The Hungry Planet, the Modern World at the Edge of Famine

Abstract

A search for educational prescriptions and support of the many current cliches about education and development will reveal little. The contributors play the traditional role of academic skeptics well, and, in this respect, the second function of the book is met. Although most contributors imply a relationship between education and development, data and arguments refuting generalized prescriptions are repeatedly evidenced. In an illustrative case using less-thanadequate Indian data, a much higher rate of return to physical versus human capital was calculated. Techniques for projecting teacher "needs" and the consequent evidence of teacher "shortages" in underdeveloped countries were seriously questioned. The formal vocational school was downgraded by some authors and characterized as an inflexible development tool, while others gave qualified support to vocational training. The creation of "economizing behavior" and a set of cultural attitudes complementary to development was suggested by some to be the single most important role of education in developing countries-a nebulous function capable of being supported by any number of activities.The book should serve as an excellent reference for students of economic development. Its very usefulness would seem to rest on the relevant hypotheses which the historical perspective stimulates. The book closes with a note on the ready availability of historical education data in even the most primitive countries, yet the paucity of research using these data to refine our presently crude ideas about education and development relationships.Famine, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1965, ix + 487 pp. ($7.95) As a professor of food science, Georg Borgstrom is to be commended on the outreach that he has put forth in this book. The world trends in population by continents, regions, and political groupings have been delineated along with the biological resources that are required, utilized, or expended to realize a food supply for a total world population twice the present size within the space of the next generation.The empirical as well as the analytical treatment of the subject of the world food supply requirements are reminders that the Malthusian theory, scoffed at by the world for the past 150 years, is no longer bunk. It gives chilling evidence that it is timely to consider that 50 percent of the present population ends each day either plain hungry or ill fed. Also that by the year 2000, before today's youth reach middle age, the world population will more than double. Further that seven-eighths of the increase will occur in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These continental areas are already hollow shells of food production and their potentialities are even less than evident. Here too are located what today are called the underdeveloped nations.

The Evolution of Land Resource Carrying Capacity in 35 Major Cities in China

“…This perspective was expanded by FAO [20], which studied LRCC by establishing a novel method that divides several agro-ecological cells in each country according to structure, spatial layout, and cultivation time of species. The perception of LRCC based on the ecological footprint originates from the concept of Ghost Acreage presented by Borgstrom [21] in 1965. Wackernagel and Rees [10] extended the concept of Ghost Acreage and studied LRCC, which was expressed by the surplus or deficit carrying status of land resources via comparing pressure with supply capacity.…”

Pellagra: Down Not Out If Down and Out (and South) – Part 2

“…If we set our minds we could disallow a range of blackwhite disparities in the prevalence of chronic disease including (Caribbean) "amputation capitals" caused by metabolic and "blood sugar" syndromes as well as excessive deaths from infection. Targeting the vulnerable may be more effective, more workable and more affordable than other proposals or repatriating looted cultural artefacts and could be off-set by other stolen assets from corrupt dictators laundered in the West as more recent "sins of the fathers" [57, [312][313][314][315][316][317][318][319].…”

“…Meat is not a luxury for billions and should be democratised or as Benjamin Franklin (1758) stated "For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost". Metabolic rifts allow for dangerous metabolic ghettoes with poor brain development crucial for abstract thought, language writing and arithmetic and the many Neuro-prefixed disciplines that "supersize the mind" [312,316,410,411]. A more moral economy should focus on this need as did the "physiocrats" and "levellers" several centuries ago-and was Confucian philosophy long before that [186,397,412].…”

Tackling issues and initiating public debate: New Zealand Association of Scientists 1974–91

“…NZAS 1978/79 President Wren Green 'broke new ground for the Association' [ §3/3/79] in organising both the General Symposium on Social Responsibility in Science at the ANZAAS 49 th Congress, Auckland, January 1979, and publication by NZAS of the book recording the Proceedings, which he edited [64]. Opening with a paper by distinguished overseas professor, Georg Borgström, author of The Hungry Planet [65], who bewailed the 'failings of science to shoulder social responsibility' [66], it also contained papers by Australian and New Zealand scientists on different impacts of science and technology on society, as mentioned above. This attracted an audience of about 300 [67] and helped to boost NZAS membership to 473 in 1980 [68], which appears to have been its peak [see ref .…”