Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Daily we are deluged with gloom about how we are overwhelming the Earth’s ability to sustain and support our growing numbers. Increasing population is again being hailed as the catastrophe of the century. In addition, floods and droughts are said to be leading to widespread crop loss. The erosion of topsoil is claimed to be affecting production. It is said that we are overdrawing our resources, with more people going hungry. Paul Ehrlich and the late Stephen Schneider assure us that we are way past the tipping point, that widespread starvation is unavoidable.
Is this true? Is increasing hunger inevitable for our future? Are we really going downhill? Are climate changes (natural or anthropogenic) making things worse for the poorest of the poor? Are we running out of food? Is this what we have to face?
Figure 1. The apocalyptic future envisioned by climate alarmists. Image Source
Fortunately, we have real data regarding this question. The marvelous online resource, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) statistics database called FAOSTAT, has data on the amount of food that people have to eat.
Per capita (average per person) food consumption is a good measure of the welfare of a group of people because it is a broad-based indicator. Some kinds of measurements can be greatly skewed by a few outliers. Per capita wealth is an example. Since one person can be a million times wealthier than another person, per capita wealth can be distorted by a few wealthy individuals.
But no one can eat a million breakfasts per day. If the per capita food consumption goes up, it must perforce represent a broad-based change in the food consumption of a majority of the population. This makes it a good measure for our purposes.
The FAOSTAT database gives values for total food consumption in calories per day, as well as for protein and fat consumption in grams per day. (Fat in excess is justly maligned in the Western diet, but it is a vital component of a balanced diet, and an important dietary indicator.) Here is the change over the last fifty years:
Figure 2. Consumption of calories, protein, and fat as a global average (thin lines), and for the “LDCs”, the Least Developed Countries (thick lines) . See Appendix 1 for a list of LDCs.
To me, that simple chart represents an amazing accomplishment. What makes it amazing is that from 1960 to 2000, the world population doubled. It went from three billion to six billion. Simply to stay even, we needed to double production of all foodstuffs. We did that, we doubled global production, and more. The population in the LDCs grew even faster, it has more than tripled since 1961. But their food consumption stayed at least even until the early 1990s. And since then, food consumption has improved across the board for the LDCs.
Here’s the bad news for the doomsayers. At this moment in history, humans are better fed than at any time in the past. Ever. The rich are better fed. The middle class is better fed. The poor, and even the poorest of the poor are better fed than ever in history.
Yes, there’s still a heap of work left to do. Yes, there remain lots of real issues out there.
But while we are fighting the good fight, let’s remember that we are better fed than we have ever been, and take credit for an amazing feat. We have doubled the population and more, and yet we are better fed than ever. And in the process, we have proven, once and for all, that Malthus, Ehrlich, and their ilk were and are wrong. A larger population doesn’t necessarily mean less to eat.
Of course despite being proven wrong for the nth time, it won’t be the last we hear of the ineluctable Señor Malthus. He’s like your basic horror film villain, incapable of being killed even with a stake through the heart at a crossroads at midnight … or the last we hear of Paul Ehrlich, for that matter. He’s never been right yet, so why should he snap his unbeaten string?
APPENDIX 1: Least Developed Countries
Africa (33 countries)
Angola
Benin
Burkina Faso
Burundi
Central African Republic
Chad
Comoros
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Djibouti
Equatorial Guinea
Eritrea
Ethiopia
Gambia
Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Lesotho
Liberia
Madagascar
Malawi
Mali
Mauritania
Mozambique
Niger
Rwanda
São Tomé and Príncipe
Senegal
Sierra Leone
Somalia
Sudan
Togo
Tanzania
Uganda
Zambia
Eurasia (10 countries)
Afghanistan
Bangladesh
Bhutan
Cambodia
East Timor
Laos
Maldives
Myanmar
Nepal
Yemen
Americas (1 country)
Haiti
Oceania (5 countries)
Kiribati
Samoa
Solomon Islands
Tuvalu
Vanuatu
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You have got to love the contextualised ads:
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Good one as usual Willis.
But look at the pacific islander nations listed amongst the LDCs….have you seen the size of those lovely islander people? Their sustanance intake cannot possibly be low
Some 30 years ago, I have read a book in Dutch, called “De Groene Aarde” (“The Green Earth”), that the earth can sustain about 130 billion people for food. That was based on the population density (over 1,000 inh./km^2) of the two Holland provinces in The Netherlands which, despite the population density, still have a net export of a lot of agricultural products like milk, cheese, tomatoes, paprika’s, flowers and bulbs.
