Feeding A Billion People

May 22, 2016 1:15 PM

Turpan Yuanyang Xiapu (SLYT)

There is also this article from 2013 about food production in China: 6 Mind-Boggling Facts About Farms in China How China feeds a billion people is both incredible and a bit scary.

posted by Michele in California (4 comments total)

Thank you. The Nat Geo video is far too brief, but the Yuanyang rice terraces have been among my desktop photos for a long time so it's prompting me to look for more (and more on Turpan too).
posted by anadem at 9:39 PM on May 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

Great post
posted by esto-again at 12:21 AM on May 23, 2016

This is so scary. It's like we are watching the end of our own species in slow motion. We know how to stop it but we just won't. The earth will survive. I guess this is a form of species Darwinism but here, being the fittest to survive means using our brains and common sense by being respectful of the earth instead of being rapacious.
posted by gt2 at 2:04 AM on May 23, 2016

I not sure I get the doom and gloom. The situation seems more complicated than the "soylent green is around the corner" read by mother jones and usually left sources. I can imagine the worlld of hunter gatherers fretting over the coming end of humanity because the herds were thinning and lands being picked clean.
posted by 2N2222 at 7:18 AM on May 23, 2016