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Millenium Project



So anyone got a spare $115bn to spare?

I thoguht we could only spend that kind of money if we were attacking a country, not supporting it.

Anyone ever notice how when any country in the world has some sort of natural disaster, the US is expected to dish out money like crazy, yet when natural disasters happen in the US, the UN and other countries couldn't give two sh[b][/b]its about us. How about the huricanes last year in Florida? UN didn't give a dime...

I'd have to give up my milk money...

Although I'm a humanitarian at heart and wish we could get rid of global poverty, it would cause at least as many problems as it would solve.

We really can't just hand money over to a people who have allowed themselves to overburden their local ecosystem (not that it's good that we do it ourselves), as it would cause more devastation.

The perfect example is in Ethiopia, which has had many famines that I can recall in my life. These famines were so devastating only because the local population far surpassed the ability of their land to provide for them - even in 'good rainy' years. So when the famine happened, the natural trend of equilibrium (sadly) should have been a drastic reduction in population to the level at which the land could sustain them.

Unicef, CCF, and all sorts of other aid organizations stepped in and disrupted the natural equilibrium, however, and fed those who would have otherwise died. Instead of the famine reducing the population to a sustainable level, they only decreased by a small percentage - keeping the environment overburdened. Then the next time they had a dry season there was another famine... and the aid organizations came back and disrupted the equilibrium yet again. And the next time, etc.

It's sad to say, but if we hadn't stepped in the first time, they probably wouldn't be in this mess again and again. They would likely be 'poor but healthy', like their neighbor Kenya.

Now the real 'power brokers' don't really care about suffering, but they do understand that we're killing the environment - and they also understand that it is only going to get worse with countries like China increasing their per capita consumption. I feel that 'they' have intentionally held back the poor countries of Africa and Asia to prevent them from increasing their contribution towards global greenhouse gasses - and very little else beyond that.

Why these countries are so poor is not because they have bad land - granted it's not great land, but there's worse - it is because of the stranglehold on their budgets because of loan and interest payments to the International Monetary Fund. If you're spending half your annual budget on your national debt, of course there is very little left to improve the state of your nation.

The international banking syndicates know this very well. But if they forgave the debt it would cause more problems than just environmental ones... this issue is far too complex to simply say 'throw more money and we can fix it'. Once people are no longer poor, they will want to be like Europeans and Americans and have lots of consumer goods - like all nations on the rise.

Can our environment really support any more consumer societies?

Edited, Wed Jan 19 11:41:30 2005 by Mindwalker

Giving them tractors and allowing them to farm more efficiently wouldn't exactly solve any problems. Their ecosystem currently (this era) is variable, with some seasons that are inevitably going to be bone dry - having a mechanized agriculture base doesn't change that in the slightest.

This once again would create more problems than it solved unless it was very slowly introduced... give them tractors and now they need irrigation (which requires vast quantities of clean water, which they don't have abundant quantities of in the first place), and they need hybrid seeds to avoid drought or bugs (but that require chemical fertilizers that pollute the runoff), and fuel for the vehicles (increasing greenhouse gas emissions).

You've quoted some stats - but nothing that actually proves anything - you say that the land is considered 11% arable by the current government. That statement means absolutely nothing unless you provide a UN estimate of how much is truly arable (or something similar). You also quote their size and their population - yay, you've discovered Google! What relevance do those numbers have on anything without being in the context of what population density the land should be able to support.

On your basis, I will state that 42 IS the answer to 'life the universe, and everything' - and provide no context whatsoever for that to be meaningful. Not trying to cut you down or anything, but numbers don't mean **** unless a valid context is provided.

Yeah the government of Ethiopia needs change, but like most African nations, they are ruled by a bunch of competing factions of bullies - shoot the leadership in the head, it won't make me cry. But changing the leadership won't change the environment they live in - one that cannot support anywhere near the population density of the average European or North American territory.

But that still doesn't change the fact that increasing the mechanisticity of these 'poor' nations would be opening a Pandora's Box unless it were done very slowly over time.

Edited, Thu Jan 20 16:56:21 2005 by Mindwalker