That was the result of the “green revolution” (and glass greenhouses), and assumed all available good land to be used for agriculture, not as happens worldwide today for harbors, town expansion, etc… But even so, the evolution in techniques didn’t stop in the past 30 years and bio-engineering is looking for methods to enhance the ability of several plants to grow even in harsh conditions of drought and floods, on poorer grounds and/or more salt tolerant. So, the future still looks bright…
I don’t see Zimbabwe on the LDC list. Are we on a LLDC list *grin*.
The real threat to people is poor governance. Technology, land, labor and inputs are available everywhere but poor governance will always impede people’s ambition to improve their nutrition.
The same is true of the impact of natural disasters. Haiti and NZ had similar magnitude earthquakes with very asymmetrical outcomes. Australia and Pakistan have had monumental floods with once again quite dissimilar effects on the population. Africa has an abundance of good land, water and climate for crop growing but poor governance severely constrains the continents ability to feed itself.
Perhaps Malthus and Erlich are right about the effects of overpopulation they just needed to refine that down to a specific segment of the population, crap politicians.
Its not what goes in but what comes out of humans is more of a worry!!! 6 billion turds a day, but as only about 1/3 of the world has toilets maybe it helps with the soil nutrients?
Then there is the huge amount of food that goes rotten before it gets to market because of bad transportation or bad government, as an example here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thor-halvorssen/a-rotting-chicken-in-ever_b_666805.html
Per Capita food consumption has grown on the rise of cheap energy that has manufactured and shipped fertiliser all over the world, powered machinery and punped water for irrigation. Rather than a green revolution we have had a black revolution based on cheap oil.
Now however the cheap energy has gone, vast areas of flat fertile agricultural land has been built on, fresh water aquifers are rapidly being drained, large areas of other fertile regions are now degraded so their yield per acre are dropping fast.
Phosphate is no longer cheap and our ability to get more and more tonnes per day extracted and distributed is now limited. Without phosphate modern agricultural practices can’t continue as they are.
I believe we are at a point of peak agriculture and the consequences will be far more severe than anything CO2 increases might cause. In fact give us more CO2 to help grow more food!
Hopefully the worst of Malthus’ predictions won’t happen, but with peak agriculture and peak oil just about on us we are living in interesting times.
There are several assessments of the food impact of IPCC predicted climate change. The most comprehensive is by a IIASA team, coordinated with FAO, and headed by Gunther Fisher. Even using the worst-case A2 scenario (absurdly high population growth with lowest growth of output), and even more so with other IPCC scenarios, average food consumption, and even more significantly, percentage of people undernourished (ie consuming less than the bare minimum to survive at minimum weight with only light physical activity) will both improve greatly. The current worldwide undernourishment rate is about 14%, and about 17% in all developing countries taken together (developed countries are nearly zero). By 2080 both figures would fall to about 6% in A2 and 1-3% in other scenarios (FAO regards undernourishment rates below 5% as non significantly different from zero because of inherent uncertainties). The future rates of undernourishment are estimated by Fischer et al using a complex “Linked System” using climate projections plus economic models plus agricultural production models, and respecting agroecological zones ie without farms encroaching over unsuitable land such as virgin forests, and under very conservative estimates of future technological change and economic growth (much below current or recent rates).
References
Fischer G., M.Shah & H. van Velthuizen, 2002a. Climate change and agricultural vulnerability. A special report, prepared by IIASA as a contribution to the World Summit on Sustainable Development. IIASA, Johannesburg. Laxenburg (Austria): IIASA. http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Admin/PUB/Documents/XO-02-001.pdf.
Fischer, Günther; Harrij van Velthuizen; Mahendra Shah & Freddy O.Nachtergaele, 2002b. Global agro-ecological assessment for agriculture in the 21st century: methodology and results. IIASA RR-02-02. Laxenburg, Austria: IIASA. http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Admin/PUB/Documents/RR-02-002.pdf.
Fischer, G., M.Shah, F.N.Tubiello & H.van Velthuizen, 2005. Socio-economic and climate change impacts on agriculture: an integrated assessment, 1990–2080. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Series B, 360:2067-2083.
