R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes
Here is an educational bombshell: Take from all of today's industrial nations all their industrial machinery and all their energy-distributing networks, and leave them all their ideologies, all their political leaders, and all their political organizations, and I can tell you that within six months, two billion people will die of starvation, having gone through great pain and deprivation along the way.
Fuller, R. Buckminster. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Southern Illinois University Press, 1969, p. 38.
While this was somewhat hyperbolic at the time, it became true during the century.
Often referred to as “Father of the Green Revolution” for his contributions to food growing throughout the world
The president was right. There is enough food to go around. The problem however is logistical, economic, and political. Some countries use food as a weapon to keep their own people under control. The major problem is the distribution of the food. It has to be transported from where it is gown to where it should be consumed. Much food in the third world rots because the transportation system cannot move the food efficiently enough. Even when food is donated to nations, the free or cheap food undercuts the local farmers who go out of business and there is even less food the following year.
From a technical and production point of view, there is no practical limit to population size that is imposed by food production. We can produce sufficient food for the world even if population increases dramatically. None the less, even today we have some starvation and much malnutrition problems. These however are political, economic and tend to be distributional. We can produce the food. Morris does NOT advocate large population growth. Although food need not be a problem with an expanding population, job availability, medical care, energy, land, natural resources, ethnic hatred, migration, violence, and other problems are produced by population growth.
Richard Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, and futurist. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing more than 30 books and coining or popularizing such terms as "Spaceship Earth", "Dymaxion" (e.g., Dymaxion house, Dymaxion car, Dymaxion map), "ephemeralization", "synergetics", and "tensegrity".
