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Re: Ecological Economics and Entropy
On 14 Nov 1996 17:19:23 GMT, jmc@Steam.stanford.edu (John McCarthy)
wrote:
>Yuri Kuchinsky includes:
>
> World Food Organization reports that over 800 million people
> are starving on this planet right now. Get rid of your pink
> glasses.
>
>I'm sure that "starving" isn't the word that was used by the World
>Food Organization. If 800 million were starving, and the report was
>from last year, we would expect them to be dead by now. Would
>Kuchinsky tell us what actually happened or will happen in the next
>year or two?
You want to know what's happening? Can you face the truth?
U.N. World Food Council documents:
-------
Every day around the world 40,000 people die of hunger. That's 28
human beings every minute, and three out of four of them
are children under the age of five.
The number of hungry people increased five times faster in the 1980s
than in the previous decade. By 1989, 550 million people filled the
ranks of the malnourished or hungry.
-------
This shows quite plainly that things are not getting better. Since
1989 the number of people facing famine has almost doubled. These
people are not simply upset that they have to live on swill instead of
a Big Mac and fries, they're dying.
If everyone produced and consumed food as North Americans do, there
would only be enough food on the planet to feed 2.5 Billion people. On
the other hand if Americans reduced their meat consumption by just
10%, it would free up 12 million tons of grain anually - more than
enough to feed all those facing famine.
Jason McGinnis
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