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
Sponsored IT training links:
Pass your RH302 certification exam on first try using up to date 70-270 dumps and 646-985 practice exam .
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
John Marshall says:
To divert land from food production to biofuel is stupid.
Absolutely. This is why policies based on the AGW scare are actually doing real and grave harm today. If, in a few years or decades, it turns out that the sceptics were right, that CO2 warming is mostly benign, it will be too late for those that lost their lives due to food shortages. It will also be too late for ecosystems lost, e.g. the rain forests that have been converted to palm oil farms, and for the species that possibly got extinct on the way.
.
Willis, we DO have a problem here.
Pakistan has quintupled (x5) its population in 50 years, and then complains that floods are killing many people, and it needs American food aid.
Ethiopia is always complaining about famines, but has managed to septuple (x7) its population in 100 years.
Bangladesh has quadrupled (x4) its population in 100 years, and has become a net food importer.
What we have here, is the population-incontenent Third World growing their populations on the back of population-stable First World food. This is NOT sustainable, Willis.
I don’t want my hard work undermined by the reproductively incontinent. We had a good example on the BBC last week. Someone in Africa was complaining that he was so poor and needed First World help to feed his 12 children. Well, FFS, I would be poor and need outside help if I had 12 children. Don’t ask me to sustain and promote your incontinence. I don’t like being punished for being responsible.
(nb: Britain’s population has increased by just 1.5 in 100 years, and most of that was through the highly divisive policy of immigration – the Third World exporting their population-incontinence to the First World.)
.
Tenuc says:
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.
Quite the contrary Tenuc, history shows there has been virtually no change in the basic forms of energy supply for over two centuries.
The fact is that the main relationship between “innovation” and energy, is that making energy supplies available have enabled innovative ways to consume that energy. In fact, it is very hard to think of any “innovations” that have caused a drop in energy use … that is because “innovation” is really the concept of finding new ways to consume energy.
We innovate because we have energy, unless you have a very long memory innovation hasn’t significantly changed our supply of energy:
Heat from burning coal has been common since the 17th century
Gas hasn’t really changed since the Victorians
Electricity and (perhaps you could count Nuclear power) are the only new forms of energy.
Wind power … was used by the Egyptians to sail up the Nile
Bio-fuels, etc. are all green nonsense.
… oh and I suppose I have to add the infernal combustion engine, which was developed over two centuries ago … together with the technology of drilling a hole and pumping out oil.
To put it another way, the wave of innovation during the 20th century was driven by the previous century’s discovery of another way to delivery energy to the home: electricity. Unless I missing something, there has been no new mechanism to deliver energy to the home/factory in over a hundred years, it is therefore inevitable that sooner or later, that we will run out of innovative ways to use this new form of energy supply, much as previous civilisations ran out of ways to use previous “new” technology.
Of course you can’t assume that the trend will continue. The Green movement and the wamists are doing their best to:
1. Increase the cost of energy through the silly war on CO2 emissions
2. Reduce the availability of food by mandating the use of biofuels
These are the REAL things we should worry about. These are the factors that will lead to starvation.
What I hate about the climate science is the old, white, male conservative denier can sound a heap more progressive than the young, post-modern, radical environmentalist.
You’re turning the world upside down. Congratulations on this article Willis.
Other contributers have spoken well on this subject. Deja Vu? Which of the WAGTD scenarios spouted forth over the last 500 years has ever come true? Erlich & his ilk are the negative, miserable doomsayers, who have limited brain capacity to actually sit down & think about a positive solution to a problem, but only the negative ones. That’s Marxist Socialism for you, take control, punish success, enrich yourself in the process, dole taxes out to corrupt elements in poor countries. Most of the named countires in Africa have corrupt socialist governments & or dictators, doing much of the aforemention practices.
Humanity, namely the so called free democratic free world, rose to the challenge of rising populations, by doubing the food production & more! What the hell has Paul Erlich et al contributed to the world? IMHO, nothing, zilch, nada, rien!
I hope you haven’t alerted the manipulators of statistics to the fact there’s still an honest and credible disseminator of information out there. The FAO will now need to be pulled into line, surely.
