It isn't a problem, for us, right now. As the national G article states, population is now growing at a faster rate than ag production.SeattleGriz wrote:I just don't see overpopulation being a problem right now, for some of these simplistic reasons:D1B wrote:
By all means, jump in. All you've done so far is protect Tman. He's a big boy.
What are your thoughts?
1) We are paying American farmers to enroll land in what is called Conservation Reserve Program. Granted it is only 34 million acres, but farmers are still being paid by the government not to farm, but let the land sit.
2) When I read about other countries having farming issues, I can't help but think what their land could produce if they had some real farmers working the land. A perfect example was how S Africa forced the white farmers to give up the land to black farmers, only to see the farms drop significantly in production.
Also included in this is all the land that had potential but was fvcked up by those in the third world who don't know their azz from a hole in the ground.
3) Some of the most productive farmland in the US is in metropolitan areas. I could grow a pretty good garden in my backyard if I had to. Where the hell is Wedgebuster? He had some photos of a really nice garden.
Essentially, I just don't see us as having come close to squeezing the full yield out of our current lands.
Because you didn't read it, here are the highlights:
"Agricultural productivity growth is only one to two percent a year," warned Joachim von Braun, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C., at the height of the crisis. "This is too low to meet population growth and increased demand."
High prices are the ultimate signal that demand is outstripping supply, that there is simply not enough food to go around. Such agflation hits the poorest billion people on the planet the hardest, since they typically spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food. Even though prices have fallen with the imploding world economy, they are still near record highs, and the underlying problems of low stockpiles, rising population, and flattening yield growth remain. Climate change—with its hotter growing seasons and increasing water scarcity—is projected to reduce future harvests in much of the world, raising the specter of what some scientists are now calling a perpetual food crisis.
From 1950 to today the world has experienced the largest population growth in human history. After Malthus's time, six billion people were added to the planet's dinner tables. Yet thanks to improved methods of grain production, most of those people were fed. We'd finally shed Malthusian limits for good.
Or so we thought.
More and more farming is not the long term solution. Industrial farming eventually ruins the soil.
Today, though, the miracle of the green revolution is over in Punjab: Yield growth has essentially flattened since the mid-1990s. Overirrigation has led to steep drops in the water table, now tapped by 1.3 million tube wells, while thousands of hectares of productive land have been lost to salinization and waterlogged soils. Forty years of intensive irrigation, fertilization, and pesticides have not been kind to the loamy gray fields of Punjab. Nor, in some cases, to the people themselves.
Finally, Malthus was right.
On a brisk fall day that has put color into the cheeks of the most die-hard Londoners, I visit the British Library and check out the first edition of the book that still generates such heated debate. Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population looks like an eighth-grade science primer. From its strong, clear prose comes the voice of a humble parish priest who hoped, as much as anything, to be proved wrong.
"People who say Malthus is wrong usually haven't read him," says Tim Dyson, a professor of population studies at the London School of Economics. "He was not taking a view any different than what Adam Smith took in the first volume of The Wealth of Nations. No one in their right mind doubts the idea that populations have to live within their resource base. And that the capacity of society to increase resources from that base is ultimately limited."
Though his essays emphasized "positive checks" on population from famine, disease, and war, his "preventative checks" may have been more important. A growing workforce, Malthus explained, depresses wages, which tends to make people delay marriage until they can better support a family. Delaying marriage reduces fertility rates, creating an equally powerful check on populations. It has now been shown that this is the basic mechanism that regulated population growth in western Europe for some 300 years before the industrial revolution—a pretty good record for any social scientist, says Dyson.
Yet when Britain recently issued a new 20-pound note, it put Adam Smith on the back, not T. R. Malthus. He doesn't fit the ethos of the moment. We don't want to think about limits. But as we approach nine billion people on the planet, all clamoring for the same opportunities, the same lifestyles, the same hamburgers, we ignore them at our risk.
None of the great classical economists saw the industrial revolution coming, or the transformation of economies and agriculture that it would bring about. The cheap, readily available energy contained in coal—and later in other fossil fuels—unleashed the greatest increase in food, personal wealth, and people the world has ever seen, enabling Earth's population to increase sevenfold since Malthus's day. And yet hunger, famine, and malnutrition are with us still, just as Malthus said they would be.
"Years ago I was working with a Chinese demographer," Dyson says. "One day he pointed out to me the two Chinese characters above his office door that spelled the word 'population.' You had the character for a person and the character for an open mouth. It really struck me. Ultimately there has to be a balance between population and resources. And this notion that we can continue to grow forever, well it's ridiculous."
Perhaps somewhere deep in his crypt in Bath Abbey, Malthus is quietly wagging a bony finger and saying, "Told you so."
