Something does not add up! Where did you get your data? According to the 2006 Chinese census there were roughly 6,994,500. They estimate the current population in 2008 to be around 7,018,636.

Hong Kong has a total area of 1104km². Subtracting area that are water, that gives you a land area of 1053km².

7,018,636 people ÷ 1053km² = ~6665.371 people/km²

1km² = 1,000,000m²

Therefore there are ~0.00665371 person per sq. meter, not 1.65.

So that means there is 150m² per person.

If you are referring only to Hong Kong Island, then your math is still wrong.
As of the 2006 census there were 1,268,122 residents.
It has a land area of 80.4km².
So you have a density of ~15,772.66/km² or 0.01577 people per sq. meter.

Although that is still way too crowded.

Learning to adopt and being a little more green friendly.


Also, there's plenty of land on earth that's not forest and it's perfect for farming.
Being friendly with countries that have such supply wouldn't hurt them.
It's amazing all the untouched real estate land you see when you drive around here.
It could easily be given up and used for more useful things, other then new malls.

It seens that natural genocide is the only way out.

What's that?

EveV is right, you;d be surprised how much untouched land there is.

Umm... Odin, sorry to correct, but a Kilometer is 1,000 meters, not 1,000,000.

You added 2 zeroes there, so... Accounting for that, according to your own data... That's more than 6 people per kilometer...

No you're confusing a kilometer with a square kilometer.

A kilometer is a distance that is 1,000 meters.

A square kilometer is an area that is 1 kilometer by 1 kilometer.

Thus it is the same as an area that is 1,000 meters by 1,000 meters.

1,000m × 1,000m = 1,000,000m ²

Therefore 1km²= 1,000,000m²

Oops! Sorry Odin.

I have math idiot moments at times. I forgot that a square km. was, of course, squared.

My bad. I'll have to work on that. But still... That IS way to many people...

Natural Genocide? That would be something like a Natural Disaster.
I'd like to see people who state that option be effected by one first.
Lead by example. ;)

Hm well.. China already have their rules against over child bearing. I doubt learning to adopt will help anymore in that place.

I'm rude to annoying people :)
But yea the threads usually get deleted if they are of a stupid nature or have become a war zone.

O.o I dont know what that's all about but I read somewhere that in China you are legally only suppose to have one son or daughter(right now) due to the fear of overpopulating the country any more than it currently is.

And because of this "law" it left many families upset and fleeing the country after that huge earthquare which killed thousandsssssss of people. Half of which were children of those single family homes..Which ultimately left those families childless and heartbroken.

Exactly

Encourage adoption over child bearing, reduce meat consumption, blah blah blah.

Yeah, a lot of the so-called available land is infertile or unsuitable for cultivation. Take the Canadian Shield for example

I'm talking about the south which is completely different.
I've watched this place go from forest, to country, to city.
They build house after house store after store.
This land could be used for farming and theres TONS of it.
I know this for a fact because many people here bought themselves a few acres and use it for their private gardens. Full of tons of healthy fruits and vegetables.

You people have really lost your sense of size if you can't see that.


If we all put down our barriers and stopped saying " This land is mine" and actually attempted to take care of one another then China would have no worries butttt that's very unlikely to happen.

Well its true that people chop down a lot of trees to make way for their own use, especially for the "Rubber" industry.

Some of the price inflation of food stuffs can be attributed to rising gas prices. The cost of shipping food overseas or by truck has gone up--even supplemented by Ethanol, which is more expensive to refine in the first place and places undue pressure on the corn industry, which in turn pressures dairy, beef/pork/poultry, and pretty much any other industry that has any reliance on corn at all, which further inflates prices.

Best way to help (not 'solve', notice) the problem of food prices is to go down to Saudi Arabia and kick some of those oil-hording butts back into line, if ya ask me >_< . Better yet, allow American companies to drill in Texas and Alaska!

Even better than that, having a "closed circuit" for goods manufacture and disposal would make a lot of things a lot cheaper. I'm talking about recycling. Not that recycling is free... But it should save some money, yeah?

I don't entirely disagree with you, but let me guess. You don't live in Texas or Alaska, do you? Why don't we drill for oil in Ohio? They have an even larger reserve underneath their land, but successfully killed any drilling as far back as at least the early 1960's.

How about we stopped spiking every food product out of American factories with "High Fructose Corn Syrup". Its not needed, and its slowly killing people with empty calories. Besides it destroyed the flavor of those thing that really benefitted from being made with cane sugar, which we now pay southern farmers not to produce.

