Guest essay by David Archibald
Things have improved over the last 25 years according to this recent WUWT post. The future doesn’t look so rosy if you look at a larger data set. The world’s population growth will at some stage hit a resource constraint with dire consequences. How that will play out in detail can be determined from grain production and import statistics. As Chairman Mao said,“Take grain as the key link.” Mao should know with the biggest score of deaths caused by any communist leader. His personal tally was 45 million, mostly from the 1959 famine caused by taking grain from the provinces to pay for imported machinery. He also left a time bomb in Chinese demographics. In 1960, Ya Minchu, then president of Peking University, called for the introduction of population control in China but was exiled to the country because Mao thought that history belonged to the ‘big battalions’. Population control in China wasn’t introduced until the 1980s. China’s population grew from 600 million in 1960 to some 1,380 million now. If they had stayed around 600 million people, they could easily feed themselves and environmental degradation in China would be much less than it is. China now imports 15% of its grain consumption and is vulnerable to potential crop failures in the northern provinces.
There is a strange notion that most countries’ populations are at their ideal level right now and they would be worse off if they were lower, where they had come from. Japan’s population in 1950 was 83.2 million after a few million came back to Japan after World War II. It is now 126.7 million. Young Japanese have reputedly lost interest in sex let alone spending a few years changing nappies. So Japan’s population is falling and the average age is increasing. Japan, though, has chronic underemployment. Japan spends only 1% of its GDP on defence but 6% on make-work schemes in the countryside such as concreting river beds. If Japan’s population fell back to the level of 1950, they would be able to feed themselves from their own efforts and remove a big existential risk to the country. Nobody would want to be a food importer in the next few decades if they knew what was coming.
Let’s try to divine what’s coming from graphical representations of the history of food production and some projections from those, starting with ground zero which is the Middle East.
Figure 1: Afghanistan Wheat Consumption 1960 – 2015
Afghanistan’s recent history is written in its wheat statistics. It was mostly able to feed itself up to the mid-1970s when imports started rising. Production and imports collapsed a few years into the Russian occupation but population growth didn’t fall below 2% per annum. When the U.S. got involved in 2001, Afghanistan’s population was 21 million. The U.S. occupation provided perfect breeding conditions for the Afghans because you don’t want people starving to death while you are trying to do some nation-building. So the population growth rate accelerated and there are now 12 million more Afghans than in 2001. One day the grain trucks will stop arriving and then Afghanistan’s population will fall below its carrying capacity of some 13 million.
Figure 2: Egypt Wheat Production and Imports
Egypt had been the granary of the ancient world. At the time of the Napoleonic Wars, Egypt’s population was 4 million. It is now 96 million with a doubling time of 36 years. They ran out of spare water decades ago so all that population growth is made possible by imported grain.
Figure 3: Egypt Wheat and Corn Production and Imports
More than half of what Egypt eats is imported. Near the end of President Morsi’s period in office, the country was down to three weeks of stocks. That precarious situation was possibly one of the drivers that got the Muslim Brotherhood regime chucked out. The Egyptian government subsidises bread production with price of each type of loaf related to the proportion of corn flour in it.
Figure 4: Egyptian Oil Production and Consumption
Egypt used to pay for its food imports with the revenue from its oil exports. It is now a net importer as well as a major grain importer though the large gas fields being developed will help offset that.
Figure 5: Iran’s Population Growth from 1960 with the Proportion fed from Imports
Iran has reached the limits of its agricultural production system and now approaching having half its population is dependent on imported grain to keep body and soul together. Iranian agents have murdered Jews at gatherings as far afield as Buenos Aries. More recently Iranian proxy forces have been lobbing ballistic missiles from Yemen at Saudi population centres. If they upset enough people, eventually the rest of the world will stop feeding them. This is an option going forward.
Figure 6: Tunisian Wheat Consumption per Capita
The Tunisians are the world most enthusiastic wheat eaters with wheat providing most of the daily calorie requirement. Tunisian population growth is down to one percent per annum but, with imported wheat providing half of what they eat, that won’t save them when some other country with more money wants to bid up the wheat price.
Figure 7: Yemen Grain Consumption
Yemen’s population growth is still galloping away despite the civil war there. What is interesting about Yemen’s situation is that wheat imports took off as soon as the country started exporting oil in the mid-1980s. That was followed by imported corn which is cheaper to feed chickens with. Oil production has been in decline for years and the country could not afford to feed itself with or without the civil war.
Figure 8: Domestic and Imported Grain in the MENA Region
The whole Islamic belt from Morocco in the west to Afghanistan in the east is much the same with imported grain providing more than half of consumption. Israel is no different but Israeli GDP per capita is some eight times that of the surrounding region so they will have a better chance of getting themselves fed. The Israelis are able to grow commercial crops using desalinated seawater. It takes one thousand tonnes of water to produce a tonne of grain. Nuclear power at $0.03 per kWh would produce wheat from desalinated seawater at $700 per tonne, more than three times the current price.
Figure 9: Wheat and Rice Production in India
What is remarkable about India is that their grain production has kept pace with population growth. In fact India is now exporting wheat to Afghanistan through an Iranian port. Their last famine was in 1967 when a drought killed one million people. The Indians are well aware that they are reaching the limits of their agricultural production while population growth is grinding on at one percent per annum. To ameliorate that they intend to apply more nitrogenous fertiliser. This will provide more protein if the crop is not water-limited.
Figure 10: U.S. Grain and Soybean Production
Wheat has the best amino acid profile of the major grain crops and is a near-complete foodstuff for those who do not have allergies to it. The amino acid profile of soybeans complements that of corn with the ideal ratio between them being 30 percent soybeans and 70 percent corn. The reason for this is the essential amino acid make-up of each component. Maize protein is deficient in lysine and tryptophan but has fair amounts of sulfur-containing amino acids: methionine and cysteine. On the other hand, the protein of food legumes is a relatively rich source of lysine and tryptophan but is low in sulfur amino acids. This is a near-complete meal for adults but is not suitable for children without an animal protein supplement. Given that human corn consumption is only limited by the availability of soybeans, US soybean production of 90 million tonnes per annum would allow human corn consumption of 210 million tonnes. US production of wheat, soybeans and corn combined could feed just over one billion vegetarians on the basis of per capita consumption of 350 kg per annum.
Figure 11: U.S. Corn Production by End Use.
The mandated ethanol requirement increased corn production by over 100 million tonnes per annum, showing how quickly US agriculture can respond to a price signal. It is also an indication of further latent potential in the system. The 100 million tonnes of corn going to the ethanol requirement could, if combined with 42 million tonnes of soybeans (just under half of the soybean crop), could feed 400 million vegetarians at a 350 kg per capita rate. The United States has a substantial agricultural buffer over its minimum domestic requirements and it should strive to maintain that buffer. Another way of putting that is that every extra immigrant increases that chance that someone within the continental United States will starve during a climate-driven reduction in grain production.
Figure 12: Mexico Grain and Soybean Imports
NAFTA wiped out three million small holders in Mexico when they could not compete with the more efficient gringos. That suggests though that there might be some latent capacity in the system that might be awakened by a price signal. The Mexican population growth rate of one percent per annum means that their population is ratcheting up at one million souls or so each year, in turn requiring another 300,000 tonnes of grain as adults to keep those souls with their bodies. All this will come across the border from the U.S.
Figure 13: Mexico Oil Production and Consumption
As with a number of countries, Mexico has been able to pay for it grain imports with the revenue from its oil exports but is now close to the crossover where it has to start paying for imported oil and food.
Figure 14: China Grain and Soybean Consumption
China’s economy started taking off from about 2000 and so did its grain consumption as it changed the animal protein to vegetable protein ratio in the Chinese diet. China is at its limit of agricultural production with state subsidies for application of nitrogenous fertiliser wringing the last out of the system. Nitrogenous fertiliser in China uses coal as the feedstock, not natural gas. Chinese coal production is forecast to peak in 2020 after which making things from coal will become more expensive. China’s oil production peaked a couple of years ago.
