This is a guest post by Dr. Gary Peters, author of the textbook Population Geography.
Speaking in Abu Dhabi on November 23, 2010, FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf stated, “The key to long-term food security lies in boosting investment in agriculture, particularly in low-income food-deficit countries.” He also noted, “The rapid increase in hunger and malnourishment since the food crisis of 2008 reveals the inadequacy of the present global food system and the urgent need for structural changes….The food price and economic crises have had a severe impact on millions of people in all parts of the world.”
Mr. Diouf’s comments are supported by many, if not most, economists.
For example, in his recent book, The Plundered Planet: Why We Must—and How We Can—Manage Nature for Global Prosperity, Paul Collier wrote, “Global food prices must be kept down…there is nothing to be done about the increase in the demand for food. The solution must be to increase world food supply.” Similarly, writing in the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs, in an article titled The Fertile Continent: Africa, Agriculture’s Final Frontier, Roger Thurow commented,
[T]he fact that nearly one billion people are nevertheless going hungry is a damning indictment of the world’s food-distribution system. But since demand is growing, production will also have to increase in the years ahead. With the world’s population expected to expand to more than nine billion by 2050 and much of that growth occurring in China, India, and other countries where living standards are rising fast, food production will need to increase by 70-100 percent in order to keep pace and feed the already chronically hungry.
Thurow also wrote about the need to “[S]atisfy the world’s ever-expanding appetite.”
According to a recent report from the UNFAO, The State of Food Insecurity in the World, 2010: Addressing Food Insecurity in Protracted Crises,
The number and proportion of hungry people in the world are declining as the global economy recovers and food prices remain below their peak levels, but hunger remains higher than before the food price and economic crises, making it difficult to meet the internationally agreed hunger-reduction targets.
Since those 2010 targets were agreed upon in 2000 world population has increased by more than 800 million. In 2009 the number of undernourished people in the world, according to the FAO, reached just over one billion. Two hundred years ago there were not that many people on the planet. To anyone other than an economist it should be apparent that “economic growth” has not solved the problem of feeding the hungry and it probably never will. As Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out, in her 2008 book This Land is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation, “The economists’ odd fixation on growth as a measure of economic well-being puts them in a parallel universe of their own.”
World Population and Need for Stopping Population Growth
According to the Population Reference Bureau, world population increased from 6.067 billion in 2000 to 6.892 billion in 2010, an increase of 825 million people in one decade. Though the rate of natural increase dropped from 1.4 percent in 2000 to 1.2 percent in 2010, the world’s population this year will grow by about 83 million. Population projections for 2050 range from 9.1 billion (United Nations) to 9.49 billion (Population Reference Bureau); the U.S. Census Bureau projection is in between at 9.28 billion. These are projections, based on estimates of the changing course of fertility and mortality; they are not written in stone.
Is Paul Collier correct when he says that “[T]here is nothing to be done about the increase in the demand for food”? Is Roger Thurow right when he says that we need to “[S]atisfy the world’s ever-expanding appetite”? Both are wrong. The big unasked question is this: Why do we not move aggressively to stop population growth? It is not the problem but population growth exacerbates most of our problems. I know of no problem right now that will be more easily solved by adding another 80 million people to the planet each year.
In an article for the Population Reference Bureau (October 18th, 2010), “Investing in Family Planning: It Makes Dollars and Sense,” James Gribble wrote,
The linkages between smaller families and economic development are clear and the evidence is mounting. In many countries, responding to unmet need for family planning—which results in slower population growth—means that governments can spend less to provide high-quality health care, education, and water and sanitation—all of which are related to the MDGs [Millennium Development Goals]. In some countries, each dollar invested in family planning means that the government saves three dollars or more in future expenditures on other social sector programs.
We’ve known for decades that the benefit-cost ratio is high for preventing births. We’ve also known that tens of millions of births each year are unwanted. So why are the rich nations not fully funding family planning programs in the poor countries?