Forgot to add, you colonials in the Virginian Colonies don’t play much proper sport, although your rugby team makes a valiant effort, but have you seem the size of those Samoan rugby players, built like brick lavatories!!! They must get fed somewhere.
Andrew W says:
September 9, 2010 at 12:52 am
Not true at all. I said nothing about the future, and I did not extrapolate anything. I merely pointed out that a) right now we are feeding everyone better than we ever have, and b) there is no decrease in that rate of improvement, to date it is not slowing down.
Does this mean it will continue in the future? I don’t know. I wrote this because I’m tired of people claiming that the food situation is terrible. It is at the opposite end of terrible, it is the best it has ever been in history.
Quite the opposite. Technology is what turns a raw material into a resource. Take the resource called iron as an example. The raw material is ore. The technology of mining and milling and smelting and refining the ore is what creates the resource called iron. As that technology improves, we can create more and more iron from a given batch of ore.
Take another resource, uranium. How much is there? Depends. The Japanese have done very interesting work on extracting uranium from seawater. This is another resource which is created by technology. How much uranium energy is there available in the ocean? Enough to power the planet for thousands of years …
However, let’s return to whether we can feed 9 billion people. We doubled the population from 1960 to 2000. Despite dire Ehrlichian predictions, that didn’t cause a decrease in human nutrition. By 2050 the population will likely increase by another 50%. Can we feed them? I don ‘t know.
I do know, however, that there is enough potential rain-fed farmland lying idle in the Sudan to feed all of Africa. The problem is one of human greed and inefficiency and waste and post-harvest loss and hatred and stupidity and the like, not a shortage of resources.
And I know that to date, we still continue to eat better and better. Now as you point out, that doesn’t mean the upward trend will continue.
But by crickey, it does mean that at least to date we must be doing something right …
Rod Gill: What evidence do you have to support your belief in peak oil and peak agriculture?
Search the web on Peak Oil, but if cheap energy is readily available, why are oil companies spending US$100 million per hole desperately drilling in extreme deep water, thru molten salt and into even more uncharted and deeper terriotories (BP disaster in GOM) and getting excited about drilling in the Arctic (think ice bergs and cold that can shatter steel)? The oil that’s left is expensive and hard to get out of the ground. Result reduced capacity to get it out of the ground which is what peak oil is about.
For peak agiriculture look back to 2008 when oil consumption peaked. Food riots. Look at Russia today. A bit of a drought and a few fires and they have to ban all exports. Food riots in some countries that depend on Russian wheat exports. Understand what’s needed to keep modern agriculture running and even a hint of peak oil sees it start to fall apart and that’s without water scarcity and idiots growing biofuel instead of food. If the negative PDO and weak solar cycle does produce Global cooling then agriculture is going to be hit big time.
I’m an Engineer. Cause and effect. I live and work by cause and effect, so peak oil and peak agriculture is as obvious to me as is the fallacy of CO2 being a pollutant and causing run away global warming.
I was quite distressed during Richard Dawkin’s first documentary on Charles Darwin (which was really an apotheosis of himself). He dealt with Malthus’ theories, then the documentary immediately switched to the HIV epidemic in Africa. Could Tricky Dicky have made his rather sinister views any clearer?
Ehrlich said there would be starvation on a massive scale due to food shortages by the 1980s at the moment. The huge droughts in Africa were due to corruption, not shortages, and a cadre of Westerners with too much money to spare who made things worse with their gullibility.
Mike Haseler says: September 9, 2010 at 12:39 am
Mister Mr says: September 9, 2010 at 12:53 am
Agree.
What really concerns me is when
* one group of people see factor A as crucial but completely underrate factor B, and
* another group of people see factor B as crucial but completely underrate factor A –
* and when mudslinging starts between the groups when it’s not really clear to outsiders what the full evidence is, either for or against either factor A or factor B.
I see the Roman Empire dissolving in the chaos of the end of the Roman Warm Period. I see Nazi Germany arising in a general time of increasing affluence largely because of an acute economic bottleneck there (Versailles Treaty PLUS depression PLUS majority of citizens no longer able to grow their own food, being town-dwellers).