Figure 15: US and Brazilian Soybean Exports and Chinese Imports
China has the world’s largest herd of swine. Pigs have a protein conversion efficiency of 13 percent, halfway between cattle at five percent and chickens at 25 percent. Pork is so important in the Chinese psyche that the Chinese government keeps an emergency stockpile of frozen pork and live animals. To keep its swine herd fed, China has become a giant vacuum cleaner for soybeans, taking close to 100 million tonnes of the combined U.S. and Brazilian exports of just over 120 million tonnes. Soybeans have three times the protein content of wheat so, in protein content terms, those imported soybeans equate to about 300 million tonnes of wheat. Processed through pigs, imported soybeans provide 20 percent of China’s minimum daily protein requirement.
Figure 16: Russian Wheat Production and Consumption
Under communism, Russian wheat production used to be less than its consumption. After 1990, consumption fell as waste was removed from the system and more food options became available. It took a few years for production to recover as de-collectivisation dragged on, with droughts thrown in. In the last few years though production has taken off suggesting that market signals are extending through the system and Russia’s latent potential has started to contribute. Russia has 40 million hectares of cleared land that is producing nothing. At 2 tonnes to the hectare, wheat production could double from here.
Figure 17: South Africa Wheat and Corn Production and Imports
To make the stuff that white people eat, bread, South Africa is now importing more than half its wheat. The country tends to import more corn when droughts impinge upon domestic production. The staple diet of black South Africans used to be sorghum. It is now corn and that has caused an epidemic of squamous carcinoma of the oesophagus. This is caused Fusarium fungi grow freely on corn, producing fumonisins, which reduce nitrates to nitrites and synthesise cancer-producing nitrosamines. Fusarium fungi do not grow well on sorghum with the production of fumonisin from sorghum being two orders of magnitude lower than from corn. Another Sword of Damocles hanging over South Africa is its HIV rate. which is 13.6% in blacks and 0.3% in whites. In the 15 to 49 year old age group, the incidence is 16.6% of the population. South African life expectancy fell from 62 years in 1992 to 51 years in 2006. It is now 56 years. HIV isn’t the killer it once was because of anti-retroviral drugs. Provision of these drugs costs the South African government US$1 billion per annum and a further $0.5 billion from donor countries. There are localised hotspots of higher infection rates with some schools in the Natal province having 28% of schoolgirls HIV-positive. If the government broke down to the extent that the anti-retroviral drugs weren’t distributed, then the black population growth rate would go negative. It is currently 1.6% per annum. Of HIV-positive mothers, one quarter of the babies they bear is infected with the virus. If South Africa failed as a state, it would be missed. Amongst other things, it produces 68% of the world’s platinum.
Figure 18: Wheat Imports in Some African Countries
Africa now has the world’s fastest growing populations with most of that growth fed by imported grain. There are plenty of projections of Africa’s population exceeding 800 million by mid-century but those ignore the question of where the food is going to come from. A major famine in the Middle East is likely to trigger panic stock-building which will exacerbate the situation. That is when grain ships will stop arriving at African ports with a consequent African population collapse. The Middle Eastern oil producers have the money and so they will get the grain.
Figure 19: African GDP per Capita 1980 – 2015
There is a theory that once a society gets wealthy enough and the women of that society get an education then population growth will fall to the replacement level or below. Africa’s GDP per capita figures suggest that few countries on the continent will reach that escape velocity.
Figure 20: Philippines Grain Consumption
The population growth of the Philippines is still galloping along at 1.6 percent per annum. So with a population of 105 million, another 1.7 million new Filipinos are created each year who, as adults, will consume the equivalent of half a million tonnes of grain per annum. That grain has to arrive in ships.
Figure 21: Indonesia Grain and Sugar Imports
There was a prediction in 1976 of the fall of the Soviet Union based on increased infant mortality rates, indicating a society in decay. Therefore an indication of declining infant welfare in Indonesia deserves close scrutiny. After declining over decades, childhood stunting in Indonesia has increased from 28.6% to 36.4% over the decade from 2005 to 2015. Indonesia’s GDP nearly doubled over that decade so lack of money shouldn’t be the cause of the increased infant malnutrition. Most of the income growth went to a small subset of the population though. McKinsey counts 45 million members of a consuming class with household income of US$7,500 or more. Some 82 percent of Indonesia’s population, 200 million people, live on less than US$4 per day with half of those under US$2 per day. Indonesian rice production has plateaued at about 35 million tonnes per annum from 2003. Domestic rice production per capita has declined from a peak of 171 kg per capita in 1991 to the figure now of 144 kg per capita. Food imports started taking off from the same year as per Figure 21.
The situation is a little more complicated than that in that Indonesia has significant corn production now approaching 10 mpta. A significant proportion of that and the imported soybean meal would be going to conversion to animal protein for the consuming class. While Indonesian per capita foodstuff consumption has increased, for the bulk of the population the quality has declined, as reflected in the childhood stunting statistics. Though the stunted children might be getting an adequate amount of food, they are missing the micronutrients that come with animal protein. The most important organ in the body is the brain with most of the brain cells being created and refined in the first four years of life, so nutrients are prioritised for brain development and the rest of the body misses out. Severe protein deficiency results in kwashiorkor, the symptoms of which include brain damage.
Figure 22: Percentage of Grain and Soybean Consumption Imported
The Asian region is a big net importer of grain and soybeans. Of the larger countries in the region, Malaysia is one of the most vulnerable to supply disruption.
Figure 23: Colombia Domestic and Imported Grain 1990 – 2016
All of Colombia’s population increase has been fed on imported grain. None of the Latin American countries north and west of Brazil are self-sufficient in food.
Figure 24: World Animal Protein Production per Capita
Though it is possible to survive as a vegetarian, we have teeth shaped for cutting flesh. Animal protein consumption has doubled over the last fifty years, mostly in chickens and farmed fish.
Figure 25: Protein Conversion Efficiency by Major Animal Type
The reason for the relative rise in the production of poultry and fish meat production is the fact that these are the most efficient animals for converting vegetable protein into animal protein and therefore produce the cheapest meat. This was aided by the cheap grain of the last 30 years or so. Cheap meat from penned and caged animals made meat from grazing animals less valuable, and the land they grazed on. When grain prices rise again, there will be a ‘grass arbitrage’ making grazing land more valuable. Lactose tolerance developed in Europe and Africa because of the efficiency of cows in converting grass into protein through milk which is eight times more efficient than growing cows to kill and eat them.
Figure 26: World Production of Major Grains
With the world’s population at 7.6 billion, total production works out at an average of about 350 kg per head.
Table 1: World Population Growth relative to Grain Supply
The world’s population growth more than tripled since 1930 but grain prices are at their lowest level in human history. The reason is that grain supply outran population growth by a wide margin with the excess grain converted into animal protein and fats.
Figure 27: Wheat Yields in Developing Countries
The Limits To Growth isn’t discredited, just a couple of generations too early. This is largely due to the efforts of Norman Borlaug who pioneered the development of wheat, corn and rice varieties that didn’t use energy for making stalks more than absolutely necessary so the proportion going to the head could be increased. It seems that all the potential gains from that technology have been achieved with wheat yields in developing countries plateauing from 2000.
Figure 28: Wheat and Corn Prices 1916 – 2017
This graph begins at a time when horses provided motive power on farms. The horses required that 20 percent of a farm’s production was feed to keep the horses going. Much the same holds today if a farm tried to make its own biodiesel for tractors. About 20 percent of the farm’s land area would be required with a consequent 20 percent reduction in food output. Farming only takes two percent of fuel consumption but it is the most vital two percent. This graph ends with what appears to be the first signs that the world’s agricultural system is near its limits. The right price signal will increase the area under grain until the world bumps up against its land area limit. That is mostly 40 million hectare in Russia and possibly another 150 million hectares of as yet uncleared Brazilian rainforest. This might keep world population growth going up until the mid-2030s until that wall is hit.
