* Some good news: in South Korea, the preference for boy children over girls appears to be breaking down.
South Korea is the first of several Asian countries with large sex imbalances at birth to reverse the trend, moving toward greater parity between the sexes. Last year, the ratio was 107.4 boys born for every 100 girls, still above what is considered normal, but down from a peak of 116.5 boys born for every 100 girls in 1990…..
The most important factor in changing attitudes toward girls was the radical shift in the country’s economy that opened the doors to women in the work force as never before and dismantled long-held traditions, which so devalued daughters that mothers would often apologize for giving birth to a girl.
The hope is that just as South Korea was ahead of China and India in development, they might also follow it in this.
* An attempt to calculate if Britain could feed and clothe itself – the answer being probably yes, just (PDF). But what sort of agriculture?
… organic livestock-based agriculture, practised by orthodox methods and without supplementary measures, has the most difficulty sustaining the full UK population on the land available, while other management systems can do so with a more or less comfortable margin.
However organic livestock agriculture becomes more ef- ficient and sustainable when it is carried out in conjunction with other traditional and permacultural management practices which are integral to a natural fertility cycle. These include: feeding livestock upon food wastes and residues; returning human sewage to productive land; dispersal of animals on mixed farms and smallholdings, rather than concentration in large farms; local slaughter and food distribution; managing animals to ensure optimum recuperation of manure; and selecting and managing livestock, especially dairy cows, to be nitrogen providers rather than nitrogen stealers.
These measures demand more human labour, and more even dispersal of both livestock and humans around the country than chemical or vegan options. Effective pursuit of livestock-based organic agriculture of this kind requires a localized economy, and some degree of agrarian resettlement. Other management systems based on synthetic fertilizers or vegan principles lend themselves more easily to the levels of urbanization currently favoured by the dominant (and mostly urban) policy makers.
(But, I’d add into this equation the fact that city-dwellers are generally more energy-efficient than those living in the country.)
* Reading – if it is in long-term decline what does this mean for society? The New Yorker asks the question in an interesting survey of anthropological and brain scanning research, but one, I’d suggest, that hasn’t really caught up with the shift from television to the internet.
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