I see crucial factors easily overlooked. And in a time of change such as now, I see the possibility for such factors to be hugely multiplied. But I also know that “Hope Springs Eternal” both in the spiritual and the scientific / technical realms.
I think it’s seriously possible that the alarmists’ picture of Peak Oil is badly exaggerated. But I remain unconvinced that there is no problem here at all. And I am very sure that the foundation of energy is important. But Cuba managed in an extraordinarily creative way when the oil supplies were suddenly cut off. But OTOH North Korea managed extraordinarily badly in a parallel situation.
I’m most concerned by those who shout “THE DIALOGUE IS OVER!”
Thank you everyone here. And PS, a primer on the issues of Peak Oil both for and against, as a post here, to make the basic facts more accessible to flounderers like myself, would be nice.
Normally I agree with the postings on WUWT, but not this time. I believe the dangers of AGW to be grossly exaggerated but the danger of adding 6 million more humans a month to the planet to be much understated.
Probably shortages of water, rather than food, will hit first, and indeed in some parts of the world are already doing so, but food will do so when price or shortage of oil hits agricultural output. The halting of Russian grain exports and riots over food shortages in Africa and elsewhere should be ringing alarm bells.
Malthus is much maligned – his theory is sound even if mechanised farming, which he could hardly have foreseen, delayed its reality.
When we try to quantify things that are too fantastically complex, we make fools of ourselves. Malthusian calculations are the best example – or were until the rise of “climate science” – of the blindness engendered by intellectual conceit.
Take a look about. The world is almost empty of people. There are bugs and plants everywhere…but very few people. Am I not supposed to notice that?
As far as resources go, I’m with Julian Simon:
“Coal, oil and uranium were not resources at all until mixed well with human intellect.”
Am I not supposed to notice that?
In spite of the Duke of Edinburgh’s yearning to be reincarnated as a virus to wipe out much of humanity, and in spite of the best efforts of Communism in Asia, the only sustainable (ugh) way to reduce birth rates – if you must – is to develop a society with a dominant middle class. Works every time! Am I not supposed to notice that?
Of course, a big bourgeoisie is the one solution the elites don’t want to contemplate, because it entails a world indifferent to their theories and fulminations. Hence the popularity of the Che Guevara tee-shirt among the pensive classes.
I wonder how many have actually read “An Essay on Population”? All the Rev. Malthus was pointing out is the difference between the arithmetic increase of food production and the geometric increase in population. If you increase your effort or land area you can double the food you grow, but you have then to maintain the same effort year in year out because the output is a linear function of effort and area. The increase in population, however, is a function of population – i.e. there is positive feedback. The current doubling period of humanity is lss than thirty years.
The much-maligned “Club of Rome” did a similar exercise in “Limits to Growth” in the sixties, taking great pains throughout to repeat that theirs were not predictions but illustrations of the mathematics. Naturally, this message was lost.
It seems that Willis is making the same error for which we castigate the warmisti – extrapolating a short trend. Surely nobody actually believes that continuing geometrical increase in the human population will not at some point overwhelm the available food supplies? Food, anyway, is not the only factor which makes life worth living. What about space? Many people are apparently happy to live crammed into small spaces, but anecdotal evidence shows movement away when wealth permits.
I am reminded of the chap who jumped off a skyscraper and was heard to say, as he passed the 13th floor, “See, I told you it wasn’t dangerous”.
Thanks Willis, for your usual application of intelligence, research, good sense, all delequently and succinctly expressed.
Expanding on Keith Battye’s comments re the Christchurch (NZ) and Haitian earthquakes; the majority of buildings damaged severely in and near Christchurch were those classed as ‘heritage’ buildings and cherished as reminders of the not-so-distant past, built using the methods and materials of the Victorian era. Only two people were injured seriously and no fatalities occurred in the Christchurch ‘quake, while in Haiti many were buried and died under old colonial-era buildings that simply collapsed. A massive international effort was required to assist Haiti and there are now complaints that much of the promised aid has not materialised and rebuilding is very slow or not happening at all, while New Zealand is getting on with repairing the damage, estimated to be in the region of 2 billion NZ dollars, without any calls for international aid.
