Human Life: Expendable
Life on Earth is improving for millions of people according to United Nations statistics. Global average death rates have dropped to eight per 1,000 annually from 13, forty years ago. Life expectancy has risen steadily from 56 years to 67, and that's on average. Needless to say in developed, wealthy countries of the world life expectancy is higher.People living in extreme poverty account for 1.4-billion in 2005 from 1.8-billion in 1990. That statistic will not go far in cheering the 1.4-billion that continue to live in dire poverty; for them nothing will have changed, life remains for them a despair of failed expectation.
The percentage of souls who are considered to be malnourished has been cut in half in that same time period. But since the world population itself has risen substantially, the irony is that the number who are malnourished has risen from 814- to 925-million.
Science, the healing sciences, agricultural science, has grown in tandem with population growth; one having not much to do with the other, but with the passage of time and humans' ability to overcome obstacles to human health and longevity, and the production of food to aid in the former achievement.
Where once it was feared that populations would collapse when they reached a certain limit because insufficient food would be produced from the Earth to sustain human life, we now grow more than enough to feed the world's current population, and substantially more. The grains that are grown that sustain us, however, have other strains on their potential.
A third of the grain is fed to cows, pigs and other livestock, because the wealthy of the world demand that not only grains and vegetables be placed on their tables, but meats grace them as well. Another sixth of all grains grown are sidelined for the production of ethanol; feeding machines to produce another energy source, rather than feeding people.
Countries suffering from environmental change resulting in longer and more sustained and more severe droughts have an obligation to store grains to feed their populations. Failed governments, and politicians who engage in corrupt practices empower themselves first before making feeble attempts to discharge their obligations to the people they are meant to serve.
The current situation in the Horn of Africa, stricken by famine in the face of ongoing drought conditions and a rise in the price of basic foodstuffs sees the world community coming together under the United Nations to provide life-sustaining food for starving communities in Somalia and Ethiopia.
Civil war, corruption, disengaged politicians, tribal and clan hostilities all conspire to work against the desperate need of starving people. It's not that we are faced with impossible-to-solve conditions mitigating against human endurance, it is the sustainability of civic infrastructures within uncivil societies where corruption is endemic and human life expendable that is the problem.
Labels: Africa, Agriculture, Energy, Environment, Political Realities
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, August 16, 2011
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