How can Cloning Improve Agriculture?
“I am hungry, but we have no food. Not my family, I mean. I’m talking about this town.” -Anon
Visiting a primitive development in Northern Africa
Source = Anonymous Quotes- Volume II

People throughout the world are constantly starving. Not you, of course. But others like you. Even here in the US, we’ve got food problems. It’s not that we don’t have enough food, which is a huge problem in many other places, including portions of Africa, but we have those who just can’t afford it. And some of those “other places” not only don’t have enough food, they don’t have enough money to produce sufficient food even if they have the resources to do it.

Now, how could a very devoted hunger-prevention fanatic go about solving a problem of such enormity?

Well, there are many ways. Establishing farms, donating food, donating cash for others to use to buy food, etc...

But that barely helps the problem at all from a global perspective. So you delay fifty people from starving to death for a day or two. Big deal.

Well, there is a possible solution. And it comes from an unexpected place- science. The fact is, it comes from an even more unexpected place of science- cloning. “Cloning?!!” you exclaim, raving ludicrously. “What nonsense is this??”

It’s not nonsense. Nowadays, thanks to all the media, who know less about what they are talking about than the reader himself/herself and those stupid ethicists who have to keep a job somehow, when people hear the word cloning, they scream and shout and rave on about armies of Hitler taking over the world. Well, cloning, believe it or not, is not a term that was developed just for application to the human race. It also refers to other living things, like plants, for example. I mention plants because they, along with trees, are the solution to the global hunger problem. So someone clones a weed. Wonderful. Just another small inconvenience added to the world. So someone clones a dandelion. Wonderful. Just another small enjoyment added to the world. So someone clones an apple tree. Big deal. Just a few more apples added to the world. So someone clones a thousand apple trees, bean plants, and corn stalks. Wonderful! Just a few hundred thousand more appetizing pieces of food added to the world...

See what I’m getting at? If we divert more private and federal funding to agricultural cloning research, we could, in a reasonable amount of time, develop a highly effective solution to the global hunger dilemma. And we could make farming and other agricultural processes far cheaper. This is because in this way plants and trees could quickly be mass produced and planted in places where there were hunger problems. This could also be done when planting crops, supposedly reducing agricultural costs, as mentioned above, and making the farmed food cheaper. This would allow people with financial difficulties to get more bang, er, I mean food, for the buck..

And what about meat? We all like that (vegetarians not included, of course). We all want that. But sometimes, that pre-cooked frozen duck is just too expensive for our liking. Well, it’s always too expensive for our liking, but sometimes it’s bearable, and sometimes, you decide to get the chicken livers in broth resting in aisle 3 instead. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get that duck every day? Or how about being real cheap and being able to get a burger at half the price it costs now? A 99 cent BK cheeseburger now costs about 49 cents... Oh yay.

…Cloning does have its advantages, you see. And it appears ethicists can’t find anything to argue about yet in this topic area, yet still, progress is slow (if at all existent).

One must realize that this wouldn’t completely solve the problem (not that anything besides killing the starving people really could), but it would help TREMENDOUSLY...

URLs Used
For convenience purposes, all URLs used, except for base subsections, which are included within a base source, have been listed on one page.
www.humancloning.org/ (base source page)
http://www.religioustolerance.org/cloning.htm (base source page)
http://www.globalchange.com/clone_index.htm (base source page)
http://members.tripod.com/~Kaeleb/kaeleb1.html (base source page)
http://www.newsscientist.com/nsplus/insight/clone/clone.html
http://archive.msnbc.com/modules/cloning/timeline.asp
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.09/stock.html
http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/articles/0,3266,17694-1,00.html
http://www.seattletimes.com/extra/browse/html197/clon_022597.html
http://www.wired.com/wired/6.03/seed_pr.html
http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/articles/0,3266,17688-4,00.html
http://library.advanced.org/24355/
http://www.pathfinder.com/TIME/cloning/
http://www.aynrand.org/medialink/cloning.html

Note: Listing every web site I visited, including subsections, would’ve taken a lot longer… and exceeded a page. I just decided to bypass that altogether and list all the URLs conveniently together with their base sources (if applicable). Hope it helps!