Ruth Alexander
speaker
4,250 appearances
120 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2011
last heard Aug 2018
Ruth Alexander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But the UN food experts are much more sanguine.
We'll probably produce more food over the next 40 years or so than we have in the past 10,000, in large part because we'll want to.
But this concern about how we're going to feed ourselves in the future isn't new.
As Tom Chivers, a journalist with the UK's Daily Telegraph, points out, since Paul Ehrlich made that prediction, the population has more than doubled to 7 billion, but the amount of food per head has gone up by more than 25%.
And there have been famines, but none in America.
More or less.
This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
I'm Ruth Alexander.
And it was glory for singer-songwriter John Legend and the rapper Common at this year's Oscars.
They won Best Song for this track, Glory, from the film Selma, which is about Martin Luther King and the campaign for voting rights for African Americans in 1965.
In his acceptance speech, Legend made the point that inequality in the US is still a problem.
He said, there are more black men under correctional control today than there were under slavery in 1850.
Is that true?
Well, let's start with the United States Census of 1850, which makes for uncomfortable reading, I have to say.
Wesley Stevenson's been looking at the numbers with me.
So, Wes, the total number of African American slaves was 3.2 million.
And that's almost half the total slave population, which is just shocking to me.
But John Legend was making a claim about the number of men who were enslaved in 1850 versus the number of men who were under correctional control, as he puts it, in the US today.
Whereas today it's estimated that there are almost 2 million African-American men in either state or federal prisons, local jails, or on probation or parole, i.e.
out of prison but under supervision.
Showing 741–760 of 4,250 · page 38 of 213
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