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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Robert Bradbury wrote:</FONT><BR></DIV>
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<DIV><SPAN class=gmail_quote>On 12/6/05, <B class=gmail_sendername>Dirk
Bruere</B> <<A
href="mailto:dirk.bruere@gmail.com">dirk.bruere@gmail.com</A>>
wrote:</SPAN><BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE class=gmail_quote
style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: rgb(204,204,204) 1px solid">There
is plenty of food for everyone on the planet.</BLOCKQUOTE>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT><FONT
face=Arial size=2></FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT><FONT face=Arial
size=2></FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT><BR>I tend to agree with
Samantha -- I'd like to see hard data that backs up this
claim.</DIV></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>You could work it out pretty easily..
</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Food is energy (joules or calories). Food is also
vitamins, minerals, nutrients. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>You can come up with an average daily energy
requirement - say 10MJ per person and multiply it by the population then
see if there is that much food produced. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I haven't checked but I'm pretty sure there is.
</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>You could do the same with vitamins, minerals and
nutrients using recommended daily allowances etc. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT><FONT
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size=2></FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT><BR>It would be safe to say there
is *not* plenty of food for everyone on the planet at a price that everyone
can afford. </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV></BLOCKQUOTE>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Perhaps, but it would be a huge leap to infer that
because food isn't currently available at prices all people can afford that
making it cheaper to produce would solve the problem for those people who can't
afford to buy enough currently.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>To avoid having anyone starve its necessary for the
people and the food to be in the same place. </FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV> It is also safe to say that there will not be plenty off food in
the future if current unsustainable agricultural practices continue.
(Sufficient water and fish protein are two problems which immediately come to
mind where overharvesting has created shortages and will create more
significant problems in the future.)<BR></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT><FONT
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<BLOCKQUOTE class=gmail_quote
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the starving poor cannot access or pay for normal food then GM food will
certainly not solve the problem.</BLOCKQUOTE><FONT face=Arial
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT><FONT
face=Arial size=2></FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT><FONT face=Arial
size=2></FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT><BR>It will if it makes the cost
of producing the food cheaper!</DIV><FONT face=Arial
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>To avoid having anyone starve its necessary for the
people and the food to be in the same place. </FONT></DIV></FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT><FONT
face=Arial size=2></FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT><BR>If I have two
choices (a) make hundreds of millions or billions of people richer or (b) make
more/cheaper food then (b) wins every time because it has lower inertia.</DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV></BLOCKQUOTE>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>What do you mean by "inertia"? The word as I
understand it isn't applicable in this case. </FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV> I can produce the seeds (or bacteria) required to totally
transform an agricultural system in only a few years. It is impossible
to transform an economy in a similar time frame. </DIV>
<DIV> India and China are providing good examples but they have been at
it for years and it is only successful in limited areas of those countries
(northern India and rural China have not experienced significant economic
improvement).<BR><BR>I would suggest that you consider the biology.
Bacteria can have doubling times as low as 20 minutes, eukaryotic cells have
doubling times of ~24 hours, large organisms (crop grains, fish, farm animals,
etc.) have growth and doubling times measured in months to years. I can
grow a quantity of "GMO-bio-gruel" in a solar pond significantly faster than I
can grow the same quantity of rice, corn, ham, beef, etc. </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV></BLOCKQUOTE>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>But can you do it in sufficient scale Robert? You
don't have a solution unless you actually manufacture your gruel in sufficient
amounts. </FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV> (In fact bacteria are doing most of the essential chemical
conversions necessary to allow you to grow the meat at all.) I can
easily engineer the GMO-BG to produce more protein which is one of the major
reasons people consume meat (or fish or poultry).<BR><BR>Fundamental point --
if I can grow it faster using the available resources more efficiently it is
going to be cheaper than products produced using traditional methods.
Would this have been possible 20 years ago -- no. Then the only solution
one could envision was making people wealthier to allow them to be able to pay
more for the food. Now the biotechnology knowledge base and its
industrial infrastructure are sufficiently robust that they enable alternate
solutions for these problems (famine, starvation, malnutrition, losses during
production, etc.).<BR><BR>Now many people might not like the idea of consuming
GMO biogruel. </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>But if you had your choice of eating biogruel or becoming a prostitute
with significant risk of contracting HIV (quite common in parts of Africa,
India, Thailand, etc.) *which* would you choose?</DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV> If you want to choose the "economic development" path I
*challenge* you to show me how growing the economies in those countries by
building the schools, educating the people, creating the entrepreneurs and
investors to finance them and having them become wealthier so they can afford
sufficient food is *faster* than the "GMO development path" which simply makes
the food cheaper!<BR></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>You haven't given enough information to provide a
comparison. How *much* bio-gruel can you produce? Would your bio-gruel be
safe to eat or contaminated because of</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>the way you produced it? Would food authorities
have to trust you that it was safe or would you have to produce your bio-gruel
under the same testing regimes as other food producers? </FONT></DIV><FONT
face=Arial size=2></FONT>
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT><BR>This
isn't something I'm uneducated about. The Hunger Project has been around
for ~25 years and for many of those years I supported their efforts to pursue
what could be called the "economic development" path. After I became
more educated about microbiology and biotechnology it became clear that the
GMO route would be much faster and save many more lives.<BR></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>See above comments. Your bio-gruel has to be made
somewhere on earth and in sufficient quantities. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>It looks completely impractical to me.
</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT>
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<DIV>Thinking about this problem requires some deep thought about how long it
takes to educate people and uplift an entire economy vs. how long it takes to
build solar ponds and seed them with engineered GMOs with doubling times of 20
minutes. (Doubling times of 20 minutes allow bacteria to grow to the
mass of the Earth within 2 days -- *if * they can be fed sufficient
resources.)</DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV></BLOCKQUOTE>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Thats an excellent point - what are you going to
feed your bio-gruel producers to make them grow (and contain the right
nutrients)? Bio-gruel maybe? :-)</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>(What was the movie that solved the problem by
inventing Soylent Green ?)</FONT><FONT face=Arial
size=2> </FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV> To solve the nutrition problem for humanity requires combining the
machinery of existing genomes (that are capable of many chemical
transformations) with the ability of humans to collect, concentrate and
transport resources (C, H, O & N along with trace
elements).<BR></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Certain schemes are just not practical because they
cannot be done politically. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>For food to provide nourishment it has to be at the
same place as the the people that have to eat it - that's the problem.
</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Would you have you saving Africans or whatever
sprinkle bio-gruel into local puddles? They don't have that much control over
that much real estate. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Starvation is a political phenomenon. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Brett Paatsch</FONT></DIV>
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