Amanda Starbuck is a senior food researcher and policy analyst at Food & Water Watch.







*****







I’ve talked about the other thing a couple of times already, but I’m sure you’ve heard enough about it by now, and there’s nothing extra that I can say that hasn’t already been said, so let’s talk about something else.















Let’s talk about the state of the world and

its people. Bear in

mind that life expectancy in the US in the year 1900 was about 48. Thinking

of all the countries in the world, taking into account the huge populations of

the poor countries in Africa and Asia, what would you guess is the average life

expectancy of people today? 50 years? 60 Years? No, the

average across the whole world is now 70.















And again, across the whole world, what

percent of the population do you think has access to electricity? The answer is

80 per cent. And if you had to guess what percent of children had at least some

of their vaccinations? Again, across the planet, the answer is 80 per cent.







Finally, if you had to guess, over the last

hundred years, taking into account the massive population explosion we’ve had,

what has happened to the number of people – the absolute number, not the

proportion – the number of people who die each year in natural disasters; has

it more than doubled? Stayed the same? In fact, that number has more than

halved.







All these figures come from a

book by the Swedish academic Hans Rosling, and he formulated them to show

us that sometimes, things are much better than we think they are, and in

particular, for all our cynicism, things can and do get better. Lots better.







By those metrics that he chooses, the

average person in the world today is vastly better off than the average person

was in the United States a hundred years ago.







More children – much,