I hear people all the time talking about how the world is overpopulated.
While we are definitely headed that way, we are not there yet. So it's not true.
What is true is that we produce too much waste. Far more than we should. We refuse to adopt technologies and practices which would reduce waste.
What is also true is that we absolutely produce enough food to feed everyone on the planet plus more. The reason we have so many people starving is not for lack of raw resources. It is because of money, pure and simple.
It is well known that we waste huge amounts of food daily. America is absolutely the country most guilty of this. Yet we have people starving in our own country, our own communities.
In many places it has become illegal to feed the homeless. But throwing away food that is perfectly edible is legal. Children can go to school hungry and be shamed if they need assistance. Even though taxpayers subsidize corn, wheat, milk and beef production, among many other food items. We pay for it yet are punished when we cannot afford to pay more.
In many countries, they look at waste far more critically than the US does. Milk is heat treated and shelf stable for months or even years. Bacon is sold in cans. Not sure of the result but in the early 90's candy makers in Europe were looking at producing edible candy wrappers to reduce waste from packaging. In Asia, you can find food sold in rice paper, edible and biodegradable.
Recently there was a situation where a FEMA contractor was supposed to deliver millions of meals to disaster victims. They delivered roughly 50 thousand meals. They pocketed the difference while people starve.
Corruption, bribery, greed are our enemies. We see huge political campaigns talking about supporting family farms while the same politician and programs give massive tax breaks to corporate mega-farms and enact laws to drive small farms out of business. Which affects not only the small farm but all the businesses which that farm supports. Local farming supply stores, equipment sales and repair shops, all suffer when small farms fail. Corporate farms truck in their own equipment and supplies, purchased in corporate sized deals. When the other businesses lose that, then the entire community suffers and often dies.
Drive through small town America and see how many businesses are boarded up, vacant ghosts of a distant past along interstate highways. Once thriving towns filled with hopeless faces and defunct manufacturing or processing plants. Children and grandchildren of once proud farmers and ranchers living in dilapidated apartments, dependent on government welfare to eat. Not sure that will be around another year, possibly another month.
It does not end at our borders. Look at other countries where we wage wars for oil. Where farmland cannot be worked because of all the unexploded ordnance buried there. Irrigation systems destroyed. Drinking water supplies poisoned with chemicals by intent or as a side effect of destruction and contamination. Bombs, chemical weapons, depleted uranium, diesel, oil and gasoline leave deadly waste behind. Cities and countries who have suffered war for decades may lose the very knowledge of how to farm and produce goods for basic survival.
But the corporate war gods must be fed. And feed them we do. We feed them our money, our food, our resources, our safety, our security, our lands, our neighbors, our children. We feed them our souls.
They scream for more and we beg to feed them, though we have nothing left to offer.
As long as WE have anything left they will continue trying to convince you that there are too many of us. They will continue trying to convince you that your starving neighbor is your enemy. That compassion is evil.
Too many of us keep buying what they are selling us.
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