Well, I just read a different article about Bangladesh and the fish farms. Even though with the focus on leather industry. (german: https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Bangladesch-Der-Mensch-fris...)

Basically, there is a side to this, not mentioned in the economist: that flooding former rice fields with seawater, makes them logically salty - and not only them, but the whole area. You can't grow much in salty ground. So this is destroying farmland. Not very sustainable. I fail to see any goodness in such a short term strategy for quick profit. Especially not when the real sea is big enough for all the aquafarming you want.. Oh and the fish are getting fed with toxic leftovers from the leather-industry.

This especially happens for shrimp. In Thailand, farmers are lured in by high short term profits for farming shrimp, so they clear a lot of biodiverse mangrove swamp. When they realize that shrimp are a bitch to raise in densities that make it profitable, they end up selling the land to professional shrimp farmers, who grow the shrimp with lots of antibiotics and specialized shrimp feed.

After a while, the shrimp parasites and diseases are endemic to the land, so the pros just leave and find someplace else cheap to buy. Meanwhile, the land is ruined, as shrimp live in brackish water, the salted land is no good for agriculture, and it takes decades for the mangroves to grow back again.

What about how settlements tend to start near fresh water and fertile soil? If a city grows, eventually all the best farmland gets covered in buildings that don't need to be built on fertile soil. I wonder if it would be better for non-agricultural populations to live somewhere with water but less fertile soil.

>The grains will be bought by farmers, who will grind them into pellets for fish and cattle. “Twenty-five years ago, people were starving for want of this,” he says, marvelling. “Now we feed it to animals.”

Capitalistic, industrialized farming is coming fast to these countries. Food production will explode.

Also why efforts to influence meat production for global warming's sake is kind of meaningless because so many of these countries are coming into the modern world, transitioning from a low-protein diet to a high-protein diet, increasing demand and meat production. The same goes for efforts to curtail plastic use.

If you can make a transition to a high protein, mostly plant-based diet work in the U.S., then that gives you an existential proof that it would someday be possible for countries further back in the consumption curve.

At the same time, we also have evidence that “leapfrog” development can happen, e.g. France’s Minitel phase is something the U.S. skipped.

Figuring out a desirable reduced meat lifestyle (people have to want it for themselves) then appears to be highly relevant to combat global warming.

I have high hopes for lab grown meat.

The day that comes i'll switch and wont go back.

It probably wouldn't look much different from a modern poultry farm.

Minus the brains, so no suffering. Hopefully also more energy efficient.

I would imagine more similar to a modern pharmaceutical factory (which is much, much cleaner than a poultry farm).

How? I imagine sterile enourmous vats and tubes in a continuous process, like a brewery.

TL;DR cities have so much more money that there's an initial boom as farmers fill the need to feed the cities. Eventually, the market responds and farmers are challenged by razor-thin margins and turn to technology to become more efficient. The net result is higher population and fewer problems feeding everybody.