Grain shortages are in the news. There’s now a stronger link than ever between food and fuel. Here’s the conclusion:

Cheap food, like cheap oil, may be a thing of the past.

The article draws an analogy between the current financial crisis and the emerging food crisis. Taking it further, if our collective debt problems are a result of us living beyond our means, then rising food prices paint a much more disturbing picture: hundreds of millions of people, if not billions, will be living beyond their means simply by existing. You can do your best to avoid debt by not doing stupid things like taking out loans to spend on a holiday, but you can’t choose not to eat.

Now, taking a detached, purely cold-blooded just-the-numbers-ma’am-please approach for a moment (it’s what I do best anyway), if x million people can’t feed themselves, is the most ethical course of action to let them die before they reproduce and become 2x million people that the world can’t afford to feed?

You could say “No! The most ethical course of action is to give food aid and help those x million people live!” That works while the rest of the world can afford to feed them, but if the population of chronic destitutes keeps on increasing, there will inevitably come a point where we can’t afford the aid, and there will be no choice in the matter: they will all die. By this time, their population will have doubled and doubled again, many times over, and we are back to the question: let x million people die, or let 2x million people die?

It is possible that our planet and our culture can support 20 billion people sustainably. It is also possible that it can only support 2 billion. Scienticians call this the carrying capacity, and I don’t know which it is, but I suspect it’s closer to 20 than 2, and that we still have the time and technology to keep everybody alive. That’s cautious optimism; we still need to educate people about birth control and make them richer - the two best ways to encourage people to have fewer children. Hence green secular libertarianism is good for my peace of mind: making people richer and opposing Catholic nonsense about condoms prevents me from having to pull a genocide-by-default on billions and billions of people at some point in the future. That would generally be considered a bad thing, wouldn’t it?