Ishmael and the Starving Children

The book “Ishmael” has been around for a while, and when a friend gave it to me to read recently I thought after finishing “I am Ishmael”. My conclusions are the same: agriculture changed the human paradigm for ever, for the worse. Never truer than today. Millions of people starving to death in Northern Africa. The stated cause: Drought and crop failure. That is complete rubbish. The cause is simply too many people trying to live on too little arable land. And the land gets less arable as global climate change drives the droughts.
The conundrum is this: if we let the millions starve and die, them the population will be reduced to the survivors who might have a chance to survive the coming disasters of weather. If we feed them they will survive and have more babies and further degrade the environment in which they live. The civilized answer is “feed them”.
But wait! Where does the food come from? Ah, therein lies the rub. It comes from the world’s nations that have surplus food production, and they also have population increases and they also have climate-related problems with agriculture. So what happens when the starving of the world are starving and we don’t have surpluses to give them? Do we starve ourselves to feed them?

(By the way, You are responsible for all the starving children in Africa today. Yes, You. You wanted their parents fed 20 years ago, and now their children are starving. At least take responsibility for that.)
Don’t turn away from this discussion friends. It is just around the corner.
Image: http://misstila.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Starving-Child-5.jpeg
Ishmael the novel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_(novel)