Comment by seven_stones | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seven_stones | Hacker News Reader

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The real trick is that the existing cultures themselves will have to quickly reconfigure so that this doesn't simply shift the problem laterally.

For example, initiatives to dig wells in various African countries have turned out to result in other problems. Some nomadic cultures began staying put, and then they started overusing all the other resources. The scarcity of water was a control in itself, limiting how long groups stayed in a given area. Removal of that control has led to desertification of areas surrounding the wells. And it also brought disparate groups into contact with each other for longer periods of time, which led to more disease outbreaks. Nomadic groups had fewer and briefer encounters with others before, limiting the spread of disease from one group to another.

Another example is the grave humanitarian crisis in Somalia. Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to starve to death in the next few months. Due to raging conflicts, humanitarian aid cannot be effectively distributed.

However, even if the crisis could temporarily be averted, the problem with food aid is it undermines any possibility of local production. Farmers can't compete with free food dumped on the market, so they stop farming. Not being self-sufficient, now you're looking at not only providing aid, but ever-increasing aid as the population grows, which means if you stop for any reason -- including civil war flaring up again -- now even more people die: the ones you saved, and the children they have had in the interim.

See http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363663,00...

Cultures with high child mortality compensate by having high numbers of children. Once you get rid of the main causes of child mortality, you have to either stop having so many kids, or dramatically increase food production. Otherwise curing Malaria can result later in all the problems that accompany a lack of resources: bigger famines, increased civil strife and warfare.

> Once you get rid of the main causes of child mortality, you have to either stop having so many kids, or dramatically increase food production. Otherwise curing Malaria can result later in all the problems that accompany a lack of resources: bigger famines, increased civil strife and warfare.

Much as what happened in Europe, this tends to self-regulate over a few generations: high natality is a requirement in high-death and low-income situations, where you need many children to have some survive (and help you in old age), and children are hands that can work and provide wealth.

As mortality decreases you need less children as they'll pretty much all survive, and as wealth increases you want less children because raising them to your society's standards gets more expensive and there's a much bigger investment in each child.

Of course there will be 2-3 generations with high natality and low mortality, and an explosion of younger generations (likely leading to a few revolutions). But there's little you can do about that in the short term.

Yes - see Germany, Italy, Singapore and Japan for high life expectancy and low birth rate. Interestingly, children also become less affordable, as opposed to just less financially necessary.

Yep, noted that at the end of the second paragraph (might not have been clear enough)

Oh, no, you were really clear. I just did not read that paragraph. Oops...

Regarding cultures with high child mortality and the effects of vaccine: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y... If these cultures can focus on development instead of battling sickness the surprising fact is that the earth population actually will stop growing...

Humanity is still an animal race. Our birth rates still self-regulate. If children stop dying in Africa, people will in time stop having as many children.

There will very likely be issues like you describe, but they should run their course and go away so long as outsiders don't try to meddle too much.

Unlike accelerated disease propegation between nomadic tribes, the problem of having extra people is one of the better problems to have.

Otherwise curing Malaria can result later in all the problems that accompany a lack of resources: bigger famines, increased civil strife and warfare.

I cannot fathom why someone would be against curing malaria. Bring on the faminines or civil wars. We shouldn't keep the Africans down. Africa already has civil wars & famines, we shouldn't sacrifice the little black kids aswell.

I didn't read this into seven_stones' post. We should eradicate Malaria, of course, but we should also plan for the consequences of eradicating it - intensify investment in modernizing agriculture, education and getting ready for a few famines and revolutions (and the resulting deaths) too if all else fails.

> However, even if the crisis could temporarily be averted, the problem with food aid is it undermines any possibility of local production. Farmers can't compete with free food dumped on the market, so they stop farming.

Aid like this needs to happen through buying the food locally, or as close to it as possible.

I think you'd get the most long-term benefit from enforcing peace on the roads and at the refugee camps, then giving the refugees money - ever more until it's worth it for independents to deliver food.

Initially this would result in the same rush of foreign food which would otherwise put local farmers out of business, but instead of the aid being foreign food which displaces local food production, it's foreign money - which will buy local food with preference because it's cheaper. Local farmers could command any price - just short of that of shipping food across the world under military convoy, and would make a fortune. This would build local food production, not ruin it.

The USDA has been piloting a food aid program for a few years that procures food locally. I think an independent study on the program is due next year.

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