Malthusian nightmare

The 19th century started with unlimited optimism in the power of scientific revolution to solve mankind’s vulnerability on all fronts. Man seemed to be at the threshold of fulfilling God’s command to use nature for a better world for all. In this milieu the English cleric and scholar, Thomas Robert Malthus (1766 – 1834), stunned the European intelligentsia by publishing An Essay on the Principle of Population. It was first published in 1798, quickly followed by a major revision in 1803. There he famously proclaimed that “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.”

In the next two centuries, world population grew steadily, with periodic reductions due to war, famine and pestilence having only marginal effect on the overall upward trend. At critical moments science came to the rescue with new innovations resulting in substantial increase in food production.

The latest UN population projection has suddenly shaken us from our amnesia about the ability of the Earth to produce enough food for all by the turn of this century. This UN report predicts that by 2050 there should be around 9.7 billion people inhabiting this planet. It is 700 million people more than the last UN forecast on the growth of future population on Earth. This dramatic increase in the estimate is presented in the UN report, World Population Prospects. The report expects the world population to hit the 11.2 billion mark by the end of this century. This will be the logical consequence of 200,000 babies that are born every day.

Interestingly, Europe is the only region where the population will actually decrease this century. At present there are 738 million people living in Europe. That number is expected to decrease to 646 million in the year 2100. By 2050 more than 60 per cent of the European population would be older than 60 years. Fertility rate in Europe as a whole is now 1.6 children per woman that is well below the replacement level of 2.1. Hectic government efforts to increase the number of affordable day-care centres, and allowing new mothers and fathers to leave and enter workforce with relative ease, are expected to increase the fertility to just 1.8 children per woman. Despite huge resistance to economic migrants in Europe, they are going to provide some increase in the European population, but that would not stop a dramatic population decrease in Europe throughout this century. According to the UN projection, the population of India is going to cross that of China by 2022 that is actually six years earlier than the previous prediction. Half of the global population growth is expected to be concentrated in only nine countries – ndia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda and the United States. In fact, the UN projects that 82 per cent of population growth in the developed countries between now and 2050 would be due to migration. This explains considerable population increase in the United States during this period. Upper middle class Indians with high level of education heavily subsidised by our government, as well as the economy of the United States, would benefit immensely from this trend.

Malthus’s prediction of food shortage may become a reality, particularly in Africa where the population of the 28 countries there is expected to double by 2050. In fact, Nigeria is expected to become the third most populous country by then, overtaking the United States. According to John Wilmoth, Director of the UN’s Population Division, “The concentration of population growth in the poorest countries presents its own set of challenges, making it more difficult to eradicate poverty and inequality, to combat hunger and malnutrition.” There is a ‘think tank’ set up at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, called “Future Food Utrecht (FFU),” with the task to study the increasing global population pressure and suggest sustainable solutions for feeding the teeming billions in the future. This multidisciplinary research centre includes academics from the faculties of biology, veterinarian sciences, psychology, geography, economics and medicine.

In a recent interview with the Dutch national newspaper, De Telegraaf, Professor Rens Voesenek, member of FFU, said that the focus at present on important sources of food, like grains and corn, is solely to increase their production. In his opinion, we’ll be confronted with dramatic climate changes, where extreme drought and rainfall would be the rule, rather than exception. It is imperative for agricultural scientists to develop new seeds so that they may withstand the anticipated climate changes. Professor Voesenek also stressed that the distribution of sweet water over our planet plays a big role in all these efforts. Large regions of the world are already facing serious shortage of sweet water and would in future be unusable to harvest foodgrain.

An unusual suggestion that FFU proposes to tackle this problem partially is to drastically alter the traditional western attitude towards consumption of food. According to Professor Voesenek, one-third of the food meant for consumption is actually thrown away in the West. The wastage is at its highest in the United States. A friend of ours in Los Angeles calls a refrigerator the “vegetable rotter.” Professor Voesenek is confident that America would have to confront this huge wastage of food sooner or later as the country would be facing serious shortage of irrigation water in the future.

A century after Malthus’s Essay, Gandhiji warned about the ultimate inability of nature to fulfil our insatiable demand for consumption in his classic, Hindu Swaraj, published in 1909. He talked about the evil of the multiplication of desires – “We notice that the mind is like a restless bird; the more it gets the more it wants and still remains unsatisfied.” His main critique of modern civilisation was that it puts no limit on want, and thereby no limit on growth. His was a religious vision in tune with the fringe of the western establishment, most notably Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy. Almost seven decades later there was the startling publication of a book, Small is Beautiful, by the British economist EF Schumacher in 1973. It became an instant bestseller and soon attained the status like Mao’s Red Book among the nascent environmental activists. Drawing heavily from the vision of Gandhiji and with rational economic analysis he warned against massive corporate growth and pleaded for what is now fashionably called “sustainable development.”

By an interesting coincidence, a secular critique of the danger of over-consumption came from the first Club of Rome report in 1972, Limits to Growth, written by Donnella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers and their team at MIT who developed a range of scenarios out to the year 2100, based on a cutting edge computer model available at that time. The main theme was that unlimited growth in population and production of associated material goods would eventually lead to a crash. Once the oil crisis of 1973 was managed, and the Thatcher-Reagan economic vision took hold, this incisive Club of Rome report became a matter of ridicule among the true believers of the free market. Today, however, many scientists believe that life on Earth over some generations would be completely different than at present. With the projected population growth, the ecosystem would be irrevocably destroyed and we would cross the point of no return. According to calculations made by “Global Footprint Network”, a non-profit organisation, the critical threshold of the “point of no return” has already been crossed in the 1970s.  That was the moment after which we started to consume more from ecological sources than the ability of our Earth to reproduce them.

There is a silver lining in the UN population projection. It is not for nothing that the UN calls its report “population projection”, and not “population prediction.” Small changes in some critical variables have huge impact on actual population growth. That is why the UN report gives an 80 per cent confidence band in which the actual population would lie from now till the end of this century. Specifically, one may say with 80 per cent confidence that the population in 2050 would be between 9.4 and 10 billion. The figures quoted so far are all the “medium variant.” In the favourable situation, the world would have 300 million less people to feed by the year 2050.

the statesman