Fischer, Günther; Mahendra Shah, Harrij van Velthuizen & Freddy O. Nachtergaele, 2006a. Agro-Ecological Zones Assessment. IIASA RP-06-03. Laxemburg, Austria.
Fischer, Günther; Guy Jakeman, Hom M. Pant, Malte Schwoon & Richard S.J.Tol, 2006b. CHIMP: A simple population model for use in integrated assessment of global environmental change. The Integrated Assessment Journal 6(3):1-33.
For undernourishment: FAO’s State of Food Insecurity in the World, an annual publication found at http://www.fao.org/publications/sofi/en/.
The fact that politicians (wrongly) propose vast increases in the use of bio-fuels tells you there may be a surplus of agricultural products.
The fact that anaerobic digestion of food waste to produce “renewable energy” is on the increase tells you that we (wrongly) waste vast amounts of food.
As Keith Battye rightly says “The real threat to people is poor governance” “crap politicians”.
Well put Willis.
Matt Ridley’s new book (The Rational Optimist) is excellent on all this.
A second thought: your recent post on Armagh showed their land record against SST in the Atlantic and the Irish Sea. SSTs have of course changed from testing a bucket to engine inlet measurement and then the satellite date. The former was surface temp, and probably sporadic, the middle was deeper water, and the final method surface again, and more systematic. Maybe your fit with the land record was not that good after all?
I may add that according to the same sources cited (FAO) undernourishment by 1980 was about 35% in developing countries, falling to about 20% by 1990-92 and 16.4% in 2004-06, increasing slightly in 2008-10 to about 17% according to very preliminary estimates released by FAO, due to world recession and international rise in food commodities prices, especially in 2008. But the price spike was not so high as initially estimated, nor lasted for long, and thus this estimated temporary increase may not have existed or may be promptly reversed. FAO computes undernourishment based on habitual consumption, approximated by 3-year averages, thus a passing price spike may not alter the figures much.
Very good, Willis! I’m so tired of Malthus and the neo-malthusians myself, and try to stop the mouth of them whenever I can. I agree with you that per capita wealth is a bad measure, but that’s because arithmetic mean is such a bad measure of the expected value for skewed distributions. If they had only used MEDIAN wealth as a measure of per capita wealth, the numbers would have been much more interesting.
Your food statistics is a very good weapon against the doomsayers, I’ll make use of that! My personal favorite evidence that the well-being of humans has been drastically improved even in the last few years is the fact that child mortality has plummeted since 1990: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64N0PM20100524
Rod Gill says: … with peak agriculture and peak oil just about on us we are living in interesting times.
There are four fallacies of modern thought:-
Energy consumption will increase.
Food supply will increase.
GDP will increase.
World Population increases.
For those in the know, these are really just the same thing said in three different ways because they are so highly interlinked that a reduction in energy supply/consumption will mean a reduction in food supply, GDP and population.
The only reason people think there is some kind of law that these all increase, is that modern thinkers haven’t lived through an age when they have decreased.
The really interesting/critical question is what will the world be like when these presumptions on which the whole world economy and politics are founded fall apart?
That is why I have a keen interest in history, because history teaches us what is likely to happen when energy (aka food) supplies run out — and the main thing it teaches us is that politicians even democratic forms of government are incapable of handling such situations and therefore the likely outcome of the end of oil is a profound decrease in democracy worldwide.
Thanks Willis for another elegantly simple debunking of the green brigades alarmist rubbish.
We haven’t even scratched the surface of what modern technology can do to improve traditional food production in the third world, and in the developed world the move to hydroponics will have a massive impact on efficiency and yield.
The ‘peak ???’ doom-sayers always fail to take into account that circumstances change as we move forward in time. History proves that mankind makes progress in leaps and bounds rather than plodding along in the same groove.
How about a volcanic winter with no preparations for 7 billions???
Agrarian pyramid populations COLLAPSE EVERY TIME because of this!
Rod Gill: What evidence do you have to support your belief in peak oil and peak agriculture?
This is a very light weight post, all you’ve done Willis is extrapolate a trend.
Whether or not the planet can feed 8 billion or 10 billion people hasn’t been addressed in any sensible way. The planet feeds more people now because we consume more resources, those resources are finite, technology gives us the ability to use what’s there, not the ability to create resources that aren’t there.
