Too Many People?

Lester Brown is nothing if not consistent. Year after year since the 1970s he has warned that population growth will soon outstrip food production. Every time food prices go up or food production falls, the founder of the Worldwatch and Earth Policy institutes announces that this time there is no turning back. Humanity must start “improving food security by strategically reducing grain demand”—by which he means “quickly shifting to smaller families.”²

We are still adding 80 million people each year. Tonight, there will be 219,000 additional mouths to feed at the dinner table, and many of them will be greeted with empty plates. Another 219,000 will join us tomorrow night. At some point, this relentless growth begins to tax both the skills of farmers and the limits of the earth’s land and water resources. ³

Of course, Brown isn’t the only person issuing such dire warnings. Claims that population growth will outrun food production have been made for two centuries, and they appear in most populationist writing today. Headline writers like such statements, because they offer a simple, easy-to-understand explanation for the bewildering and frightening spectre of food shortages and global hunger.

There is an important element of truth in arguments that link population size and food supply, because there is a direct relationship between the number of people on the planet and the amount of food that is required to sustain them. Each individual needs between two and three thousand calories, including all the necessary nutrients, every day. More people require more food.

Thus in 1967, the Paddock brothers, one of whom was an agricultural expert, failed to foresee (or even imagine possible) that a radical increase in agricultural productivity would take place in the decade following publication of their book Famine—1975! For them, the current situation and current trends were immutable: population growth was a “locomotive roaring straight at us” that would inevitably collide with “the unmovable landslide across the tracks . . . the stagnant production of food in the undeveloped nations.”

The present downward trends cannot be reversed, nor can they be dusted under the carpet. Those who say there are too many variables in the future to forecast food deficits ignore the present trends . . .

The amount of food per person will continue to decline in the future as it has been doing the past few years. No panacea is at hand to increase the productivity of the land, just as no miracle will arrest the population explosion.⁴

Seldom has a prediction been refuted so quickly and completely. Today even Lester Brown says the years when the Paddocks wrote Famine—1975! were part of “the golden age of world agriculture.”⁵ And since that time, as the Food First Institute pointed out in 1998, “increases in food production during the past 35 years have outstripped the world’s unprecedented population growth by about 16 percent.”⁶

When there are food shortages, populationists declare the trend irreversible, but when food production grows faster than population, as it has for the past half century, they warn that the surplus can’t last long. In the 1990s the Ehrlichs, for example, finally accepted that their Population Bomb predictions were wrong—but only in regard to timing. In a 1993 article for an academic journal, they wrote:

Overall, it may prove difficult even to maintain today’s level of production over the long run, let alone provide a sustainable global harvest two, three, or more times larger . . .

It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the prudent course for humanity, facing the population-food-environment trap, must above all be to reduce human fertility and halt population growth as soon as humanely possible . . . Success in this area remains a sine qua non for a sustainable future.⁷

As we know, that’s not what happens. The global cereal crop in 2010 was the third highest ever, but 950 million people were desperately hungry, and over a billion more couldn’t get enough nutrients to support good health. Even more shocking, 60 percent of the world’s hungry people are small farmers and 20 percent are landless agricultural workers.⁹ The global food industry isn’t just not feeding the world, it isn’t feeding the people who produce food.

This raises a critical question: where’s the food? If the world produces 3,500 calories per person per day, what happens to it? Population is one factor to consider, but it is only one, and it is far from the most important. A serious analysis of food shortages and hunger has to include at least the following points.

1. Food follows the money. The world food system is controlled by a handful of giant agribusiness corporations that maximize their profits by moving food to the places where they can reap the greatest return. As Nicholas Hildyard writes, in the capitalist market, “food goes to those who have the money to buy it . . . people earning $25 a year—if they are lucky—must compete for the same food with people who earn $25 an hour, or even $25 a minute.”¹⁰

Africa.¹¹ Those are averages: food is distributed even more inequitably within regions. Even in the United States, the very richest country, thirty-six million people live in hunger, and 17 percent of children are “at high risk of cognitive and developmental damage as a result of inadequate nutrition due to hunger,” because they can’t afford food.¹²

2. Grain is converted into beef. Forty percent of all grain harvested is used to feed animals rather than people.¹³ Most goes to factory farms where cattle are fed corn (maize) instead of the grass they would normally eat. This is nutritionally very inefficient: “a single half-pound beef burger eaten daily by a consumer in Brazil or the United States uses up enough grain to meet the entire total daily energy and protein needs of three people in India with a combined grain and milk diet.”¹⁴ But there’s more profit in burgers than in grain, so burgers take priority.

