imagine the amount of food a meat eater consumes every meal, roughly the equivalent of all food that creature consumed in a lifetime! When your food eats my food, we both'll end up with no food at some point. To give an historical perspective, the last time Indians assaulted animal world in this fashion, Hinduism was born! (at the expense of vedic-Brahmanism.)
India is also one of the greatest polluters of the world. (3rd largest, if I'm not too wrong.) But we give the usual BS that Indians per-capita pollute less than the western world and hence will do nothing on the emissions front. The poor Indian whom India has ill-fed, treated brutally in the name of caste and has effectively abandoned in the recent economic upswing, bails us out by sharing our pollution expense. Wow, welcome to Indian socialism!
2 comments:
here we go again(and again)
"When your food eats my food, we both'll end up with no food at some point."
wat logic is that? it doesnt matter whether u eat 1chicken which eats 10plants or 100plants urself directly. its a question of demand and supply. if more ppl eat chicken, there will be more chicken "created".
plants and animals used for human consumption(most of them atleast) are not perishable resources bcos they are created artifically in poultry, farms etc. environmentalists dont talk abt nonperishable resources.
>> environmentalists dont talk abt nonperishable resources.
huh? Dubya and people are now precisely talking abt the global food crisis. in the west people mention even ethanol to have caused a shortfall of corn as food.
if indian food habits become as non-vegetarian as the west, there'll definitely be a huge food crisis.
people don't pull off chicken or the grains it feeds on from thin air. they need to be grown. agriculture (or even poultry bcos of birdflu etc) is not a very profitable enterprise. farmers are going to cash crops from food crops.
even if the world were to increase arable land or increase productivity infinitely, there'll still be huge pressue on earth's resources. no other animal on the planet eats as randomly and destructively as humans do.
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