Human Ingenuity Will Solve The Food Crisis, Oil Crisis, And Global Warming – but can ‘they’ afford it?
Optimists look to human ingenuity to solve any problem that humanity confronts – including all those that it creates.
In the 1960’s there was great concern that the world couldn’t feed itself. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution did much to solve the problem.
Something has changed since Norman Borlaug’s: the rise of Intellectual Property rights. Nowadays the results of Human Ingenuity are protected by Patents and copyright, and other products of human ingenuity, such as terminator seeds, that ensure that the benefits flow mainly to a few. Pills that cure diseases, such as AIDs, that can be manufactured for a pittance, must be price as high as possible so that the companies that own the patents must get as rich as they possibly can.
Just think, a brilliant scientist – a Norman Borlaug, an Einstein – might come up with a few seeds, like Borlaug’s dwarf Wheat Seeds, that can grow to thousands, to millions, to endless producing food for the world, but, with this extra human ingenuity, the farmers of the world can be forced to pay a tithe to the company that owns the patent. Poor farmers will be force to part with much of what little they have, so that rich people can get richer. The poorest farmers will not be able to afford the royalties and will starve.
It is the Big-men of New Guinea on a global scale. What does it matter if a few billion starve, as long as a few people make it to be billionaires?
Human Ingenuity is no longer the tool of Humanity’s progress; it was been hijacked, like everything else, for the benefit of a few.