Not sure what my being from Texas or Alaska has to do with anything... It's a widely known estimate that Alaska alone has more oil in it than most of the Middle East, yet the environmentalist nazis are constantly lobbying to make sure we can't drill there because, god forbid, laying a pipe in the ground might kill a few fish. Ohio would only be another example of the same stupidity.

While I agree that HFCS is useless and unhealthy, I fail to see how that might help a global shortage of food. It'd be better to stop procuring corn for ethanol.

Short of massacreing millions of people, there really isn't a way to eliminate over-population. Although, if there is indeed a major food shortage world wide, then that means that nature is about to balance itself. With less food, population growth would stem and the global census for the rest of history would read 6.2 billion or whatever.

Of course, since population growth in some areas is STILL exponentiating, one has to wonder if claims of a 'global' food shortage are really true.

The problem with your second suggestion is that most of this rich oil land in Texas is being used to build houses stores and malls so there is just no more space. And recycling has always been suggested. People just don't listen. *shrugs*

Hm... There's still the horizontal pipe stuff that they keep suggesting for use in Alaska. That could go under houses, easy, no?

Mer, I dunno that much about how it works, I just know that it's there and a lot of people want to drill it while a lot of louder people want to keep it illegal to drill.

The real problem here is not the food crisis but rather the weather crisis. It is irregular weather patterns that are impacting harvests. Moreover it is only getting worse. If global warming continues unchecked the rise of temperature in the world's oceans will cause an enormous drop off in precipitation cycles. This means less rain, worldwide desertification and less farmable land.

It also does not help that man is cutting down vegetation at an alarming pace. The Amazon rainforest ecosystem will collapse in 20 years. That also effects weather patterns and atmospheric CO2 levels. And that is but one example.

I fear humans are setting themselves up for a sudden downfall. Im not saying it would be the end of humanity, but rather an end to the comfortable and wasteful lifestyles we have come to know. There is no way we can continue on doing what we are doing to nature. Everything has a limit.

Incidentally, particularly here in America, such an idea is despised and tossed aside because we the "greatest, most free" country in the world thinks that would lead to communism, and we wouldn't want anything related to that because the few of us who actually have a say (the rich, if you can't figure it out) would have to give up their luxurious lifestyles, wouldn't they?

Maybe I'm just incredibly cold, but I see plenty of people in the world that we could EASILY "trim" out of the circuit, so to speak... Major criminals being in the high slots on my list.

As you can probably tell, I support Kira's ideals. Not the execution, just the ideals.

Of course, there's always the potential of a "false accusation." However, when there's over-whelming evidence against the perp, and ESPECIALLY if he's a repeat offender, I don't see the point in sending him to jail and using the tax payers money to give him three square meals and a roof over his head, just HOPING that he won't get out of jail and commit the same crime again, this time with more "street cred."

But, that's just my oppinion on how to lower the population. Not to mention, it would lead to a much safer and inevitably happier world. Sure, it might only be safe because of fear, but looking through the past it seems that the ONLY way to maintain peace amongst human being is to put the fear in them.

After all, the Cold War never fully exploded, because both sides were afraid of the nukes, am I not right? (Note the word "fully," as in all out between the US and Russia)

After reading this, I've been thinking...

What if there USED to be life on Mars, but they did the same thing to their planet that we're doing now? Maybe that's why it's more-or-less just a huge desert...

There is no more usable farmland in the US. Every inch is being used. That's why lots of farmers are going to Brazil to buy cheap land and grow now very profittable crops like sugar cane for bio-fuel.

Hmmm, yes and no. Utilization of current farmland is near 100%, however there are large tracks of former farmland, that have gone feral under government wildlife conservation programs. The farmers are paid $50 per acre not to plant, and allow the land to return to it's natural wild state. However with newer high food prices many farmers are wanting to pull out of these programs. At the current food prices, they can earn over $150 per acre planting wheat or other staple crops.

The main driving force for the land grab in Brazil and Argentinia is economics. Farmers who wish to expand production into previously underutiliesed land, find it much much cheaper to produce in there. Land and labor cost are lower by a factor of 10 or more in those areas.

There is also the problem of farmland conversion in land near metropolitain areas. Even with higher food prices, it is often the case that the land is worth more to urban developers, than it would ever be worth as farmland. So many farmers sell out, and buy land in South America.

