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By Michael Fumento
Too many people too little food. That's what the population-control
lobby says when it pushes for abortion. Just one problem: The food supply
is growing. We’ve heard it for decades: The world is overpopulated its
natural resources can’t sustain so many people and we’re headed toward
mass starvation and other forms of human misery unless we slash the birth
rate dramatically. That scenario’s scary enough to come in handy for
groups with their own policy agendas: Planned Parenthood for example has
used it to impose abortion sterilization and contraception on countries
where large families are treasured and abortion is shunned. After all if
overpopulation is going to lead to global catastrophe the niceties we like
to value in other contexts (like respect for other cultures) are just
going to have to go on the back burner for a while. We’re talking about
the fate of the world y’know. Well actually we’re not. At least not the
way most people think.
Ever since Paul Ehrlich published his landmark book The Population Bomb
in 1968 and introduced the term “overpopulation,” dire threats of global
starvation and energy shortages have become a normal part of public
discourse. Yet after all these years (and with a world population that’s
since grown by more than a billion) Ehrlich and his acolytes have yet to
prove we’re overpopulated; they merely assert that we are. In fact
population growth is slowing dramatically and by the reckoning of
virtually all demographers it will end during this century.
You can’t estimate population growth with a calculator because simple
mathematical formulas don’t take into account underlying circumstances
such as fertility rates. But we do know that in almost every nation women
are having fewer children with those in about 60 nations already giving
birth at a rate far less than the replacement rate.
Want some numbers? While world population has more than doubled
since 1950 to the current 6.3 billion according to the United Nations the
population will top out between 2050 and 2075. Demographer and American
Enterprise Institute scholar Nicholas Eberstadt says it’s likely to come
on the earlier end of that estimate when the world hits 8 billion by 2050.
“I think it’s perfectly plausible that world population could peak by 2050
or even sooner and perhaps at a level below 8 billion,” says Eberstadt
noting the past 35 years of declining fertility rates.
Thus the world in the next half century will have fewer additional people
to take care of than it did in the last half century. In percentage terms
while it handled 100 percent more people in the last 50 years it will only
have to deal with 27 percent more in the next 50. Granted that’s still a
lot of people. But it’s a long way from apocalyptic.
It’s true that parts of the world tend to be pretty crowded. (Ehrlich has
admitted the impetus for the book came when he found himself in the crush
of humanity in a large city in India.) But while “overcrowding” may sound
frightening it’s a misleading term because it’s defined by individual and
cultural lifestyles and circumstances — which have little to do with the
scientific definition of “overpopulation.” People in India were crammed
together not because there were too many for the land to hold but because
like people the world over they prefer urban centers to rural areas.
That’s why some Manhattan high-rises practically house more people than
South Dakota. Overcrowding may be a problem but it’s not overpopulation.
The Food Explosion Ehrlich’s other prophecies of doom haven’t
proven any more reliable. The Population Bomb initially focused on the
prospect of famine with Ehrlich predicting “In the 1970s the world will
undergo famines . . . [and] hundreds of millions of people
[including Americans] are going to starve to death.” As it happened he was
off by oh hundreds of millions.
In Ehrlich’s 1990 sequel The Population Explosion he claimed that world
grain production peaked in 1986. Wrong. In 1986 about 1.8 million metric
tons of cereals (the most important grain) were produced an increase over
previous years according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of
the United Nation. By 2001 that number had increased to 20.7 million
metric tons. "Global food production per person peaked earlier in 1984,”
Ehrlich further claimed “and has slid downward since then.” His fellow
doomsayer founder and president of the Worldwatch Institute Lester Brown
(along with Ehrlich another winner of the MacArthur Foundation “genius
award”) wrote in 1981 “The period of global food security is over.”
Wrong and wrong again. From 1981 to 1989 grain production per person
increased by more than 5 percent. Since then it’s increased another 4
percent more per person. Yet we haven’t had to plow under the face of the
earth to get this extra food. In 2001 304 million acres were used to grow
the world’s cereals slightly less than in 1968 when Ehrlich’s bombastic
bomb book appeared and far less than the 330 million acres used in the
peak year of 1991. The figure that counts the most however is that
calories available per person reached an all-time high of 2,800 by 1999 up
from 2,371 in 1968. We are finally growing enough calories per person to
keep the world’s population well fed — if those calories were evenly
distributed.
Unfortunately far too many are sustaining the American obesity epidemic
and still too few are going to the underdeveloped world. (Though as the
World Health Organization recently reported obesity is now a problem even
in many of the poorest nations.)