Food and Energy
On a different theme, Michael Levi and others wrote, in “Globalizing the Energy Revolution: How to Really Win the Clean-Energy Race,” in the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs,
Oil remains indispensable to the global economy, but it is increasingly produced in places that present big commercial, environmental, and geopolitical risks; greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere; and the odds that the world will face catastrophic climate change are increasing. These problems will only worsen as global demand for energy rises.
These two themes—energy and food supply—are inseparable. In both cases increased demand is assumed and the economic problem becomes the following: How do we increase the supply of food and energy to meet the growing demand? Before the Industrial Revolution these problems were perplexing, localized, and often not solved at all in some times and places. After the Industrial Revolution, and with the rise of modern neoclassical economics, these problems were assumed to have simple solutions. If more food is needed, we will produce it; if more energy is needed, we will extract it. Let the market system do the walking, so to speak. But as James Galbraith warned, in his 2008 book The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too, “The great fallacy of the market myth lies simply in the belief, for which no foundation in economics exists, that markets can think ahead.”
Our Finite World readers know that conventional oil extraction peaked in 2005 and has been on a bumpy plateau since then. Despite that, the world’s population has grown by more than 400 million during the last five years, so per capita oil extraction is steadily declining. Chris Martenson may be right when he wrote, in It’s Official: The Economy is Set To Starve, (Chrismartenson.com, Nov. 23, 2010), “The potential knock-on effects of less energy to the complex system known as our economy are unpredictable in their exact details and timing, but are thoroughly knowable via their broad, topographical outlines. The economy will become simpler and less ordered.”
A “simpler and less ordered” economy will struggle to increase food supplies, especially when per capita oil extraction is declining steadily. If food production declines in any major exporting country, exports will be affected disproportionately, much as we saw this summer with Russian wheat. Oil is critical for agricultural production, so expanding per capita food supplies in a period of declining per capita oil extraction will become ever more difficult, if not impossible. Expanding food supplies will be further complicated as more corn in the U. S. is diverted to ethanol and as climate potentially becomes more unfavorable for agriculture in important growing regions. You can not argue that this makes no difference to poor countries because many of them are dependent on significant food imports from the rich countries.
Food is critical. As Russell Hopfenberg noted, in Human Carrying Capacity is Determined by Food Availability, published in Population and Environment (Vol. 25, No. 2, Nov. 2003),
Addressing the problem of human population growth must include a shift in cultural attitudes, which may well consist of changes in the social, political, educational and religious mindset. This cultural shift must also include the recognition, as the present study makes clear, that the problem of human population growth can be feasibly addressed only if it is recognized that increases in the population of the human species, like increases in the population of all other species, is a function of increases in food availability.
Hopfenberg’s work has been misinterpreted on occasion. He does not say that population growth will be high in places with abundant food, such as the U. S., home of the overstuffed American. Rather, he says that the human population can only grow if food supplies are available.
As William R. Catton, Jr., wrote, in his 2009 book Bottleneck: The Impending Impasse,
Though we moderns may be stubbornly ethnocentric about our ‘right’ to plunge onward with ‘our way of life,’ no social order systematically promoting the pickpocket outlook and the impatience that we must ‘fly now, pay later’, can long endure. Our descendants may see that in retrospect.
Whether he is correct or not, we won’t know for some time, but I think he would agree that if we would curb population growth, it would lessen the pressure on our natural environment. If we could combine population stability or decline with modest or moderate constraints on consumption, it would at least buy time for us to develop other energy resources and move toward a more sustainable lifestyle.
In an email that I received from John Michael Greer last year, he wrote
I certainly agree that a voluntary reduction in population, now, would help a great deal. I’m sorry to say I don’t think that’s likely to happen, but then those four guys on horses are saddling up as we speak; it’s probably too late, even if people were willing, to overcome the demographic momentum in time to make a difference.
Sad to say, given our supposed sapience, he is probably correct. If he is right, then neoclassical economists, with their narrow focus on economic growth and their failure to see that humans cannot for long exceed Earth’s carrying capacity, must accept much of the blame. Kenneth Boulding was right when he wrote, “Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”