Nine billion or bust!

…Yesterday’s reader discussion of the tensions between the world views expressed by technological optimists of the Norman Borlaug stripe, who believe an unending “green revolution” will keep allowing humanity to escape the consequences of its own proliferation, and those who believe that sustainability requires a comprehensive change in how humans live on this planet, inevitably led to the invocation of the ultimate prophet of doom, Thomas Malthus. Some believe we are already well past the breaking point of how many humans the planet can support. Others believe that further technological innovations will only prolong the inevitable reckoning. It’s an argument that’s been raging for at least 200 years, and the addition of another three billion or so humans to the total already living on the planet in the next fifty or sixty years is going to keep the debate hopping quite nicely.

But what I draw from the U.N.’s report is that this is a question that may well have an answer. As population and per capita consumption stabilize by the middle of this century, my daughter will have a pretty good idea of whether Malthus was right, or finally, absolutely, indubitably wrong.

Of course, whether proved right or wrong, adequate resources for the survival of humanity does not automatically imply that those resources will be adequately distributed. Let’s give the U.N. the last word.

The slowdown in world population growth and the attainment of a peak of total population shortly after the middle of this century will certainly contribute to easing the rate at which pressures are mounting on resources and the broader environment from the expansion and intensification of agriculture. However, getting from here to there still involves quantum jumps in the production of several commodities. Moreover, the mounting pressures will be increasingly concentrated in countries with persisting low food consumption levels, high population growth rates and often poor agricultural resource endowments. The result could well be enhanced risk of persistent food insecurity for a long time to come in a number of countries in the midst of a world with adequate food supplies and the potential to produce more.

Salon.com