Sex and Food and More Sex

Lets talk sex. Let's talk food.

No, unfortunately this isn't the fun type of talk about that topic, and admittedly I'd really prefer writing a steamy erotic scene or a delicious recipe, but this got my attention instead. This talk is much more about making babies and what they are going to eat.

Interestingly, wimp.com posted two videos today. The first was about 50 Cent talking about his new charitable interest www.dump.com/2011/10/30/50-cen… of providing a billion meals to people that don't have food. Now that sounds like a good idea, but it's not. In fact, it's a really horrible idea.

The irony was that on the same day the other video they posted was about how the world's population has jumped www.wimp.com/bigfast/ . It's estimated that it took about 20 thousand years for the population to reach the 1 billion mark, which it did in the early 1800's. But in the last 200 years we have gone from a population of 1 billion to one of 7 billion.

6,000,000,000 people in 200 years. Even if you were to average that it equates to 30 million people a year. That's like giving birth to a the population of Seoul...three times each year. That's insane.

In 1972, Donella Meadows wrote "The Limits to Growth", a book that stated that although we have an exponential capability for breeding there is a finite amount of arable land on Earth, and no technology can change that. The concept is simple: There will come a point that we will out-reproduce what we can produce.

Now, although I could believe Mr. Jackson (50 Cent's given moniker) has the best intentions, he was only about 9 or 10 when "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and "We Are The World" was released. Furthermore he doesn't strike me as the kind of guy that gets into 1980's hair-bands. So, like a lot of people he probably hasn't come to the realization that what is going on in Ethiopia and Somalia right now is part of a cycle.

At current U.N. estimates, 11 million are starving in Africa right now. Overpopulation paired with poor infrastructure has contributed to the fact that, just as the Meadows book says, there is only so much the land can produce. And, yes, poor weather conditions can complicate things but we're addressing average local production for the land. When people out-reproduce what their land can produce then they starve. That provides a sort of solution. Fewer people equates to more resources per capita (a cold fact, but true) and then there is a chance for recovery. But instead of focusing on infrastructure and social management, reproduction resumes and the cycle begins again. It's no coincidence that this latest famine happened just 25 years after the last one. It's just enough time to get through on generation and start on another.

50 Cent has already claimed to have provided 2.5 million meals and wants to provide a billion. But does that help?

Let me make this clear: aid on such a large scale is logistically impossible.

Assuming that that billion meals can be arranged, that feeds the starving in Africa for the grand total of one month. That's it. And that doesn't take into consideration the concepts of theft, corruption or food spoilage.

As good as our intentions were, much of the money collected from the 1985 charities either went to 1] the record companies, 2] Michael Jackson – the only celebrity who insisted on being paid for his time, or 3] African warlords that confiscated the supplies to fund (now this is really interesting) the al-Qaeda movement. And the charity we provide today is pretty much going in the same direction.

The right-to-lifers are going to complain that I say this, but a billion condoms would do better than a billion meals.

Sure, what is going on is a horrible tragedy. And I am not generally against activism or charity. Far from it. But let's not spend our resources putting a band-aid on a broken leg. We should be concentrating our efforts on things that will actually accomplish results. Social infrastructure. Diplomacy. Renewable resources. Education. Until we actually fix what's wrong the cycle can't be broken, and we are doing nothing more than asking for disaster to repeat itself.