Eating one fewer Big Mac a day will help us stay healthier but it won’t do
Africans or Indians any good. Talk about “equitable distribution of food”
is just that talk. What’s needed is a rising tide to raise all boats.
Neo-Marxist groups like Greenpeace insist that all we have to do is to
evenly divide up the world’s food; but that’s no more likely than dividing
up the world’s wealth. (Which they would also love to do.) Just as
increasing wealth among the poorest requires increasing wealth generally
so too must we continue to increase the amount of food available for all
to help those with the greatest need. This is even more important because
lesser-developed countries are acquiring a taste for more meat which
requires far more crops than eating the crops directly would. The question
is are we up to the task of providing all those calories?
Norman Borlaug should know. He’s a Nobel Peace Prize winner and “father of
the Green Revolution,” which brought dramatic increases in cereal-grain
yields in many developing countries beginning in the late 1960s due
largely to use of genetically improved varieties. In his chapter in the
just-released book Global Warming and Other Myths he claims that “the
world has the technology — either available or well-advanced in the
research pipeline — to feed a population of 10 billion people.” More
specifically “Even without using advances in plant biotechnology yields
can be increased by 50 to 70 percent in much of the Indian
subcontinent Latin America the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and
by 100 to 150 percent in sub-Saharan Africa.”
There also are tremendous advances in biotechnology that make the scenario
even brighter.
Consider a single crop: rice. Swiss researchers have added genes from
daffodils to so-called “Golden Rice” to give it Vitamin A the lack of
which causes about 2 million deaths annually. (It’s also the leading cause
of preventable blindness in anywhere from 250,000 to 500,000 children.)
Then they added a gene from a fungus that creates an enzyme allowing the
human digestive system to break down the iron in rice that’s otherwise
unavailable to us. Still other researchers are adding genes to rice crops
that increase yields by 20 to 40 percent.
Of course the ability to feed mankind is not our sole worry in terms of
whether we can sustain a growing population. Yet time and again we’ve
stubbornly refused to run out of things that were supposed to have been
depleted long ago.
Needed: More People Ehrlich in his 1974 book The End of Affluence declared
that “Before 1985 mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity . . . in
which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing
depletion.” He was hardly alone; a group called the Club of Rome issued a
much-publicized report in 1972 that had us running out of virtually
everything by now but sand and cockroaches.
Yet no minerals — “key” or otherwise — are today in danger of being
depleted. Price over the long run (as opposed to temporary gyrations) is a
direct indicator of scarcity. But the International Monetary Fund’s price
index for metals is now the lowest it has ever been.
Similarly while the Department of the Interior originally predicted that
oil would run out in 1954 and later moved that back to 1964 because of
technology breakthroughs improving the discovery and extraction of oil
reserves are more numerous than ever. Still there is one vital resource in
which we may develop a shortage in the next few decades: us.
That’s because the world’s population won’t just conveniently level off
after it peaks; more likely it will drop like a stone. According to U.N.
Population Division Director Joseph Chamie current population projections
assume the earth is moving toward an average fertility level of 1.85
children per woman. Considering that a 2.1 level is needed to sustain a
population the planet’s population would peak at 7.5 billion by 2050 and
fall to 5.3 billion by 2150.
And that has interesting political implications since the decline will not
be evenly distributed among nations. The populations of several
Soviet-bloc nations already are falling because of declining birth rates
and emigration. Japan is expecting its population to peak in 2006 and then
drop by 14 percent (almost 20 million people) by 2050. Germany expects a
similar decline while Italy and Hungary may lose 25 percent of their
populations and Russia a third. These nations already are becoming giant
“leisure worlds,” with Depends outselling Pampers. Still there’s one thing
that as the population shrinks we simply won’t be able to make up for. Of
all the population prophets the one whose predictions got the least
recognition was also the most accurate. That was the late University of
Maryland economist Julian Simon. He saw humanity not as a plague of
locusts but rather as what he called “the ultimate resource” in a 1981
book by the same name. “The standard of living has risen along with the
size of the world’s population since the beginning of recorded time,”
Simon observed in that book. “And with increases in income and population
have come less severe shortages lower costs and an increased availability
of resources.” True he wrote “Adding more people will cause [temporary]
problems but at the same time there will be more people to solve these
problems.”
To Simon the cry of a little baby represented not just one more mouth to
feed but perhaps the next Pascal the next Kepler the next Michelangelo the
next Bach.
We don’t know how many of these won’t be born. But we’ll grieve their loss
just the same. |