Figure 29: Wheat and Corn Prices 1784 to 2013
When the current age of abundance is over, the situation will return to what it was like prior to 1916. For most of human history grain prices were much higher and far more volatile. In the graph above, the big spike on the left hand side was due to the eruption of Mt Tambora in Indonesia in 1815. The price of oats, what horses are fed on, in the northeast U.S. went up close to 10 fold. In Switzerland people resorted to eating their horses and then their cats. Climate-caused famines in Europe over the last thousand years have been well documented. A cold period due to low solar activity in the late 17th century killed 30% of the population of Finland with lower numbers further south. A sudden cold snap in Ireland in 1740 killed of 20% of the population. This was 100 years before the better known potato famine.
Why This All Matters
There will be an end to the global warming hysteria at some point. But global warming is only the warm up act to an even bigger monster called the UN Sustainable Development Goals. There are 17 of them. Global warming, now one of the lesser gods, is goal 13. Goal 1 is to end world poverty and Goal 2 is to end world hunger. The UN’s ambition has grown from the $100 billion per year they wanted under the Paris climate agreement. They want to spend $175 billion per year and $267 billion per year respectively on Goals 1 and 2.
There will be no rest.
David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare
World population will level out. If there is not enough food, energy, etc. the population will respond (not grow as fast). It will adjust to what is available as far as food, energy, housing, land availability, economics, – all those things. – The population will adapt. It will have to (or die).
How does that jibe with population growth rates dropping, not in stavring countries, but in wealthy and developing countries?
It has something to do with prosperity and wanting to enjoy the fruit of their labor as opposed to the drudgery of surviving day to day and raising starving kids. A very long time ago I read a thesis on that but can’t recall who wrote it.
Perhaps you need to see an exposition by the late Hans Rosling. He explains that “peak children” has already been reached and that the world’s population will peak at around 10 billion when they have all grown up. The situation in the world is better than you might think. https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies/up-next
Technological advances in developed countries increases agricultural output. The drop-off in population growth in developed countries means demand will taper, and excess in supply is made all the more available for export. Once world demand tapers, supply decreases across the board to achieve equilibrium.
But then governments intervene and that tends to mess things up.
Growth rates are dropping everywhere.
I think David Archibald left off the ‘sarc’ tag
No sarc tags needed with off the wall commentary like this:
If anyone was still thinking this was not a spoof article at that stage any doubts would be dispelled.
I may have missed the graph explaining that hundreds of thousands of Yememi civilians currently facing starving was somehow linked to their grain imports – currently blockaded by Saudi warships – ( and not the war crimes being committed by Saudi Arabia’s darling prince SbM using weapons and assistance of US and UK ‘advisers’ ) because I stopped reading at this point.
I may also have missed the other graph showing the exponential growth in extra-territorial assassinations by Mossad agents and Israeli grain imports, sorry but using a pretence of science as a sounding board for myopic political rants is not what I come to WUWT to find.
The issue with ‘eventually the world will stop feeding them’ is that the ‘world’ is not an entity, the Russians will continue feeding the Iranians as long as they act as their ‘proxy’ against the interests of the West in the middle east.
Greg is 100% correct.
Mr. Archibald seems to have a MSM news IQ for international affairs.
The evil empire (US) has joined with Israel and Saudi Arabia to foment war in ME against Shites (especially Iran) all in favor of the head-chopping Sunni’s.
“The evil empire (US) has joined with Israel and Saudi Arabia to foment war in ME against Shites (especially Iran) all in favor of the head-chopping Sunni’s.”
No, the US is fighting against radical Islamic extremists of both factions, the Sunnis and the Shiites. The Mad Mullahs of Iran just happen to be the most dangerous of them now. You act like the Iranians are innocent bystanders. Hardly. War with the Mad Mullahs is inevitable.
Note that the Islamic Terror Army was made up of Sunnis, and the US killed a whole bunch of them. The US doesn’t play favorites when it comes to radical Islam.
The Iranian Shiite extremists are no better than the Sunni extremists and it is the job of the US to wipe them *all* out. I guess you are not going to like that.
Trump has made a pretty good start with wiping out the Islamic Terror Army, and he is going to straighten out the Mad Mullahs of Iran, too.
The radical Islamists are not facing a cowardly American president any more. The radical Islamists have been confronting society for a long time and now Trump is going to confront them back.
You did note how easily Trump/US Military wiped out the Islamic Terror Army, didn’t you? Obama could have done the same thing by just allowing his military to do their job like Trump did, but Obama chose to sit back and watch while the Islamic Terror Army proceeded to kill and dislocate millions of people in Syria and Iraq. I wonder why he chose that inaction. He didn’t give the radical Islamists a very good idea of American power. This may cause them to misjudge the US in the future and might end up being the death of them.
Trump isn’t going to sit back and watch while the Mad Mullahs of Iran try to take over the whole Middle East. The fight is on.
“No sarc tags needed with off the wall commentary like this:”
Nothing off-the-wall about it.
“Iranian agents have murdered Jews at gatherings as far afield as Buenos Aries.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_attack_on_Israeli_embassy_in_Buenos_Aires
“More recently Iranian proxy forces have been lobbing ballistic missiles from Yemen at Saudi population centres.”
Try this:
Somewhere in the mountains of northern Yemen, the missile lifted off in a dense cloud of fire and smoke and began its arc over Saudi Arabia. After roaring north for some 600 miles, the Iranian-made Qiam-1 reached its target, the international airport just outside of Riyadh.
http://www.newsweek.com/iran-saudi-arabia-yemen-houthis-trump-israel-bombing-riyadh-missiles-742886
I love how Greg always comes forward to present his one sided “the US is always wrong” analysis.
Lets not investigate any of the history that might justify the actions of Saudi Arabia. Let’s just declare that they are US puppets only seeking death and destruction of others.
Food for thought…
Take every inch of the Amazon, mow it down, grow corn. Take the Sahara, add desalination water, grow corn. Lack of food is a matter of perception based on current social norms and engineering. The planet can clearly hold 5 to 10 time current population. How? Lower their standard of living.
“Lower their standard of living.”
Lead the way…. 🙂
Yeah. Let’s suppose this is right. What is the purpose of such a population growth? Are we going to export human beings to Mars? or outside the solar system?
Why does it have to have a purpose?
As to exporting humans, that will come, in it’s own time.
Can’t be done. The Amazon basin is to be used for wind/solar farms.
Why couldn’t you plant corn under the wind farms? They wouldn’t block that much light.
Obviously that would preclude the building of solar farms, which is sad. Deserts get all that sun, you know.
we still live on a finite piece of dirt and eventually starvation back to sustainable levels will occur.
“Sustainable”. Code word for “We’re doomed and there’s nothing that can be done about it, so why not just commit suicide now? (You, of course, not me)”
That word saves so much typing, doesn’t it?
“Sustainable”? In the 1800’s that was far smaller a number than now. It’s a fluid term.
Actually, human beings usually wipe out themselves with far more efficiency than nature does. No need to wait for starvation.
We could easily support 3 to 4 times the current population.
Donald Kasper,
You are apparently unfamiliar with the fact that the lateritic soils of the Amazon lose their fertility quickly, and even worse, when exposed to the air become untillable. The wind blown sands of the Sahara are not fertile soils either! Both of your suggestions require massive amounts of energy, which is at the core of the problem that alarmists are concerned about. Your ‘solution’ strikes me as being akin to the opposite of the advice, “When you find yourself in over your head, stop digging.”
May I amend your last sentence?
“When you find yourself in over your head, rename it as ‘Trench Warfare'” – reworded due to recent Lew/Mann/et al hissy fit paper
There’s also a fertilizer limit. Phosphates, and natural gas aren’t going to last forever.
Then we’ll use nuclear power to create the fertilizers.
Very interesting. Thank you.
Meh, they have been saying this forever. Still waiting. We have large amounts of land fallow that could be used to grow food but because the price of food is ridiculously cheap, it just isn’t worth it. There are better things to do than terrace the sides of mountains and massive irrigation schemes. When scarcity brings the price of food up then there is ample land to use to grow more. Our options are endless as long as we have energy and direction.
