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Population Growth and the Planet’s Future by Trevor Griffey |
We are entering an era in which human existence, regardless of its environmental practices, regardless of the distribution of wealth, regardless of super diseases and bacteria, may be unable to support itself. The absolute number of people on the planet has doubled in just two generations and will soon be six billion. At a recent global congress to slow world population growth, the world’s governments tried to outline a plan which would halt it at ten billion.
This is common knowledge, but we should not dismiss it as old news. It took 57 years to add three billion people to the planet. But during that expansion, new resources were discovered, new technologies were developed to mass-produce food and protect it from disease, and overall environmental contamination and consumption demands were reduced.
A brief history of this century’s rapid population growth is as follows: Europe’s world colonization decreased many countries’ internal warfare and brought the distribution of food to once isolated, famine-struck areas. The spread of health services--medication, vaccination, and malaria-killing agents--to developing nations decreased death rates in many countries but did not reduce birth rates. Rapid population growth ensued in many countries. Much of it was sustained by phenomenal increases in crop productivity due to the introduction of fertilizers and pesticides known as the Green Revolution.
But more jobs and food in absolute numbers certainly didn’t create a per capita increase of well being. Cultural, political, and economic institutions have all been strained, sometimes to the point of breaking. The cultural prestige of having many children to provide for their parents has proved lethal. Family lands are continually subdivided to the point of being unable to support further families. In families with too little food, a disproportionate amount of food often goes to the father, making the children and wife malnourished to the point of sickness or mental damage. Wives who are malnourished or burdened with child rearing and pregnancy cannot take control of their lives, nor can their children, who then repeat the circle of poverty and overpopulation.
These situations exacerbate already existing political tensions in developing countries: the poor masses were put on the least arable land during European colonization so cash crops for exports to rich countries could be grown on the best land, land whose productive capabilities decrease with the overuse which often accompanies rapid population growth. As a part of this process, ethnic tensions have been exacerbated, often to the point of war. In the 1950s, there was an average of about ten armed conflicts with more than 1,000 deaths per year in the world. In the 1980s and 90s, there have been over three times as many. As a product of these wars, the number of official world refugees since 1960 has increased by over twenty times to 23 million people.
Many proposals to alleviate poverty and suffering resulting from population growth involve women’s empowerment through family planning. Contraception helps women choose when to have children, which allows them to attain more prestige in the community and the family. This provides women with a tool to undermine cultural attitudes about family which predominantly burden them and their children with malnutrition and its effects. Other proposals call for a redistribution of land and an end to most cash crop production, reform of certain destructive agrarian practices, and political reform which makes for free, safe, secret elections of government leaders, just to name a few. None of these proposals, however, has had the support or scope needed to be effective outside of pockets of experimentation.
Finally, more nations are industrializing, and developed nations have their share of population growth as well. Both industrialization and population growth contribute to huge drains of poor nations’ resources--nations whose populations are growing at the most rapid rates. Efforts by developed nations to reduce their impact on the world have been few and far between. Many in developed nations, if they even think about overpopulation at all, blame the politics, ignorance of human rights, and poor environmental standards of developing nations. What they don’t realize is that many loans made by the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and developed nations to developing nations often have stipulations which do not allow the social service spending which would prevent population growth and ease its environmental and human destructiveness. A significant portion of the productive powers of developing nations in terms of their resources and labor are used to produce goods for developed nations, not for themselves. The influence we have, then, may be much more enormous than many think. The question is, when, if ever, will the public start caring enough to have it be an issue at the polls? For until there is popular support for aiding developing nations in more than superficial ways, I am skeptical that our short-term, business-dominated policies will end.
All of these issues have yet to profoundly affect rich countries, whose wealth has reached astounding levels. But their effects cannot be ignored forever. The effects of future population growth promise to be especially bleak, for the Green Revolution is over. While world population has continued to rise at astronomical rates, world food production has not kept pace. The total output of world grain production has leveled off in the past six years, all of the world’s fisheries are either at maximum use or are being depleted, almost all of the world’s productive land is already cultivated, farmland is being lost to urbanization, aquifers are being depleted, rivers are being so heavily used that many now run dry before reaching the ocean, and topsoil is being eroded at rapid rates by poor agricultural practices, all while the demand for food is increasing.
Worst of all is the industrialization of China. The incredible potential drain on resources that a gigantic country such as China could have on the world economy as it industrializes is unimaginable. Since the 1980s, the average Chinese family’s income has doubled. With this, China’s demand for consumer goods has skyrocketed. Even if we are to ignore the apocalyptic environmental damage American consumption patterns would wreak on the planet if adopted by China, its command over world food distribution could be disastrous. During industrialization, China is likely to pave over much of its cropland, increase its meat consumption (which absorbs a grossly disproportionate amount of land, water and grain compared to grain production), and simply consume more. This would mean that though countries such as Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Mexico, Bangladesh, and India could very easily triple their need for grain imports by 2030, China and other developed nations could be so rich and extravagant in their consumption that millions of poor may suffer intense malnutrition or starvation. Already within the last two years, China has gone from being an six million ton net grain exporter to a sixteen million ton net importer. Grain prices are going up with this change and threaten to price out the most needy in the process.
These threats to world stability, sustainability, and equality demand action now. On the policy level, Lester Brown, the founder of Worldwatch, suggests:1. Ending the idling of US and European cropland, which would boost world grain production by 34 million tons, enough to keep pace with world population growth for 15 months.
2. Discontinuing ethanol experiments in the US to release the 10 million tons of corn they now consume.
3. Ending the production of tobacco, which now uses 5 million hectares of land, and could increase grain production enough to keep pace with population growth for six months.
4. Shifting from free distribution of water to water marketing, making irrigation more economically viable.
5. Devising a plan for world action to halt global topsoil losses.
6. Encouraging home gardening instead of just growing grass.
7. Heavily taxing livestock products.On the individual level, we must reduce our own consumption levels. This especially requires less meat consumption, but also includes not overeating when food here is so cheap, so abundant, and, in the case of Wesleyan’s point system, forced upon us. Action to reduce minimum buy-ins would improve economic efficiency. It would also help end a complete misappropriation of resources in a time when we need to increase grain production by 78,000 tons per day just to keep pace with the 90 million people added to the planet each day. Reducing consumption is not ascetic. Have you heard of mass malnutrition or starvation stories from the US in the 1970s? When grain prices doubled in the 1970s, US meat, milk, and egg consumption went down enough to reduce grain-feeding of animals by 46 million tons, covering world population growth for 20 months. And if the world’s wealthy were to reduce their consumption of grain-fed livestock products by 10 percent, they could free up 64 million tons of grain for human consumption.
The rate of the world’s population growth is frightening. Its potential effects are disastrous for people and any kind of planet that supports life as we know it. Don’t forget it. Don’t go back to class and act as if it’s not happening. Don’t absorb yourself in reading without perspective. Don’t act as if you can’t change anything--because you can. US policy is the single most influential political economic force in the world, and US consumers some of the most influential actors in the world economy. We are all agents of change, if we want to be.