Vocal Voices

Very interesting article in the Telegraph on Wednesday.
The Ukraine is leasing five per cent of it's land to China; to grow food for the Chinese population.
Here's a link to the story in an Aussie paper.
http://www.smh.com.au/world/chinas-land ... 2udsp.html

At the end of that 50 year lease, is China going to give the land back?

This is an very under-discussed topic. We hear a lot about energy security for the UK, but nothing about food security. We don't produce enough food in the UK to feed the UK population. So we are going to end up competing against the likes of China to buy in food.

China already rents land to grow food in Africa, South america and South East Asia. The Philippines has refused to rent land to China, Madagascar was going to rent some to South Korea but changed it's mind.

China consumes 20% of the world's food but has only 9% of the world's farmlands.

Meanwhile, we continue to import hundreds of thousands of immigrants every year,we have politicians who squawk on about a housing crisis, and we put more farmland under concrete for ever with each passing year.

This might not end well.

I know that I am a bit of a global warming geek, but I have long been interested in other pressures on humanity.

This is something that will only get worse, and it will not only be food. Water wars are not far over the horizon and we have already entered bidding wars for fossil fuel futures.

The UK is already in a very weak position re food production and in some cases our weakness impacts on local populations overseas. Kenya, Uganda, Ghana and Tanzania produce such necessary staples as mange tout and baby sweetcorn for our consumption when their own people are scrabbling about for scraps.

In the 70s I had a book by leading environmentalists of the time. The UK population was about 56 million, but their consensus was that for it to self-sustain it had to drop to about 39-40 million. Imagine the space, the clean air! It is now some 75% above that figure, and rising.

cromwell wrote:This might not end well.

I think we can replace might with Will.

It's not only China leasing land in Africa. The Gulf states are at it too. To the detriment of their populations.

China loses 140 villages per year to desert encroachment. Water supplies are going deep underground or vanishing. Aquifers are drying out.

The planet is getting warmer and the jet stream is breaking down causing very unpredictable weather. If it's not scorching drought and fires, it's uncontrollable rains and raging floods. Both of which destroy crops. Also after the floods come the locusts......

The population is heading for 9bn by 2050.

The carrying capacity of a warmer world is going to drop to 5bn.

Somewhere in the middle there will be a LOT Of misery, a lot of death and EVEN MORE war....

Not a recipe made in heaven. Which is why climate change is our species single greatest issue and we are not even attempting to deal with it. On the contrary, we're breeding ourselves off the planet with people who are going to use fossil fuel energy.

A mutual suicide pact.

Understandably there are long term concerns about human food resources - but that was a very interesting post about the "land grabs", Cromwell, I had no idea about that.

TheOstrich wrote:Understandably there are long term concerns about human food resources - but that was a very interesting post about the "land grabs", Cromwell, I had no idea about that.

Me neither Os, and obviously it's a practice that's been going on for some time. The news in the UK is terribly parochial sometimes.

The Chinese have been "investing" in Africa for decades. They have been building roads and schools and other infrastructure whilst at the same time taking over failing industries and making them profitable again - often ignoring international norms regarding the environment.

We, on the other hand, have used our old Colonial position to persuade these countries to trade with us. We have played by the rules to trade, but we have not "invested", as such: and because of our past we are not trusted.

China is the new kid in town and appears to be Africa's friend, but the truth is that she is raping the continent in ways that we could never imagine or condone. One day it will all blow up in their faces because the land and its riches cannot be moved to China, same as the Ukraine farmlands.

Land Grabs have been going on as long as Humans have had weapons.

I came across the current land grabs as a result of my Climate Change searches. Mainly I was researching the food impact of climate change and I ran across the fact that African countries are selling off large tracts of land so that other countries can produce food there. Then those countries leave the Africans to starve (horn of Africa), whilst their portions of the country flourish on desalinated water driven by fossil fuel power which is starving the rest of Africa with droughts driven by CO2 climate change.

One day some activists will get together and countries like China will find that you simply can't control tens of millions of people when they willing to die to reach a goal. It may not be in my lifetime, but it will be.

That old-fashioned mother of mine used to say that we needed wars from time to time to keep populations down to a sustainable level.

Perhaps she was right.

The trouble with wars is that although a lot of effort and resources are put in, and untold environmental damage results, they are not particularly efficient at killing people.

But take a good pandemic, such as bird flu or SARS, and the situation is reversed - huge death toll, but everything left intact. Nobody could possibly thinking of planning such a thing: could they?

Recently we bought a DVD version of the 1970's version of the BBC series Survivors....

Reality is that only the smallpox virus has the ability to deliver a payload to enough users. Then again every bio warfare lab has smallpox.....

Pandemics were a scourge when a high fever would kill many people. Since modern medicine, the likelihood of a pandemic has been reduced radically. Even Aspirin is enough, in many cases, to fend off a pandemic.

It would take a highly engineered virus to do the kind of damage needed (around 2 billion) and the impact in terms of disease from the inability to mange the dead would be huge and probably kill another billion or so.

We have long passed the time when wars are an effective population control. Although they may be part of the species (Human), pest removal programme for the world to get back to stability.