World population hits 7 billion on Oct. 31, or thereabouts

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Esteban
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23 Nov 2011, 12:20 am

ruveyn wrote:
How do you explain the fact that Israel is a garden. It started out as a desert for the Jewish settlers who came there. No it blooms?

ruveyn


Because Israel is a rich country that can afford to heavily subsidize its agriculture. The desert blooms for the same reason the Japanese can grow rice on terraces on the hills or the US can grow so much corn - massive government subsidies. Obviously the Third World simply can't afford that. Third World farmers are poor because they receive little or nothing in government subsidies and they have to compete against subsidized First World farmers.

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And we are nowhere near the absolute bearing capacity of this planet.


Only because so many people lack basic necessities. To give everyone a decent standard of living would probably use up the resources of several Earths.



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23 Nov 2011, 3:35 am

The Anasazi and the Membris also irrigated desert. After a while salts build up in the land, there is not enough rainfall or irrigation water to flood the fields, leach the salt, so the crops and the people die. It is a short term answer. The Palm and Olive are the most salt tolerant of plants.

There are droughts, other claims to the water. No one has yet made rain.

A hundred years ago in the US they started farming the Southwestern rivers, the rivers carried salt, it built up in the fields, thirty years later nothing grew there. Then they moved and pumped ground water, less salt, but Arizona runs out of ground water within twenty years.

Babylon had the same problem, a generation of production, a thousand years of salt. It is now happening along the Rio Grande. So much water is used the river ends before it reaches the Gulf. Dammed it evaporates, becomes salty, and is then used for irrigation. The Brazos also.

Nothing clears the salt but a thousand years of rain. What used to be intense row crop land, up to four crops a year, now grows Alfalfa, which is salt tolerant, even removes some, which is fed to cattle, who spread it over the land.

Most of our answers are short term.