[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Pop 'til We Drop?

Wed Sep 3 04:24:48 MDT 2008

by John Feffer

Foreign Policy In Focus (August 19 2008)

According to the overpopulation crowd, the current food crisis is the
latest evidence that the world has become too heavy with us all. We are
currently at 6.6 billion and expected to approach nine billion some time
before 2050. Mother Earth is mad as hell and isn't going to take us anymore.

We've heard this all before. In 1798, to be precise, when economist
Thomas Malthus predicted in his essay on population that humanity would
increase more rapidly than our food supply. The mathematical logic
seemed inescapable. But Malthus didn't predict how much bird excrement -
and later chemical fertilizer - would increase agricultural production.
Nevertheless, his fears have resurfaced every generation or so. In 1968,
Paul Ehrlich dropped his Population Bomb (1968) on the reading public
with its forecast of mass famine in the 1970s and 1980s. Certainly
people died of hunger then - as, inexcusably, they do today - but again
increases in food production exceeded the rate of population increase
and mass famine never materialized.

And now, eager to find new evidence to prove their hardy thesis, the
neo-Malthusians have latched on to the food crisis. In a recent article
I wrote on rising food prices, I failed to mention overpopulation as a
key factor. I've never received so many responses to an article before,
and ninety percent of these comments chided me for failing to see "the
elephant in the room". As one letter writer put it, "Try to remember:
Hunger, poverty, injustice, environmental destruction, and global
warming are just the symptoms: OVERPOPULATION IS THE DISEASE".

I don't want to minimize the challenge of what demographers call
"carrying capacity", that is, the number of people that the earth can
comfortably accommodate without triggering climate chaos, large-scale
drought, and mass extinctions. In a provocative analysis of the
then-current wisdom on this subject a decade ago, Bill McKibben conceded
that Malthus would always be with us: "The idea that we might grow too
big can be disproved only for the moment - never for good". Jared
Diamond, meanwhile, has chronicled the rise and fall of a number of
societies, such as Easter Island, because of the locust-like tendency of
humans to breed, devour everything in sight, and then die. If we can do
it on an island in the sea, we can do it on an island in the galaxy.

That said, the current food crisis has very little to do with
overpopulation. In fact, the current food crisis isn't really about a
crisis in production. We still produce enough food to feed everyone on
the planet.

More pertinent than how we procreate is how we farm: whether we use the
land for biofuels, whether we depend on industrial agriculture, whether
we cut down the rainforests, whether we devote large portions of land
and grain production for livestock. If we don't change the way we farm,
we will still reach our approaching limits - of energy, land, and carbon
emissions - at current or even lower population levels. Our systems of
production are set up in a way to produce this crisis, regardless of
whether there are six billion people or three billion people who need to
eat. Of course, with fewer people, the onset of the crisis wouldn't be
as rapid. But if we don't change the systems, the crisis will come
nevertheless. Overpopulation, in other words, is an aggravating factor,
not a driving factor.

The irony, of course, is that industrial agriculture helped us leave the
era of mass famine behind. Our ability to coax so much food out of the
soil short-circuited nature's rather cruel method of population control.
By absorbing so much water (for irrigation), energy (for fertilizer),
and land (for livestock and biofuels), our agricultural system now
threatens to hoist us by own petard.

Compared to oil, water, land, and carbon emissions, population is the
only positive "peak" that we are approaching. The number of human beings
will level off in this century - perhaps in 2070, perhaps 2050 - and the
sooner we get there the better. My own guess is that we might see a peak
before then, because of rather unexpectedly rapid declines in fertility
in countries like South Korea. It's not that we have the population
issue under control. But we have figured out that rising living
standards and/or concerted government policies eventually bring down
family size.

We must address hunger and injustice first as a way of addressing the
problem of carrying capacity, not the other way around. And that means
that people living in countries with large consumption "footprints" -
regardless of how low their fertility rate - must shoulder the burden
instead of pointing the finger at countries with smaller footprints but
bigger families. A Malthusian future of famine may still await us. But
it will be less because of the way we continue to populate the world
than because of the way we continue to think about the world.

Links:

David Simcox, "Population: An Unacknowledged Presence at World Food
Crisis Talks", Negative Population Growth, July 22 2008;
http://www.npg.org/07222008davesimcox.html

John Feffer, "Mother Earth's Triple Whammy", TomDispatch/Foreign Policy
In Focus; http://www.fpif.org/fpifoped/5306

Bill McKibben, "A Special Moment in History", The Atlantic, May 1998;
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98may/special1.htm

Jared Diamond, "Easter Island's End", Discover Magazine, August 1995;
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/24/042.html

_____

Published by Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF), a project of the Institute
for Policy Studies (IPS)

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