The vast contrasts in these two cases are a stark illustration of the difference between a culture that supports good government at all levels and invests in scientific research which is applied to continually improving its own infrastructure and a culture that does not.
The lessons that can be taken from these examples are; as the developing world becomes more afluent, better educated and subject to increasing levels of good government and governance, even massive and unforseen natural events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, droughts and floods can have their impacts minimized by the sensible application of science and technology. The Malthusian view does not take into account Man’s abilities, but sees Mankind as a helpless mass. Nothing could be further from reality.
I can’t see how, on a finite planet, there can’t but be, at some point, a limit to population and growth.
Perhaps it wont be with 16 billion people and doubled economic output, perhaps not with 32 billion people and another doubled economic output but at some point things and space run out.
“Then there is the huge amount of food that goes rotten before it gets to market because of bad transportation or bad government,”
Then added to that there is the huge amount of good, edible, nutritious food that is thrown away and never gets to market because it is the wrong shape, or size, or the colour is not just right and it is rejected.
Then added to that is the huge amount of food that does get to market, and is not sold by the “display before” dates and is thrown out, despite still being good and edible food.
For Rod Gill and others concerning peak oil, see http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=6261
It confirms Anna V who says “I tend to go with the Russian school who think that oil is endogenous to the earth mantle and is created/rises continuously.”
Hi Willis,
You could also have added the vast tracts of un-cultivated land that is suitable for food production. There is also the IRRI recently released flood tolerant rice. There is also the development of drought-tolerant, and salt-tolerant rice. There is also work currently under way with the wheat genome to “develop new strains with greater yields“. Finally we have the development of heat tolerant wheat and corn. The list goes on…………….
I dare say that the world’s population will stabilise long before any mass starvation. The Alarmists like to ignore the agricultural revolution as well as current crop research and assume land will run out or food output will flatten or drop which has not been the case since the 1960s. I too am tired of Malthus speak.
References:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11099378
http://ittefaq.com/issues/2010/06/16/news0234.htm
http://www.springerlink.com/content/q68k376783w1qn16/
http://www.foodnavigator.com/Science-Nutrition/Heat-tolerant-wheat-the-future-of-food-development
http://tinyurl.com/y8azbqm [IRRI]
http://www.irri.org/flood-proof-rice/
http://www.scidev.net/en/news/tsunamihit-farmers-to-grow-salttolerant-rice.html
http://tinyurl.com/2uj9e3y [IRRI]
http://beta.irri.org/news/index.php/front-page/irri-bred-rice-varieties-for-the-philippines.html
http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/sixbillion/sixbilpart1.pdf
Andrew W says:
September 9, 2010 at 12:52 am
“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”
Andrew, there is more to this than summarized by Willis, as I tried to convey in a previous comment. As a person involved in estimating food production and food security for a long time, I can say something on this.
1. World population is currently predicted to peak at about 9 billion around 2050-60 and then starting to decline. Currently published UN population projections go only up to 2050, when population is seen as still growing at a nearly zero rate, but using their own assumptions (not an extrapolation) to extend the projections a few more years, you may see the population falling. Declining from 2050-60, population by 2100 should be between 7-8 billion, and still declining.
2. This may happen earlier indeed, because the UN uses a simplifying assumption that world fertility would stabilize at 1.85 children per women (worldwide and in each country) in the coming decades, forgetting that fertility levels are a function of economic per capita output, education, and similar variables. The decrease in fertility as a function of per capita GDP (or the wider Human Development Index of the UN encompassing GDP, education and health) extends down to about 1.3 children per woman, and then (at extremely high levels of income) it climbs back to about 1.5-2.0, still below replacement level. As observed trends agree with this, demographic growth in the coming decades is quite likely to be lower than expected by the UN (their figure for 2050 has been steadily falling at each yearly or bi-yearly revision since 1996 to 2008).