THANK YOU, Willis! I had a geography professor who lauded Malthus day in, day out, and I’m like: “This guy’s ideas are bogus! Doesn’t anyone else think so?”
I’ll read your post in full later (just took a look for a minute), but your title sums up my thoughts about Malthus pretty well.
Excellent post. As someone who has spent time as a relief worker in some of the worst refugee camps on earth, I can relate from first hand experience that, short of temporary natural disasters, the problem is not that there isn’t enough food. There are warehouses with enough food. The problem is getting the food to the people who need it or moving the people to the food (think Darfur). As Keith wrote above, the problem is “governance”. More specifically, what stands in the way most often is men with guns who call themselves “the government” in these regions. It would be more correct to call them criminals, bandits or profiteers. Without the rule of law, they can trample anyone who is weaker and steal their resources or merely shove them onto marginal land where no one can survive.
Forcing starving refugees across a border in search of food can be a tactical weapon to use against adjacent countries. Stealing donated relief supplies and selling them on the black market is just another way to fund their gang. We’re talking powdered milk for infants here. The more experienced gangs don’t even bother stealing the supplies, they just set up checkpoints and charge relief trucks a 60% “roadside tax” enforced with AK-47s.
Whenever I hear news commentators talking about perma-refugees stuck somewhere with “not enough food” it never fails to evoke a bitter, sad laugh. It’s heartbreaking enough for us westerners to think that children over there are starving because there isn’t enough food. When you know that there is adequate food, often within 500 miles, that means these children are starving simply because evil men with power are doing what they always do. It is simply unconscionable. Those that continue to push the Malthusian scarcity meme are accomplices in crimes against humanity because their wrong ideas serve as a smoke screen masking the real problem and delaying real solutions.
Mike Haseler you’re thinking like a malthusian and missing the A and O of demography. The fact is that when a country reaches a certain level of development (and thus, of food supply and energy consumption), it reaches the “fourth phase of demographic transition” and fertility plummets. The main reason is that in such societies, women decide to make a career instead of having ever more children. Even some countries which are considered very backwards by the west, Iran is a good example, now have unsustainably low fertility rates. Iran still has population growth, but if their fertility rate stays at 1.7-1.8 their population will of course start decreasing in a few years. Many European and Asian countries have now reached the fifth stage, where population starts decreasing. Some very rich countries have had a slightly higher fertility rates the last few decades, but it is still below sustainable, and the increase is IMHO solely a result of policies (availability of cheap day care, for instance).
Mike Haseler says
“a reduction in energy supply/consumption will mean a reduction in food supply, GDP and population.”
It’s not so straightforward as that. Increases in the efficiency of energy utilisation mean that GDP and food supply can stay the same or even go up, while energy used goes down.
Mike Haseler says:
September 9, 2010 at 12:39 am
That is why I have a keen interest in history, because history teaches us what is likely to happen when energy (aka food) supplies run out — and the main thing it teaches us is that politicians even democratic forms of government are incapable of handling such situations and therefore the likely outcome of the end of oil is a profound decrease in democracy worldwide.
I agree that energy is pivotal to all the rest.
I disagree about peaks in oil or this that and the other.
IF, a big if, there is a peak in oil, there is still coal, shale in large quantities, not to forget oil bearing sands.
I tend to go with the Russian school who think that oil is endogenous to the earth mantle and is created/rises continuously. The finding of a Titan, I think, satellite with methane speaks to that.
We then have sun energy, which is slowly materializing, maybe the flexible panels will become cheap enough to compete with oil, and other alternate solutions .
And to top it all there is fission power, and fusion power. Once fusion is harnessed for production, there will no longer be an energy problem, but an occupation problem.
Progress in technologies, from nano to micro to large scale, inevitably replace human labor with machine and robot labor. There will be this mass of humanity which will be fed and tended by machines, very few people needed for work and intellectual occupation. That will be the real problem.
We have the start of it already, having taken agriculture workers who where over 30% of the population and are producing food with 1% of the population as workers.
And now technology is taking away industrial jobs, that had become available to former farmers. ( ignoring outsourcing for the argument) This has given rise to the dole, and things will get worse and worse instead of better. How many service jobs can there be?
One of the reasons for the rise of bureaucracies is that there is that enormous surplus of workers who in olden times would have been occupied in agriculture and are now in some government NGO niche creating work for themselves an others.