Population increases don’t matter as long as you can feed them and as long as you can get them to do something useful – it makes everyones lives better. More people often means everyones lives are better not poorer – the key is getting them to do something useful through good governance.
“the key is getting them to do something useful through good governance.”
And NOT destroying things with bad government.. like in say Zimbabwe.
Used to be a thriving breadbasket of central Africa.
Andy,
“Good governance ” is an oxymoron.
Governments are the main cause of famine.
Har old: How about minimal governance?
but it does no make any sense, the growth per its own sake. What is the purpose of population growth?
To make more people who can enrich the bankers. It’s basically a livestock operation. Continued growth of the credit bubble requires constantly rising population numbers. That’s “the meaning of life”,
Are you serious? If so I’m sure you have sterilized yourself.
I made my own sort of control. I had only two kids. I made not any sense for me to breed future slaves. More more children you breed the more poor they would become. Unless you are filthy rich.
Three of my four kids are doing just fine. Good jobs, good husbands, healthy children. The fourth is still a kid, but he will do just fine too. Optimism is very effective. It leads to success.
leopoldoperdomo: Interesting belief. In history, large numbers of children were associated with poorer people and the need to have children to take care of you in your old age. As incomes rose, the number of children dropped. However, the number or children one has has less to do with the increase in population than how many children survive. If you have 4 kids and 2 die, it equals out to 2 kids. I suppose one could hope for more dying children or just stop treating childhood illnesses and that would help. Poverty enslaves people, not the number of children. You seem to see cause and effect backward.
(Also, until the 1960’s there was not much for effective birth control, short of not having relations and thus not reproducing. This “solution” was not popular, needless to say.)
Don’t forget. In the US we need population growth to support the Social Security Ponzi scheme.
There is no “purpose” to population growth, it is just an outcome of human societies depending on a large number of factors. Resource availability is one of the major drivers, but is not always the dominant one. From an evolutionary perspective, larger populations mean greater genetic diversity, which is better than the alternative. The more people we have, the greater the talent pool is which drives innovation and technological progress forward. Obviously there is a point of diminishing returns, but attempts to calculate that have been dismal failures. History is replete with failed attempts to predict future population growth and the limits of resource availability.
oh, I was thinking technological innovation was being worked by a minority of people.
Leo – its just happening but its already slowed down signifixcantly. We are 80% of peak already and it will level off by itself. You seem to think we plant people like we do corn. Its a natural thing, do I need to say? Prosperity is the path which slows population growth. Incidentally, to get a handle on the “size” of the population, Lake Superior could hold the entire world population, each person with15 sq metres to tread water in! If we wanted to be more intimate at a square metre, the lake could hold 90 billion.
ok, there is not any problem with population. So, I would sit and wait. I am 80 years old. So I am not impatient.
Then, you said prosperity is the sure path to slow population growth. That’s nice. We can wait for poor nations to prosper.
Why does it have to have a purpose?
It didn’t take long for Greg to once again fall back to his evil bankers controlling everything shtick.
leopold, with your attitude, I’m glad you only bred two more parasites.
Poor nations are prospering, when their government permits it.
well, this idea is disputable. But I am a rare breed of conservative. I distinguish two aspects in the idea of prosperity.
1) is the population growth.
2) the other is the future prosperity.
Then, the point 1) that if a country has a population growth it has some measure of prosperity because if their people were famelic or really hunger their population would not be growing.
Why? Because for the ovaries of a female to work properly she need to have some reserves of fat. If she is too thin or too emaciated she would not ovulate. Then, she would not conceive a baby.
As for the point 2) population growth means future problems ahead. As Malthus predicted, even if he was wrong at the time, it is very easy for a nation to outgrow its capacity to feed his future children.
Malthus was wrong because he was unable to foresee the world full of machines working by the combustion of fossil fuels. Nobody knew at his time the incredible life we have at present. But… it is not sure human scientists and engineers would be able to make another miracle, for the future time when our present fuels would be depleted.
I have had some arguments with leftist people and they do not agree with my arguments.
And we can use nukes to desalinate water for irrigation. Make the Sahara green again.
Shawn Marshall,
It takes more than water to grow things! You apparently know little about how the food you eat is produced.
When I was a child we were using this argument. I do not believe is a serious argument.
leopoldoperdomo December 11, 2017 at 11:57 am
Shhh! Don’t tell the Israelis. They get a third of their water from desalination, and when their latest plant comes online, it’ll be close to half their total water coming from the sea … so don’t tell them it won’t work, they might get depressed …
w.
Mydrrin,
If you stop to think about it, people put the most fertile and productive land into production first because it maximized their output. When pushed (the best land is already taken) people will try to make less productive land do the same job. Many of those have died trying to do so, or moved on, as during the Dust Bowl era. There is a very good reason that there is land that is currently unused . People that were half-way intelligent realized that the land was best either used for grazing or left alone. Yes, if the price of food gets high enough, people will try to put less productive land into production. But that means you will have reached a point of diminishing returns and you can’t expect the shallow, infertile, soils to match the production of the best soils, no matter how much energy you throw at it.
“Population increases” may not matter to you, but I want to do more than just exist. The quality of life is important to me. That means, I don’t want to live in big cities and put up with all the negatives such as filth, crime, and perversions that are the result of the crowding.
A lot of that “less productive” land because it was in lots that were too small to farm efficiently with modern combines.
Yeah, The grassed yards of suburbia, unused parking spaces and road margins of NA could feed millions if intensely farmed. Or replace half the trees with fruit bearing ones. No end to potential if you just look around.
DA ,for more support, see Ebook Gias Limits published in 2012. Lots of illustrations.
That you, Mr. Erlich, for another flawless prediction.
Earlich could had been a stupid… well no so stupid for he sold of his book, The population Bomb” some 30 million copies. Then, he could had been wrong in his predictions, for the drought of those years, passed away after a time. The book was published first time in 1968. Remember when some scientists were fearing the next glacial age was coming? Russia and other regions of Asia had had severe droughts. Remember the Mao Zedong famine?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine.
This occurred during the 60’s when temperatures were dropping and the rains were scarcer. Some educated people was fearing the start of the new age age.
We are tempting ourselves if we think there is not any evil in population growth. Make a check on the growth between the rich and poor countries. Then make comparisons.
And you suggest what? Forced sterilization?
Tubal ligation paid by government. You can offer a money reward to women that have had already a couple of babies.
Wouldn’t forced sterilization be more effective? That seems to be your desire (you know – to “save the planet”)
So “free health care” solves everything? Why then, do people in the utopian socialist countries have more than 2 children? They have free everything.
We are doomed to die anyway. So, most people do not care at all if they had many children or not. Only a few rational people care about how many children to breed. They have as many children as cats or dogs can except the time between a baby and the next is more extended among humans. A typical proud of lions can have an average of two cubs per female. As they are sort of two males in the pride. The average for 12 females and two males, results in a growth of 171 % per year. But we have not an epidemic of lions, because most of them are devoured by jackals or other predators. The average growth would depend on the during of the life of an adult. Assuming the average lion die of old age at year 15th this means, they only need 1/15=0,0666 or 6,66% per year. So they lions overbreed. Then, we should not worry about human being overbreeding either. They eventually would die a way or another, or they would have a war that would help a lot for them to die.
Quite the bedtime story.
Venezuela may be a harbinger when government malpractice is added to the equation, even in the midst of adequate supplies.
With all the potential of future grain shortages, what really concerns me is what will happen to the price of bier.
An illustration of playing the Malthusian game. If one makes the assumption that there is no change in agricultural technology, or population growth rates, the gloomy reverend was right.
The problem is that the predictions of imminent doom have been made repeatedly since well before I was born ( and I am getting to be something of an old fart), and they have yet to happen. “Just you wait” gets tiresome after awhile. Harold Camping had the good manners to shut up.
