“Famines are still a major global problem. From 2020 to 2023 alone, they caused over a million deaths.

Yet the long-term trend shows significant progress. In the late 1800s and the first half of the 1900s, it was common for famines to kill over 10 million people per decade. This was true as recently as the 1960s, when China’s Great Leap Forward became the deadliest famine in history.

But as you can see in the chart, that number has dropped sharply, to about one to two million per decade.

This improvement is even more striking given that the world’s population has grown substantially.”

From Our World in Data.

In 1900, the U.S. Census recorded a total population of 76.3 million, including 11 million farmers. Today, with a population nearing 340 million, the number of farmers has dropped to just 2.72 million.

At the turn of the century, each farmer fed 6.94 people. Today, that number has risen to 125. While the U.S. population grew by 346 percent, farmer productivity soared by 1,702 percent. Each one percent increase in population corresponded to a 4.92 percent increase in farmer productivity.

In 1900, life expectancy was just 47 years. Today, it’s around 77. Medicine and sanitation played a role, but the abundance of food made possible by farmers discovering and applying new knowledge was a foundational driver of that gain.

So, who’s going to tell Ehrlich and Thanos they had it backwards? More life discovers more knowledge, which leads to better tools and more abundant resources.

Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.

“A rat eradication operation took place on the atoll’s Home and Cooks islets over August and September 2023. Monitoring to confirm the atoll’s rat-free status was recently completed, with trail cameras and traps showing no evidence whatsoever of rats.

Arthur Neale, the atoll’s Executive Officer, says Palmerston’s rat-free status means the world to him and everyone else who lives on the atoll…

‘Benefits from the rat eradication are already evident. Our food security has improved massively. Fruits like guava, mango and star fruit are now abundant and free from rat damage. Our nu mangaro (a coconut tree variety) are thriving. Vegetables, especially cucumbers, have seen an astonishing increase in yield.

‘We’re very excited to see more native species now rats are no longer eating them. Seedlings of tamanu and puka are increasing and we’re seeing and hearing more birds. Wood pigeons and red-tailed tropic birds have returned to Home Islet. Crabs and lizards appear to be more abundant.'”

From New Zealand Department of Conservation.

“Researchers have created what they think is the largest chunk of meat grown in the laboratory yet, thanks to a designer ‘circulatory system’ that delivers nutrients and oxygen into the growing tissue.

Shoji Takeuchi, a biohybrid system engineer at the University of Tokyo, and colleagues report growing a single piece of chicken that measures 7 centimetres long, 4 centimetres wide and 2.25 centimetres thick. Weighing in at 11 grams, it is about the size of a chicken nugget. The work was reported today in Trends in Biotechnology.

The meat hasn’t yet been made with food-grade materials, so it isn’t ready for consumers’ plates and the team hasn’t tasted it. But the researchers are talking to several companies about developing the technology further.”

From Nature.