We are not arguing for or against vegetarian or vegan diets. As sustainable farming expert Simon Fairlie points out, “If we stopped feeding grain to animals we would still retain over half of our meat supply and also benefit from about three times as much nutrition in the form of grain as there was in the meat foregone.”¹⁵

3. Corn is made into fuel. After being stable or falling since the 1970s, world food prices more than doubled between 2002 and 2008. Why? A World Bank research paper concluded, “The most important factor was the large increase in biofuels production in the U.S. and the EU.”¹⁶ In 2007, US vehicles burned enough corn to cover the entire import needs of the eighty-two poorest countries.¹⁷ In 2009, more corn was processed by ethanol makers in the United States than the combined grain production of Canada and Australia.¹⁸

As Mark Lynas writes, “What biofuels do is undeniable: they take food out of the mouths of starving people and divert [it] to be burned as fuel in the car engines of the world’s rich consumers. This is, in the words of the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, nothing less than a ‘crime against humanity.”’¹⁹

4. Huge quantities of food are destroyed, spoiled, or thrown away. Reliable statistics are difficult to find, but the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says that in developing countries postharvest losses range from 15 to 50 percent of production. Worldwatch, citing agronomist Vaclav Smil, calculates that “if all low-income countries are losing grain at a rate of 15 percent, their annual post-harvest losses amount to 150 million tons of cereals. That is six times as much as FAO says would be needed to meet the needs of all the hungry people in the developing world.”²⁰

Socially generated scarcity

“Discussions of population and food supply which leave out power relations between different groups of people will always mask the true nature of food scarcity—who gets to eat and who doesn’t—and lead to ‘solutions’ that are simplistic, frequently oppressive and which, ultimately, reinforce the very structures creating ecological damage and hunger . . .

“Globe, Inc. is ‘overpopulated.’ And as long as access to food and other resources is determined by inequitable power relationships, it will remain so. Because no matter how much food is produced, how few babies are born or how dramatically human numbers fall, it is the nature of the modern market economy remorselessly to generate ‘scarcity.’ Blaming such socially-generated scarcity and ecological degradation on ‘overpopulation’ or ‘underproduction’ has long provided the more powerful with an explanation for human misery that does not indict themselves and that legitimizes various ideologies of exclusion.

“Without changes in the social and economic relationships that currently determine the production, distribution and consumption of food in the world, there will always be those who are judged ‘surplus to requirements’ and who are thus excluded from the wherewithal to live. The human population could be halved, quartered, decimated even, yet hunger would still remain. So long as one person has the power to deny food to another, even two people may be judged ‘too many.’”

—Nicholas Hildyard, “Too Many for What?”

In Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, Tristram Stuart writes:

Recalculating the potential savings using the most up-to-date FAO data for each and every country, it would appear that if all countries kept their food supplies at the recommended 130 per cent of requirements, and poor nations reduced their post-harvest losses, then 33 per cent of global food supplies could be saved. This level of “unnecessary surplus” would be enough to relieve the hunger of the world’s malnourished twenty-three times over, or provide the entire nutritional requirements of an extra 3 billion people.²²

In short, we are already producing enough food to provide a healthy diet for everyone on earth. By ending production of factory-farmed meat and biofuels, and reducing waste to reasonable levels, we could free up enough food for all the population growth that is expected in this century. If population growth is less than expected, we can return substantial areas of agricultural land to nature.

Populationists David Pimentel and Mario Giampietro, in an article published by Negative Population Growth, insist that environmentally sound agricultural methods, while needed, can’t produce enough food; a sustainable agriculture in the United States could feed only 200 million.²⁴ When that article was published in 1993, getting to 200 million would have required a 22 percent reduction in US population; today it would require a 35 percent cut. If they are correct, one out of every three Americans must somehow disappear so that the rest can be fed sustainably.

Pimentel’s insistence that sustainable agriculture can’t grow enough food is also defended, in mirror-image form, by anti-ecology campaigners on the far right. Climate change denier Dennis Avery, head of the Center for Global Food Issues at the right-wing Hudson Institute, defends pesticides, artificial fertilizers, genetically modified foods, factory farms, and other technological marvels as the only way to feed the world. In a 2010 debate on organic farming, Avery claimed:

We’re farming 37 percent of the land area now, and we’ll need twice as much food when human populations peak in about 2050. To prevent mass starvation and wildlands destruction we’ll need to double yields again—with nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides, and biotechnology. ²⁶

The experience of Cuba is particularly telling. Suddenly cut off from supplies of fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, and seeds when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, Cuba adopted organic, low-impact agriculture on a broad scale. US agroecologist Peter Rosset says that what happened in Cuba defied conventional wisdom about third world agriculture. After a difficult period in which food production fell drastically, Cuban farming more than recovered, using methods that weren’t supposed to work.