Correct. There’s no real theme to this (interesting though the detail is) which might cause us to reconsider Malthus’ basic error. What it does show pretty clearly is just what a mess much of the world makes of its own economics, and the large extent to which vast swathes of the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere have become extremely dependent on Western production, technology, and charity. There are consequences of this, of course, but nothing that changes the effectively limitless ability of the world to feed itself.
We cannot criticize the doom sayers. Sooner or later, we should stop making too many babies. This is not the problem. The problem is a sudden change in circumstances and we would be unable to solve a critical problem. We are not thinking fossil fuels, or natural gas, would last forever. Do we? That Malthus was wrong in its XIX century predictions it does not mean, he would be wrong forever. In 60 or 80 years, Malthus would be right, if we are unable to make more miracles.
Do you think the fall of Rome was for some degree of moral decadence? It was a climatic crisis. Climate got colder and droughts began to be very frequent. The German tribes north of the Rhin and the Danube were suffering extreme hunger and migrated towards the Roman Empire
Malthus’ error is not time dependent. It is wrong fundamentally. It won’t lie down because so many people find it hard to grasp the concept that any resource could be limitless, but in practice that is how it works out. The late Julian Simon called his masterpiece ‘The Ultimate Resource’, by which he meant human ingenuity, which puts it concisely. I guess we will always have ‘deniers’ of this thesis but, as far as can see, the science is settled!
of course is time dependent. He could not had guessed the miracles that fossil fuels and machines could had performed. In this sense, we would never stop making so many babies, because we can imagine some miracle would solve our problem.
Who we? Who ‘we’ should stop making babies?
There are no (well that I know of) readers of wuwt from countries, where the total fertility rate strongly exceeds the replacement level.
‘We’ does not include any Western country, including Oz and Kiwis. It does not include China or Russia. Nor it includes Brazil or Iran. India, whole South America, northern- and southernmost Africa are not an issue. Nor an issue is any of the very small populations like the one at the Carteret atoll.
There is one country that is causing trouble at large, that is Niger. The central Africa is late in development, but will make it. Don’t worry.
The problem of next 60 years will be population decline. Ehrlich screwed it.
I can accept that Ehrlich screwed it except that he won some money with his book. And the question of excess population is a good question. When it would be too many people in this planet is a slippery till our fossil fuels would get exhausted.
Malthus realized he was wrong. Read his later writings. He’d taken a crisis period and extrapolated into the future.
Pessimism is never a good idea – it completely discounts human ingenuity.
leopoldoperdomo: You really have drank the koolaid. I am speechless at the moment…..
Mothcatcher,
You said, “Malthus’ error is not time dependent. It is wrong fundamentally.” I disagree. Clearly there is an upper limit on the number of people that the Earth can hold. The mass of humans cannot exceed the mass of Earth! From there, we can look at more practical limitations. Pseudo-scientific claims that the entire world population can be held by the state of Texas overlooks the fact that humans need more than their personal space to survive. They need protection from the elements in the form of homes. They need natural and synthetic raw materials to be manufactured and fabricated into their clothes, tools, and toys. That is we need room for factories. They need quarries and mines to produce the raw materials for homes and transportation. They need food to be grown, an infrastructure, that allows food and water to be supplied, and refuse removed. All of this takes space. So, any consideration of how many people the Earth can hold needs to take into account the space required for the infrastructure and the supply of raw materials and energy. As you add more people, you have to make room for them by taking away from the infrastructure, such as producing less food.
It is important to realize that there are real limits, and to try to work around them with compromises have costs beyond money. I would submit that if we get pushed to the point that we start putting people underground to allow food to be grown on the surface, then we have transitioned from living to surviving.
That argument of you make me recall a coworker that said,
“I do no see any problem with population growth. We got still the moon and the planets to colonize them all.”
What an odd thing to say. The claim I’ve seen is that the current population of the earth can fit into the state of Texas with the same population density of New York City. That doesn’t mean they would all be standing around in a little square of land, it means buildings and factories and theaters and even Grand Central Parks.
Of course, not everything that New York need come from inside the city. For a Greater Texas Metropolis you’d need farms and mines and other things outside of it, but that isn’t really a problem, is it.
The only real problem is, not everyone wants to live in a big city (or in Texas). So it’s preferable to have lots of smaller cities spread around, and plenty of less population dense areas for those who prefer them. Let’s people live where they want.
Kind of like what we have now, at least in the West. And what the developing nations are striving for.
~¿~
oh, my god! Dies Texas has enough water for 7 billion people?
As always, are neo-malthusians reveal themselves to be, at their core, anti-human.
just suppose the next glacial age starts. And we have not any means to stop the glacial. This glacial age would be anti-human as you said. But nobody is proposing a new glacial age. It simply occurs that some people have some reasonable fear about the future and thinks the more children we would have the more problems they would inherit. Just imagine that they are going to inherit the planet. All the good places of the planet have already some landowners. If you are a landowner, you must divide your state among all your children. But if you have not any land or property your children would inherit only the wind or the dust bowl. They manpower would be worthless slavery.
Sometimes dooms appears without any warnings. But even Cassandra was coursed by Apollo that nobody would believe in the prophetic dreams of Cassandra. Think about Eastern Island, someone had predicted the catastrophe implicit in breeding too many babies. But nobody believed the dreams of Cassandra.
http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com.es/2015/11/the-syrian-sickness-what-crude-oil.html
It is about crude oil. Visit the link.
Theres is a phrase worth to be recalled,
what crude oil gives, crude oil will take away.
Here is a fragment of the article, below the photo of Aleppo destroyed.
Here, I argue that the origins of the Syrian collapse are to be found in the economic downturn generated by the gradual depletion of the Syrian oil reserves. Crude oil had created modern Syria, crude oil has destroyed it. This phenomenon can be termed the “Syrian Sickness” and the question is: “which country will be affected next?”
Crude oil is a great source of wealth for the countries that possess it. But it is also a wealth that comes as a cycle. Normally, the cycle spans several decades, even more than a century, so that those who live through it may completely miss the fact that they are heading to an end of their wealth. But the cycle is faster and especially visible in those areas where the amount of oil is modest; there, wealth and misery appear one after the other in a dramatic series of events.
“Here, I argue that the origins of the Syrian collapse are to be found in the economic downturn generated by the gradual depletion of the Syrian oil reserves.”
Argue it all you want.
Doesn’t stop it being a load of bollox.
Syria was never more than a marginal supplier of oil (ranked around 60th globally), and never extracted enough to seriously deplete its reserves.
?s=syriacruoilpro&v=201711211358v&d1=20070101&d2=20171231
Note that oil production was level until the beginning of the civil war.
you mean they had not extracted all the oil.
Tom Halla,
It is true that Malthusians have a bad record of predicting the future. But, that isn’t because their fundamental premise is wrong. It is because few people have the ability to see the future. What the Malthusians miss is the role of technology being like a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat. Technology has saved us many times, and probably will continue to do so. However, woe be us if we depend on there being an infinite number of rabbits in the hat and that they will be produced ‘magically’ as we need them. More to the point though, do we always want to be in a reactive mode, expecting technology to provide us with the ability to support an ever increasing population? Would it not be better to decide what an optimum population would be, and then have society provide incentives to achieve that goal with a minimum amount of pain and suffering?
You are right. In past times, I mean a few hundred years, few people could marry or could breed children. This was for a good reason. Agrarian productivity was no so good as today, not only because of they lacked the machines we have today, but also because some centuries ago, climate was a few C degrees colder than today. Even the wars of religion in Europe were caused by climate reasons. Climate often make failed harvests, when not here it occurred in another province no so far away. People began to loose reserve fat, and adrenaline levels rose well above normal levels. This was the cause of so many wars. Hunger beget wars.
You’d also have to add in no change in water storage, treatment and distribution. No change (for the better) in energy production and distribution.
Good article David.
Certainly a little scary. I see a few big problems that you allude to obliquely.
1. War plays the major destabilizing role in many areas today. The resources wasted need to go to better farming systems.
2. The bugaboo fear of genetically engineered foods has to be solved. Ever more efficient production and energy conversion is needed.
