World Population

[GodLovesTheUSA]

Among other things, the news here is carrying a story about the world population reaching the 7 billion mark. I found a website with some population information.
[URL="http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm"][/URL]d on is ..Change is coming.
We do not have to initiate that change, it is coming one way or the other. However we can learn to manage our response to change.

[rkaiser]

The challenge Ted, is that the food gets in to the hands of a few prior to distribution.. Think of this from a poverty/donation perspective as well as a subsidised farmer/wealthiest corporations in the world perspective.

Can't really blame them for taking advantage --- nobody wants to get a hockey stick and truly get in the game with them.

We are more than capable of producing food for even the 7 billion. I heard today that almost 2/3's of the USA vegetable production is in one southern Californian valley.

If farmers are going to see a difference in their bottom line, they need to take part in the food chain rather than have it looped around their necks, draggin them along.

[farmers_son]

More mouths to feed has to be considered as a underlying factor in the higher food commodity prices we are enjoying. There has been a paradigm shift in the market place. We are clearly being told to producer all we can. Previously, since about 1960, the market was telling producers to suppress production but that is all changed now.

I do not see food prices ever, and I mean ever, going back. The world can eat all we can produce.

I got this from CNN...

Here are some different ways that might help you envision the enormousness of 7 billion:

-- Seven billion seconds ago, the year was 1789. That was the year George Washington was inaugurated as the first U.S. president and Congress met for the very first time.

-- If you took 7 billion steps along the Earth's equator -- at 2 feet per step -- you could walk around the world at least 106 times.

-- Suppose an average thimble holds 2 milliliters of water. Seven billion of those thimbles would fill at least five Olympic-sized swimming pools.

-- Let's say the average human is about 5 feet tall, accounting for children. If you stack those 7 billion people end to end, they would reach about 1/14th of the way to the sun -- or 27 times the distance to the moon, Volpert said.

-- Seven billion ants, at an average size of 3 milligrams each, would weigh at least 23 tons (46,297 pounds).


"Our mind just staggers," Volpert said, when thinking about how big 7 billion really is. He said there's a similar feeling when trying to grasp ultra-tiny measurements or something as vast as outer space.

"Every once in a while when we look up at the stars, we get a glimpse of the scale that's beyond the human scale, and it's fascinating and great," he said.

Population experts are hoping that more people begin to grasp the 7 billion concept soon, because the number has skyrocketed in recent years and the situation is becoming more urgent. (See populations country-by-country)

The world didn't reach 1 billion inhabitants until 1800, according to the Population Reference Bureau, and it reached 2 billion in 1930. But with advances in modern medicine, it took only 30 more years to reach 3 billion, 14 years to reach 4 billion, 13 years to reach 5 billion and 12 years to reach both 6 billion and 7 billion.

The U.N. has estimated a population of 9.3 billion by 2050, and there is expected to be more than 10 billion people on Earth by 2100.

"We're getting into more and more trouble the bigger the number gets," said John Bongaarts, vice president of the Population Council, an international nonprofit group. "Every billion people we add makes life more difficult for everybody that's already here."