Contemporary Cuba turned conventional wisdom completely on its head. We are told that small countries cannot feed themselves; that they need imports to cover the deficiency of their local agriculture. Yet Cuba has taken enormous strides toward self-reliance since it lost its key trade relations. We hear that a country can’t feed its people without synthetic farm chemicals, yet Cuba is virtually doing so. We are told that we need the efficiency of large-scale corporate or state farms in order to produce enough food, yet we find small farmers and gardeners in the vanguard of Cuba’s recovery from a food crisis. In fact, in the absence of subsidized machines and imported chemicals, small farms are more efficient than very large production units. We hear time and again that international food aid is the answer to food shortages—yet Cuba has found an alternative in local production.²⁷

Cuba’s successes are impressive, especially for a small and poor country, but precisely because it is small and poor, it may be questioned whether its experience is directly relevant elsewhere. In fact, a growing body of research by scientists and practicing farmers indicates that ecological farming methods not only can produce as much food as we get today, without the environmental damage caused by industrial agriculture, but can also continue to provide healthy diets for all as the population grows.

A multidisciplinary team at the University of Michigan looked at 293 projects that compared the yields produced by conventional farming and various forms of organic farming, for various types of food and various parts of the world. They assumed no change in the proportions lost or allocated to animal feed. Extrapolating the results of those studies globally, they found that “the estimated organic food supply exceeds the current food supply in all food categories, with most estimates over 50% greater than the amount of food currently produced.”²⁸

Another major study involved scientists in the UK, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Mexico, and China, studying 286 projects in fifty-seven poor countries where farmers had introduced various sustainable methods, such as more efficient use of water, improved use of organic matter in soil, and reduced use of chemical pesticides and herbicides. Result: the crop yield of more than twelve million farms increased by an average of 64 percent.²⁹

The researchers compared two scenarios:

• Agrimonde GO, the business-as-usual scenario, is based on the “Global Orchestration” scenario developed by the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Under it, economic development and agriculture would continue to develop as they have in past decades, and environmental problems would be dealt with reactively, rather than by planning to avoid them.

• Agrimonde 1 involves “increasing yields by using the ecological and biological functionalities of ecosystems to the greatest possible extent” and moving toward more equitable global food distribution. The research was particularly focused on the “doubly green revolution” concepts developed by ecologists Gordon Conway in the UK and Michel Griffon in France, where the object is to increase agricultural productivity in ways that benefit the poor directly, are applicable under highly diverse conditions, and are environmentally sustainable.³¹

The study used a massive computer model (they say it incorporates more than thirty billion statistics) of the world’s agriculture and food systems, divided into seven regions and 149 geographical units. It allowed the researchers to take into account climate change, increasing scarcity of fossil fuels, the impact of land-use changes, social and cultural issues, technological change, and much more. (Of course, like all computer models this one is only as good as its data and assumptions, but the authors have been very open about what has gone into it and have created tools to allow others to test alternatives.)

The report concludes that both scenarios could produce enough food in 2050, but that under the Agrimonde GO scenario, agriculture would cause significant environmental degradation. Agrimonde 1 would allow production to expand sustainably, if three conditions are met:

1. The prevailing food model in industrialized countries must change and not be extended elsewhere. Major changes include cutting loss and wastage at all levels and reducing beef consumption and calorie intake to healthier levels. A daily average of approximately 3,000 calories per person would be available in each of the seven major regions: this would be a 500 calorie increase for most of the world, and a 1,000 calorie decrease in the North. The authors stress the health benefits of such changes.

2. Agriculture must adopt more ecologically friendly production processes and make much more efficient use of fossil fuels. Agricultural practices and education must take advantage both of the latest scientific advances and of traditional agricultural knowledge.

3. The model assumes that each region will produce food for its own needs first and export only when it has surpluses or import to cover shortages. This will require global trading rules that allow easy movement of food while enabling appropriate protections that promote development and protect the environment.

The Agrimonde study is far from definitive: many technical issues are dealt with superficially, and, as the authors admit, “social, economic, spatial, and political options . . . are not incidental and have probably not been sufficiently explored.”³² They also insist that simply having enough food available in each region isn’t enough.

Food security is above all a problem of access to food by the poorest populations. It is not only a question of production. The situation of the poorest, especially in rural areas, must be seen as a priority for both research and action, especially since they are going to be the first to be affected by the deterioration of the environment and climate change.³³

These are important issues. The fact that we can feed the world doesn’t mean that everyone will actually be fed. The giant corporations whose profits depend on ever-increasing sales of fertilizer, pesticides, and patented seeds will resist conversion to ecological agriculture, and if we don’t slow global warming, changing conditions will harm many crops. Nevertheless, Agrimonde and the other studies offer reason for optimism: they show that demography isn’t destiny, that it is possible for humanity to feed itself without destroying the world in the process.

Where’s the food?

Will food destroy the earth?