3. Planning for saving fossil fuels to produce the energy needed to farm and transport food is lacking.
4. Similarly, methods of producing nitrogenous fertilizers today rely on gas and coal. Windmills can’t help.
5. Using 40% of US corn production for ethanol is stupid in the long term.
I am sure others can see more problems.
I have faith in man’s ingenuity to overcome.
5. Using 40% of US corn production for ethanol is stupid in the SHORT term, too.
But the fuel conversion could be quickly stopped if the crop was needed for food. It seems to me a way of having a large reserve in the field in case something goes a rye with crop production in some locations. Storage of grain as was done in the past by government caused the grain prices to remain low.
I’m not for government forced food to fuel policy but it may have a small upside.
War also reduces population. Historically, it was one of the most common ways of reducing population. When war became more “civilized”, the number of casualities went down. I’m not recommending war as a solution, only pointing out that as humans became more focused in war, the population reductions no longer happened.
John MacDonald
December 9, 2017 at 9:49 pm
“I have faith in man’s ingenuity to overcome.”
Absolutely. It is this under appreciated factor that Malthusians, including David Archibald, it appears, sell short every time. See my comment on a more pleasant future going forward below:
Gary Pearse
December 10, 2017 at 9:18 am
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/12/09/world-population-and-food-security-adding-some-granularity/comment-page-1/#comment-2689725
“David, you are good at the stuff you know. But this is something else, no different than the starvation and drastic depopulation we were supposed to have before 2000.”
Malthus was wrong because he was just a philosopher, and was not acquainted with engineers working to make steam engines, He was unable to see a future full of machines, or those huge tractors and combiner systems use in farming today. He could not envision either the modern means of transportation. Not only Malthus, not any politician could foresee these inventions, and probably not even the engineers working on developing better steam engines,
The question I am presenting here is, what is easier, to make the population breed less babies, or just expect in the near future we would be able to make another miracle, like present oil?
Would our scientists be able to take another rabbit out of their top-hat?
I consider myself conservative, but I do no believe to make miracles is easy.
At least this corn wasted to make ethanol, can in the near future, when it will be really needed, to stop making this ethanol shit and use to feed people.
Thanks for that valuable compilation. Much interesting detail. Adding Canada would be make it more complete.
Oops – delete “be”
This is an interesting article. I have followed the science, always wrong, since 1974. But this piece speaks in subjects that I can analyze. Not necessarily agree with mind you.
How can you “disagree” with raw data?
Raw data can be as fake as the climate data of global warming alarmists.
You can take raw data end knead it, and put some yeast in it, and after all this you can “adjust the data” so they can conform with the theory. In the same manner, Malthus had an idea, it was philosophical and he was not in a proper situation to present some scientific argument. Most of the riddles of life cannot be analyzed rationally. But sometimes, you can analyze a problem with wrong arguments. This is a very common case.
One does not disagree with data, but rather the interpretation of the data.
You said Science is always wrong. Science simple means “to know”. But this “knowledge” are not foolproof. Most of the times, our knowledge is worthless or false. The things that are working well, the computers, the planes, the big machines, our cars, heating or cooling systems, are working properly. Those are pieces of true knowledge. But outside the mechanical world, most things we know are false or dubious.
Archibald=Malthus=wrong.
Charles Gerard Nelson = Micawber because he expects something will turn up.
Tim Groves=Miss Haversham.
Most thought provoking post in some time, and to interpret it we need to ponder on the factors which control food production and our ability to manage them. Thanks.
We have several tigers by their tails. If we mess up on any of them, there will be disaster. This fact drives well meaning people to decide that they must tamper with the economy by ending capitalism. link
When well meaning people start tampering with the system, things almost always end badly. They’re not nearly as smart as they think they are and we will all pay the price for their hubris if they can’t be stopped.
Well said Bob .
You only have to look at the world population figures and the countries with low birth rates have by far the higher standard of living and the countries that are doubling their populations in a short space of years are very poor.
.I don’t know what the answer is but if the poor countries encouraged birth control it might slow down the inevitable food price escalation that comes with shortages
.In my lifetime New Zealand’s population has doubled to 4.6 million and we export high quality animal protein and dairy products to feed 45 million people .Some bread making wheat is imported from Australia and fruit and nuts are imported from around the world.
I have to agree with you Bob that free enterprise and the capitalist system is the only way to grow more food to feed the increasing population.
Rising standard of living leads to dropping population growth rates not the other way round.
Yeah, but New Zealand is populated by Hobbits and they don’t eat much.
Excellent article. World population doubled twice in my lifetime and is now just on eight billion. A further doubling is unsustainable. As the world cools the growing seasons become less productive.
The AGW brainwashing propaganda prevents current population from preparing for the future.
The whole process of evolution is adapt or die.
“.. A further doubling is unsustainable……”
No, no, no it isn’t. Doubling is unlikely to happen anyway because as wealth increases, population growth falls, Maybe more likely that the problem will be a shortage of people and a stagnation of progress, although by then we will have so much wealth created by our armies of robots that we may not need to worry.
Mothcatcher, you are one deluded person, you know that? Armies of robots, seriously? The low-hanging fruits of automation have long since been picked and further automation only results in the destruction of capital, not in its creation.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-09/marx-robotics-and-collapse-profits
Furthermore, Malthus did not commit any “fundamental error,” as you moronically stated up-thread. He was not in error at all, fundamental or otherwise. There are always hard limits to what an economy can produce with a given resource base and a given set of production procedures. The fact that these limits can be extended in various ways does nothing to alter that; it only results in the phenomenon of “rolling Malthusianism” where a challenge is met by a successful response. But it is impossible to win every time. Eventually, every society will meet a challenge to which the fail to find an appropriate response in time, and then the limits imposed by Malthus will kick in with a vengeance. The history of the world, littered as it is with the ruins of former empires, is sufficient proof of this thesis for anyone whose face isn’t glued to his own gluteus, as yours apparently is.
Mothcatcher? This conceited fellow “intelligentdumbass” (or whatever) isn’t worth responding to.
Though I don’t really need an “army” of robots – a dozen or so is plenty.
The main problem is that hunter gatherers never had problems with population. The reproductive system of females only works when they had accumulated some amount of fat, to guaranty to end pregnancy and a part of breast feeding of the baby. So, we had not evolved any controls on breeding. But the problems of excess breeding are real since some thousand years ago. Aristotle would had not said, the ideal age for a man to marry is between 40 and 43 years. In fact, in past times, well before the industrial revolution, existed a lot of controls to reduce the amount of people breeding. The servants and slaves were not permitted to breed, for obvious reasons. And people too poor could not breed either but as an accident, for salaries were so low as dissuade breeding among the poor.
If you check the statistics, hoe much growth had occurred among rich European nations and the rest of nations of the planet, you can see which is the main variable is behind poverty.
When I was 1o years old, the school book said we were 2.5 billion people in the planet. Now we are more than 7 billion.
This adapt or die makes not much sense sometimes. If tomorrow the Yellowstone supervolcano explodes we would have not had the time to adapt at all.
When supervolcano Toba erupted nearly 70,000 years ago, humans were on the verge of extinction. Most of them died, and only a small fraction of them survived.
You think about next glacial age, or next Little Ice Age comes out in the next few years. All this bounty of food we have today would disappear. Climate can change easily for the worse. It only needs to cool.
I believe Darwin considered all of the above completely natural. Human beings survive or go extinct based on their fitness to survive. No, we cannot survive the Yellowstone supervolcano, at least not if we are near it. However, nothing in the real world says humans are entitled to exempt themselves from natural consequences. Ice ages, massive volcanoes, etc are all rediculous to use as the starting block for why we can’t adapt. Let’s be rational and discuss the real world and common occurances.
To adapt is an idea of Darwin. He needed to say this in order to make sense of his theory. It is not any clear if we adapt or not really. It is an idea we cannot prove. Think a bout a war, like the IIWW. Most people who died were not the soldiers, but common people that had to suffer hunger. They do not adapted themselves, they simply die. It does not make any sense to say that the survivors of WWII adapted. Simply they were lucky and had food during the war. Perhaps because they were soldiers and you have to feed your soldiers if you want to win a war. So, some soldiers were unlucky and died, and others were mutilated. But others were alright and survived, because they were soldiers, and the command of the army was feeding them.
