Comrade Delong writes:
"But... but... but the rural Third World as we know it--the 2.5 billion peasants--is entirely a creation of the twentieth century. The rural Third World held something like 0.5 million peasants back in 1850, each with about four time the effective farm size of today.
Are we calling for a radical reduction in Third World peasant populations back to the 'sustainable' levels of a century and a half ago, or what?"
Wait a second, Comrade. When you say "creation of the twentieth century" do you mean to suggest that this population was created by land policy or increased life expectancy and lower childhood disease rates?
Note what has happened to rural African populations since AIDS and consider what that would be like if all our old microbial enemies were to regain their former power.
The fundamental point is that the work of subsistence peasant farming is simply unfit for humans in the modern age. Human beings are not squirrels who don't use money and have to scratch their livings from the ground. The two-plus billion peasants worldwide quite simply deserve better and nobody who cares about them should be satisfied to see them digging away with their hoes and rakes and starving like animals with every drought and flood - not to mention being robbed, murdered and mutilated by whoever decides to pick up Kalashnikov instead of a sickle.