3. Food production is not an extractive process, like burning oil. It is done by combining carbon with nitrogen and other substances, through photosyntesis. This year’s food is recycled (via your body waste and your own body decomposing in the future) into future food production. Moreover, increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations imply significantly increased photosynthesis and then higher yield for C3-type crops like wheat or rice, and not so high increase in photosynthesis but significant reduction in water requirement for C4-type crops like maize. Also, any global warming would enable plenty new land for agriculture and increased yields in temperate and cold regions like North America, Northern Europe, Russia or Argentina. All in all, including the negative impact of severe warming on agriculture in some tropical regions, world food production would increase even without any further technical progress. For the time being, thus, neither a population explosion nor an exhaustion of the planet resources is expected to cause increased hunger. The complex human/natural process of reproducing and feeding ourselves through agriculture has a lot of self-adjusting mechanisms.
3. It is not true that “Whether or not the planet can feed 8 billion or 10 billion people hasn’t been addressed in any sensible way”. It has been addressed, including the case of 15 billion people by 2100 in the absurdly high population hypotheses underlying the A2 scenario. See my previous comment and references for more details. According to all serious endeavours in this matter (see also Mendelsohn 2000 and Mendelsohn & Dinar 2009) per capita food availability will be higher, and the prevalence of undernourishment and malnutrition would be decreasing towards vanishing proportions along the present century. Some analyses expect climate change to have an impact, either positive or negative for the world as a whole, but always by a very limited proportion of future food production. That does not preclude alarming predictions by some others (like Cline 2007 & 2008) using extremely faulty concepts, but the serious guys all agree on this.
4. Note that predictions about future agriculture are carefully based on suitable arable land only, not involving any encroaching onto non suitable agro-ecological zones such as tropical forests. Even at its most conservative hypothesis, Fischer et al (2002, see refs above) predict increased rainfed cereal production in 2080, with predicted climate change but with today’s technology on land currently cultivated with rainfed cereals, thus not including more irrigation, not including new land opened to cultivation by global warming, and no technical improvement at all during the 21st century. All these omitted factors would have a positive impact.
Cline, William R., 2007. Global Warming and Agriculture: Impact Estimates by Country. Washington DC: Center for Global Development and Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Cline, William R., 2008. Global warming and agriculture. Finance & Development 45(1): 23-27.
Mendelsohn, Robert, 2000. Measuring the effect of climate change on developing-country agriculture. In FAO 2000, Two essays on climate change and agriculture – A developing country perspective. FAO Economic and Social Development Papers No.145. Fao, Rome. http://www.fao.org/docrep/003/x8044e/x8044e00.htm.
Mendelsohn, Robert, William D. Nordhaus & Daigee Shaw. 1994. The impact of global warming on agriculture: A Ricardian analysis. American Economic Review 84(4): 753–71.
Mendelsohn, Robert & Ariel Dinar, 2009. Climate change and agriculture: An economic analysis of global impacts, adaptation and distributional effects. Cheltenham (UK): Eduard Elgar.
I say you are wrong because there are still vast tracts of un-cultivated land (eg in Africa and South America), flood, drought and salt resistant crop varieties being developed, etc. You underestimate human ingenuity, the same ingenuity that has allowed you to post a comment on WUWT. Something unthinkable in 1950. If you look back in history you will read about commentators who thought that the streets of London would be piled high in horse manure by 2000.
Rod Gill says:
September 9, 2010 at 12:14 am
———–
Furthermore, there were those who though that sanitation would be a problem because of the copper drainage pipes on the outside of houses would run out. Humans simply switched to pvc. :o)
Resources in nature are but discovered utilities resulting from human insight and investigation. Early man had fewer resources than are now known and used. Natural resources come into economic existence as they are seen to be worth extracting and processing. Resouces are a function of human resourcefulness – which is unlimited.
The stone age didn’t end because man ran out of stones. Some cheaper or better substitute was developed. The same will happen with oil in the ground. If will become cheaper to use other sources of energy to make hydrocarbon fuels rather than extract them. This is not Panglossian optimism but something unwise to bet against.
If trends in population are to be extrapolated then why not those in science and technology? Actually, as has been pointed out, population seems to be the thing soon to peak – and not because of lack of food.
On all this read Julian Simon and Matt Ridley.
Rod Gill says:
September 9, 2010 at 12:14 am
———–
Finally, the real shocker might come in 20 or 30 years should nuclear fusion become viable. This would render solar and wind power redundant for the West at least and end the dreams of the eco-nuts who want us to return to wattle and daub housing.