I do not believe in adaptation. You either survive or not. And nobody would care if you are alive or dead, unless someone needs you for some purpose. If someone needs you, they would hire you. If nobody needs you, you must solve your personal problem if you can. That’s all.
Richard, linear thinking alert. The population growth has been slowing notably over the past 25 years. We are 80% the way to the peak population. It may even shrink back a bit as prosperity spreads – this will be a final blow to the ever so destructive Malthusians and what they have wrought. Even the global warming BS is part and parcel of this totally wrong-headed linear thinking that has created damaging fantasy and nearly broken down our civilization. Man’s ingenuity is always left out of consideration, mainly because the proponents of the fears don’t have a lot of ingenuity themselves.
squiggy9000,
You said, quite uncivilly, “This conceited fellow “intelligentdumbass” (or whatever)…”
Just for the record, you have left me with the impression that you are more deserving of the insult than he is. He articulately states his position, while you just insult. I’m not impressed by your grasp of reality.
From the graphs it appears the common thread, other than the consumption of cheap grain is the availability of cheap transport. It would be interesting to see a sail powered 100,000t bulk grain carrier.
…..Or a sail (wind) or solar powered harvester combine?
By the way, many people would find it instructive to go back and read what Malthus actually wrote rather than reading just those things that other people have said that he wrote.
Sounds crazy, but some people are actually taking that idea seriously. Towards the end of the article.
http://splash247.com/can-honest-damage/
In Australia, Tony Abbott was hounded because of his ideas to open up the northern part of Australia by building dams and irrigations systems to catch monsoon rains.
There is a lot of empty, but water is currently scarce.
Time will tell how much the Chinese what to put into the area.
Yeah, that was an unusual moment of sanity for him IMO. I had had the same idea before he brought it up.
I heard a few years back that desalination technology had just menaged to reduce the cost to 1% of previous costs using graphene, I think. If true, those plans could be viable and we could feed the whole world.
Ever heard of Project Iron Boomerang?
http://www.eastwestlineparks.com.au/
Add water, turn the land along the link into farmland….
…. FEED THE WORLD. !!
Just imagine you are feeding the world already. The most you feed the world, the most population you will have. Thus, I think it is needed a different approach to the problem. If feeding people is not a problem, they would keep growing till there is not any more solid space available to sit down on solid ground.
We live on a water planet and yet we have simpletons hyperventilating about a lack of water!! My biggest fear is that we are destroying education and curbing ability to reason and think. Human ingenuity is THE RESOURCE. All other resources come from this, not from bean-counting estimates of resources. We don’t demand zinc. We demand rust resistant culverts and barn rooves!!! I was told by someone years ago that we could make a radio with iron, quartz and could make the case out of concrete!!!
Gary,
What if we were to turn that human ingenuity to improving the quality of life instead of just preserving life, and allowing the food supplies to be tested yet again? If no thought is given to what kind of a life we want to live, and are focused on just ramping up food production, we are always going to be playing catch-up.
Your remark about Lake Superior reminds me of a joke.
Q: What do you have when you have all the world’s lawyers floating in Lake Superior?
A: A good start.
What nonsense. World pop. Growth is collapsing, technology is still moving and a huge chunk of world food goes into idiotic biofuels. The mini-warming and CO2 increase is adding to food production. Population growth is over in 3/4 of the world — the whole Western Hemisphere and most of Eurasia. Population growth continues only in Africa, the Mideast and the Indian sub-continent. Population is collapsing in Europe and Russia. The regions with continued population growth are in trouble, but it’s their problem not ours.
Richard C .
If you lived in Europe with millions of refugees flooding in to take up space I don’t think you would be saying
What Nonsense
Population growth is not showing any reduction in those countries and when the people become refugees or insist on emigrating to your country it then becomes your problem .
yup i noted the absence of the EU pop figures
both natural and now with massive immigration.
for every one that leaves africa and mid east someone will produce a replacer , so its not going to do anything to reduce poverty or crowding at all.not while the west keep supplying food anyway
and no figures for israels pop increase they keep using as an excuse to invade past their set borders into palestinians farmland? how many billion of usa $ go to them every yr? hardly a needy nation either.
russias just had massive harvests, aus is around avg due to some weather losses.
an wheat and corn n soy arent complete or that productive compared to quinoa which IS complete food produces massively for the input and will grow in damn near seawater.
ok it doesnt make a good bread;-/ but other uses its fine
as for borlaugs short stems yeah so wheres the hay? for the animals when the crops short?
feeding animals grain is bloody stupid, theyre designed to digest fibre and woody stems
as well as the tendency for all the grains from it to be susceptible to UG99 from the genetics he spliced in? like most GMO big claims and the faults show up later.
green revolution was a can kicker basically
instead of some dying an pops stabilising to what they could support we interfered..so 3 crops a yr did feed extra mouths who kept breeding up.
meanwhile the bugs changed too and also bred up ie brown/green leafhoppers.(more pesticide)and soil degradation.more artificial chem again) corn borers are gmo resistant now. and they can survive a single soy tweenplanting n come rightback
seeing as most western pops are supposed to be close to 50% overwegiht to morbidly obese and rising
it isnt shortage BUT distribution, and sheer piggery by some while others go without.
oddly enough.its only in the first world we see obese but undernourished masses.
3rd world the starving look like they are starving,
All of Europe has fertility rates far below replacement of 2.1 kids per female. What little growth there is is entirely from immigration. Actual decline has started in Russia, Poland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Portugal, Croatia, Serbia and Greece. Altogether European population growth is zero.
South American nations, central America and Mexico are still growing.
The two largest countries in the Western Hemisphere, accounting for well over half the population, US and Brazil, have fertility rates way below replacement levels at 1.8 and 1.9 respectively. The rest of the region is near replacement or below. Fertility rates are dropping fast. Mexico, Argentina and Venezuela are at 2.2. Region as a whole has zZPG birth rate.
Population growth is collapsing? In which part? Perhaps in Japan or in Sweden.
You know of more places where population is collapsing?
Yes, Russia and nearly all of Eastern Europe.
Best rationale I’ve read for Trump’s “Build the Wall.”
Control immigration and control your destiny.
A Rome in decline could no longer keep the Visigoths, Huns, and Vandals at bay from plunder and sacking of Rome and taking of former Roman territory. So another Trumpian, “MAGA!!”
One thing is certain. Africa already is a nightmare and it is going to get worse. Chinese companies are already buying off politicians there (corruption) to build huge mines to remove minerals from Zimbabwe, Zaire, the Congo, Central Africa to ship to Chinese smelters. Nigeria has lots of oil and gas to export with a small fraction going to internal consumption. The result will be the almost assured annihilation of Africa’s megafauna. As Africa descends further in to societal chaos, the problems for emigration to Europe are going to become extreme, unless the EU can turn around their disastrous open door policies that encourage Africans to try to get across the Mediterranean Sea. There is no reason to impose any fake Climate Change for the coming worsening in Africa. Their birth rates and internal corruption have that fate sealed.
The vast mineral reserves for China to eye is to their northwest; Russia and it’s Siberian region. The differential in population growth rates between the two ensures they are on a collision course by 2050. Russian can’t build a wall, and the only thing keeping China at bay for now are their nuclear weapons. China’s long-term strategy to conquer lots of Russia territory would be to provoke a war between Russia and US, so that the US eliminates the Russian nuclear stockpile.
A country’s Immigration policy means nothing if it can not be enforced. We have evil men like George Soros right now plotting how to bring hordes of immigrants to Europe and the US to destroy them from within.
Soros will ultimately fail, as national survival instincts are powerful.
Isolationism is coming again.
US and Canada, Australia, NZ are sitting pretty if we can get rid of liberal leaders who think One World socialism is the key. All that is a global feudal society. The Bill Gates “haves”, the other 99% “have-nots.”
The UK will be okay too if they can finish Brexit and tell the EU to F-off. Once outside the EU, the UK will be able to control immigration so long as Ireland doesn’t get stupid and take in huge numbers of immigrants while demanding an open border with Northern Ireland.
Build the damn Wall!
Best rationale I’ve read for Trump’s “Build the Wall.”
Would a wall prevent people arriving by air, sea or across the Canadian border? I once crossed the US/ Canadian border entirely by accident when looking for a Provincial campsite. I stopped to ask a chap in a 4×4 where the provincial campsite was and he replied ‘We don’t have Provincial campsites in the US Sir”
Apparently, crossing the border in this way is frowned upon and you can end up being fined. But the gentleman in question was very helpful and understood that a Welsh family out camping were unlikely to be illegal immigrants and directed us back to Canadian territory.
The essence of the story is that building a wall to stop immigrants can only stop the really poor ones.Many will just get a flight to Calgary on a tourist visa and cross on one of the thousands on unmonitored logging tracks.
So are you contending that the US cannot possibly secure it’s borders? I would disagree with that contention. It is just a matter of allotting the resources. A wall may not be feasible along the northern border, but patrols with drones equipped with thermal imagining or FLIR for night operations backed by responding ground enforcement most certainly would be. No system is impenetrable, but then again no locks nor safes are fool proof either. The key is making it difficult in infiltrate and costly if caught attempting to.
…..The wall could be highly effective at slowing the numbers of those who are arriving as illegal — most of whom do walk across the border. Of course, those who come in by air legally on a temporary visa and then stay illegally past the expiration of their visa pose a whole ‘nother issue which would require a whole ‘nother strategy if control was to be gained. .
e-verify and no welfare benefits is all that is necessary.
Exactly, and the Canadian refugees are the worst. They show up wearing their hand knitted toques, with their cutesy accent, their 5% beer and their love of fist fighting hockey, and they think we’ll just accommodate them. Well that’s just downright rude.
We gotta build a northern wall.
the argument of Trump’s I am gonna make a wall, proves that to breed for the sake of breeding is going to cause a lot of problems to the world. There several reasons to explain it.
1) it the automation of industry. This means humans had become redundant,
2) the exhaustion of fossil fuels. We must be able to perform some miracles, y oil exhausts
3) We are really doomed, it a new Little Ice Age starts. Or the next glacial age.
The more people we are breeding the more people would die of starvation.
I live in AZ and we really could use more walls on the border. E-verify, and seasonal work permits are more important.
The most significant issue relating to this topic is the effect of disruption of food distribution systems.
My understanding is that more people died in WWII from starvation than did from bombs and bullets. This starvation was a direct result of the disruption of the food distribution channels.
Similarly, I understand more Japanese soldiers died from starvation than died in combat; for the same reason.
The world population is more dependent on food redistribution now than they were prior to WWII.
If we are were ever to take the clash of civilizations seriously, the most effective tactic would be to stop shipping food to the ME. The problem would be solved within a month.
You are right about distribution, but cutting off supplies would just start a war, and extremely quickly. I’d be more concerned about a Carrington event and our own distribution. Most cities would not survive 12 hours without communication and transportation.
I think it is interesting that Washington, D. C, may be one of the least self-sufficient cities that exists on the planet — unless you count resources gained througn thievery and coercion as providing self-sufficiency, that is. Perhaps the belligerent, braying jackasses should be less belligerent and more appreciative of their ability to survive as burdens to the rest of the nation, don’t you reckon.
Starvation was small compared to actual killing civilians in WW2. Food distribution is cheap and easy, farming low productivity land for food self sufficiency is stupid. Unchecked population growth where food production can’t keep up and imports are unaffordable will lead to famines and the ultimate moral dilemma: should we keep bailing them out?
William,
And think about what would happen to the world distribution of food if a Carrington Event were to happen any time soon, and all transportation would be crippled for months. We have built a fragile technological society with little resilience to either natural EMPs or produced by a North Korean nuke.
“Oscar Wilde once quipped that people can’t predict for shit, “especially in advance.” In these increasingly unforeseeable times his words are looking more and more prescient.”
Brad Keyes, Cliscep.com 24 November 2016
David
It is projected that Japan’s population will in fact reduce by forty million within forty years. That trend is in play.
Regards
Why This all Matters [last para of the article]:
Please see an abstract of my article [accepted for publication]:
Role of Pollution & Climate Change in Food & Nutrition Security
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Formerly Chief Technical Advisor – WMO/UN & Expert – FAO/UN
Fellow, Telangana Academy Sciences
Convenor, Forum for a Sustainable Environment
Plot No. 277, Jubilee Hills-Phase-III, Road N. 78, Hyderabad-500 096, Telangana
Tel.: (040) 23550480; E-mail: jeevanandareddy@yahoo.com; jeevananda_reddy@yahoo.com
Abstract
Production and distribution are the two major components for the Food and nutrition security [FNS]. Successful distribution relates to the governance. In the case of production aspects, internationally FNS is linked to climate change by taking Climate change as de-facto global warming. Climate change is a vast subject that varies with space and time in terms of meteorological parameters. Pollution [air, water, soil & food] is the hall mark of development, a major culprit for hindering nutrition security in which water is the main player. Also water is the main player in agriculture. Therefore, understanding of (1) climate change issues, (2) water resources availability issues, (3) pollution menace issues and (4) agriculture production related issues at local and regional levels play the pivotal role in achieving FNS. Under these scenarios, to achieve sustainable FNS in India, governments must put thrust on studies to characterize agro-climate and sustainable water resources availability at local and regional scales. Also, in warm tropical country like India, controlling pollution is more important over Paris agreement on controlling CO2 emissions wherein CO2 is not a pollutant. Present day mono-crop system of agriculture must be replaced by multi-crop system that includes animal husbandry as a component of farming systems. To achieve food security, food production is not sufficient but governments must see the wastage is at a minimum. Governments must implement all facets of FNS Act of 2013 by giving priority to locally produced food items. Governments must discourage producing and distributing to needy the food items that are contaminated by pollution and food items adulterated by greedy wherein they counter the objective of FNS.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy—” Governments must implement all facets of FNS Act of 2013 by giving priority to locally produced food items.”
Seriously???
The government will just muck it up.
The give away that this is a impractical greenie day dream is giving priority to locally produced foods. That is another in the vast string of eco nutter ideas – we should have food from the most efficient producers, not necessarily local. Transportation is cheap. Fossil fuels are cheap and plentiful and their CO2 emission is harmless to man an nature.
Sorry friends, you might have not read the FSN Act: In this act on our request the NAC Chairperson, Smt. Sonia Gandhi, wife of late PM Rajeev Gandhi and daughter-in-law of late PM Indira Gandhi, who was behind preparing this act in consultation with public included “Sorghum, Pear Millet and Ragi” at Rs. 1 per kg; wheat at Rs. 2 per kg and Rice at Rs. 3. It encouraged the state governments to procure locally produced cereals and thereby reducing the wastage in transport and storage — Supreme Court of India reprimanded the government the way it was wasting food at Food Corporation Of India storage outlets and advised supply it freely instead of wasting. The first three cereals are produced dry-land farmers and later two are produced under irrigation and under heavy chemical inputs.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Sorry, but you keep demonstrating that as long as it is doom and climate it is publishable, no matter how wrong, if it is written by an academic.
be specific then I can answer your point.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Dr.S.J. Reddy. I disagree that food production, storage and delivery is India’s problem. Your production increases every year but your population goes up more.
A popular tv show here has an Indian that doesn’t want to go home because “there’s so many people“. When people cling to the sides of trains for a free ride that says a lot.
India’s corrupt government is your real problem. As it is the problem in ALL malnourished countries. (Well that and the fact of how India so reveres cows)
The late Hans Rosling gave a good talk about population growth and how family size is now falling rapidly.
It’s worth noting that on top of bio fuels munching through loads of food stuffs, the world wastes about 50% of the food it produces.