This is the real problem the future humanity will have to solve: a leisure society created by free energy and robotics. History will tell us how the leisure societies worked: some were decadent, some produced Newtons and Da Vincis.
I agree we have increased food production enough to feed the increased population. But we are starting to fall behind because of the scramble for biofuel crops. This is the greatest waste of agricultural land ever thought up. To divert land from food production to biofuel is stupid. True agritechnology will help to increase yields as genetic modification is increased, once the scare tactics of the environmentalists have been addressed, but will this be enough? It is not as if biofuels are better than fossil fuels they are not they burn poorer and more fuel is needed per mile driven or Kwatt produced.
Many countries have agricultural land in abundance but due to civil war or lack of knowledge do not use it. Sudan is a case in point. I read that they use 5% of their agricultural land the rest is left to the weeds.
One problem we will have is enough water for crop growth. Genetic modification will help but increased atmospheric CO2 levels, whilst not affecting climate, does help to reduce plant water uptake so the same plants will grow in dryer conditions. This may be important in the future.
It is important to remember that, regardless of reasons for global warming if it happens, all plants prefer warmer conditions to colder ones and crop yield is better with warmth than cold. Plants will not grow under ice.
Willis, I usually love your contributions but I take some issue with this one in that I am extraordinarily tired of people who have missed the bulk of what Malthus said.
The Essay on the Principle of Population was a very scholarly work produced at the end of the 18th / beginning of the 19th century and should be read in this context. At this time farming methods had been largely static for centuries, implying constant food supply (subject of course to weather) but new developments were occurring as the Agricultural Revolution started up. Medicine had not had any radical developments and would not for a long time to come. New land was becoming available in North America.
This enabled him to do two pieces of research. The effectively infinite new food supply in the colonies enabled him to draw the conclusion that, unchecked, population would double geometrically – every 25 years if I remember rightly. This figure is probably exceeded today in the Third World, given better medicine.
The second piece of research was into historical records of population, pre Agricultural Revolution, including the many centuries of censuses in the Swiss cantons which provided a form of control environment. This showed that populations in fact tended to remain static.
These findings simply provided empirical measurements backing up the intuitive propositions of the effect of unlimited food and the effect of trivial growth in agricultural production.
Given this hard data, Malthus put the two together and posed the question “what happens to the potential population growth which has not happened if the population has in fact remained static?” His conclusion was that this potential excess would have died off from one of three basic causes – famine, war or disease. (At the time, contraception was virtually unknown and he advocated “moral restraint”, ie abstinence, as a means of avoiding the three nasties).
So far, all eminently sensible. Malthus’ basic principle – as I understand it – was that sustained population growth cannot exceed sustained growth in food supply. One could restate this to say that the population will rise to meet the food supply available, as many examples in the Third World demonstrate.
The discreditation of Malthus stems from his attempt to put a figure on the potential growth in food supply. At the beginning of the 19th century this was OF COURSE a finger in the wind and his estimate was that “the best that can be expected is that food supply increases arithmetically”.
As we know, the point in time at which this estimate was made preceded the vast impacts that science and technology have made on food supply in the last couple of centuries. In damning Malthus for this misguesstimate – he never claimed it was anything more than that, unlike the metrics on history – critics sidestep the enduring issue Malthus raised, namely that population will rise to match any increase in food supply unless it is voluntarily limited (by the contraception he did not envisage or the postnatal contraception the Chinese used) or involuntarily by famine, war or disease.
The ultimate issue is not whether we can continue to geometrically increase the food supply in the short term, but whether we can continue to do this for a sufficent period of time that worldwide people move to a contraception mindset which limits growth.
I will avoid the issue of an ideal population, which is contentious in itself. However I think that the availability of water is going to be the factor which brutally limits growth in the medium term. No matter the other scientific improvements, some areas of the world are soon not going to increase agricultural production the way they have been doing. Look at the Nile valley. And then the pundits will have to acknowledge that Malthus’ basic principle (as opposed to his guesstimate) were right.
What interests me is the amount of arable produce (wheat, rice, barley, potatoes, sugar beet etc.) that is used to make alcohol. The figure I have been told is about a quarter of the worlds production. Can anyone confirm this?
I also understand that 80% of grapes grown are used for making alcohol and as we can see from the Muslim world alcohol is not needed to sustain a healthy life, so an awful lot of good food is grown not to feed people but just to make them drunk!
Seamus Molloy