Also it has socially become compleatly unexceptable in North America to expand into land that is still in a natural state.

But they can have a second child if their first child is a girl. However, many of them cannot afford a second child and no one wants girls, so they send them off to orphanages. With a population as large as China's, you can probably imagine how many babies need to be adopted. Some relatives of mine adopted 2 girls from China.

Because if you lived on the land you are suggesting be drilled you might be more informed about both sides fo the issue. Drilling sites do far more damage than killing a few fish while they are being constructed, even when they don't have accidents. As for running pipelines under people houses, you obviously are not thinking beyond your own needs.

Do you want a pipeline under you that prevents you from digging on your own land? Whether its for a fence post or a water well, you cannot dig.
Do you want a pipeline under you that may rupture because of either land shifts, improper installation or defective manufacturing? If there is not an explosion that destroys everything you own and kills your family, you could still have a seepage that kills all vegetation, contaminates your ground water and requires a major construction & excavation team tearing up your land (and maybe even your house) to repair it. Talk to the people in the Dallas suburb last week who watch their neighbor's house blow and put three people in the hospital with critical burns.

More drilling sites are not the answer. We need less consumption.

Thank you for a voice of reason, SatoriOne.

Let me start by saying, all of this talk of oil is getting a little far from Tenchu's original post about food and population.

Most people on this forum don't really understand how the oil industry thinks and operates. My grandparents are deeply involved with oil and I have a different perspective than what is typically seen in the news.

Very few people realize how much oil and gas may be under their feet, but trust me when I say the oil companies do. Oil supplies in the ground are quite good, even without the drilling of additional fields. In the southern U.S. there are many wells that have been shut down for the last few decades. This is not because there is not oil in the wells, but because it is cheaper to acquire from sources like the middle-east and Africa.

Now that the price of oil has began to rise many of those dormant pumps are being turned on. There has also been a resurgence of drilling operations world wide. This is not because the oil is needed for immediate consumption, but because with the current oil prices the cost of drilling are quickly recovered.

Competition between oil company is one of the big reasons why they want to invest into new oil and gas fields like Alaska and Brazil. This is because once they have a hole in the ground, they will have secured the rights to that revenue source for many years to come.

Now I would like to for us to get back to the original topic of this thread. :D

Oh I agree with you, I don't want to see any expansion into natural habitats.

Kind of ironic that many farmers entered these programs because grain and cattle prices were so low almost every farmer was in the red ten years ago. They federal government had to step in to save almost every farmer in Saskatchewan (part of Canada) from bankruptcy.

Nowadays, you don't become a farmer unless you're going to inherit a very large tract of land. The only people actually making money from farming these days are large companies, and individual farmers that lucked out on having a very rich topsoil.

The world is fine, and we're not running out of space or food... If it weren't for busines and money, we could easily have double or triple the world's current population. Unfortunately, comforts make us destroy the planet.

Odin, thanks for the correction at the start of the thread... I was gonna mention it, but good explanation.

sorta not
 

Farming is big business and does'nt operate without money and business. Unless your describing subsistence farming which unfortunately is what 3rd World countrys have too operate with? According to UN and UN food program fyi UNF has spent over 612 million (USD) dollars on food for hungry people and needs more. For example UNF assists Ethiopia to reach an additional 4.7 million people in response to the government's urgent appeal for food and nutrition assistance to avoid hunger-related deaths in the coming months. According too UNF they are hard pressed too meet the minimum demands due to civil wars and natural disasters like climate change especially in Southeast Asia. The US provides 60% of all the corn -1/3 soybean crop - 1/4 rice that transported across international borders-according to 08' Crop reports for US soybean and corn are 10-20% behind last years crop due too rain. Due too low supply of key commodities in US due too weather ( rain ). Droughts and rising fuel prices too transport key commodities are another factor in continued 'world food crisis' according to UNF 08' sources.

Why not? Not everywhere in the world is like Hong Kong you know... In fact, the majority of the world is uninhabitted (even if you exclude the harsh parts of the world where it would be impossible for humans to live safely). Another way to look at it, one sixth of the worlds population lives in china and they still have plenty of space. Of course the cities are overcrowded, but they can easily build a couple more dozen cities.

The only thing making this situation dire, is money and business.

why are you showing me the earth at night? That doesn't really concern this topic. You ought to be showing this image instead...

the red is where it is densly populated. I think it's obvious that there is a lot of room left:rolleyes: