Is Food Production Feeding the 'Population Bomb'?
CategoriesThere is a view, expressed in papers by Russell Hopfenberg, that human population continues to increase as a function of the availability of food. The corollary and suggested remedy is that, putting a cap on food production, we can stop human population from further growing. The implied problem of population increase is that we are eating up our environment - we are diminishing the vital space of thousands of different species leading to their extinction, all in the name of food production.
Personally, I believe that this is an oversimplified view and that, although we do cause havoc in the environment, population numbers may not be the exclusive or even the principal culprit in this play.
Overpopulation? - Image credit: Population Day.
Some time ago, Steven Salmony contacted me by making comments on this site, arguing the view that we must recognize population growth is the major problem facing humanity, and that we must do something about it. Although he did not directly say that humanity needs to be starved into shape, the suggestion was that capping the food supply could slim down the population into acceptable numbers. At the time, I posted Overpopulation - Does Population Growth Follow Food Supply?, organizing the exhortations and successive comments, and my somewhat doubting replies into an article that could give an idea of both sides of the argument.The reason I come back to the theme of overpopulation and food supply now is an invitation by a friendly lady to take part in a discussion on the guestbook page of a website about the writings of Daniel Quinn, who seems to be a great fan if not the originator of the idea that human population increases whenever food is produced in abundance. Read on, to see what the discussion was about and how I responded...
Here is the message I received:
On 24/giu/07, at 18:54, Ms Z. S. wrote:
Hi Sepp. We don't know each other very well, but i admire our mutual friend Steven Salmony. Because i appreciate your perspective on ecosystems and the human place in them, i'd like to ask you a favor. Or at least invite you into conversation.
The Ishmael Guestbook is a place where i go to discuss such matters. A guest there, a student from Toronto named Ryan, has posed more of a challenge than i have yet met. Specifically, he's convinced of a human exceptionalism that imagines it's ok to turn wilderness into human food without causing population growth, in denial of the basic ecological principle tying population of every species to their food supply. i'd like to ask you to share your opinion there. If you are aware of any sources of scientific thought showing that the basic dynamics of population as they are known to ecologists also apply to the species homo sapiens, access to those sources would be appreciated.
Your own post, however brief, would better convince, but if you are uncomfortable with that, any references or quotations you can supply could be introduced in one of my posts. A single sentence or link could be of help, thanks.
The Guestbook is at http://www.ishmael.org/Interaction/Guestbook/guestbook.cfm and near the top is a place to click to add an entry.
You are welcome to read the most recent few posts if that helps you find your place in the discussion.
Thanks for anything you may contribute.
- - -
I did read some of the recent contributions as suggested. If you want to look into that discussion, go to the Ishmael guestbook page and start reading at entry number 14686...
Here is my reply, penned or rather keyed after getting an idea of the problem brought to attention by Ryan:Hello Z.,
thank you for your mail and the invitation to join the discussion on the guestbook page of ishmael.com.
Well, after reading the last thirty, more or less, posts on that page I am not so sure that what I have to say would be welcome there.
My thoughts are close to what Ryan expressed in his posts.
The first thing I would ask is: If it is true that availability of food causes populations to increase, then how is it that the countries where food is most abundantly available to every citizen (the industrialized group of nations) have the lowest birth rates of all countries on the planet, and conversely, why is it that the poorest countries seem to have the highest birth rates?
Do these facts not immediately invalidate the contention that food supply is causally related to births, except, perhaps, in the inverse way - the more food (and food security) the less births, the less food (and food securtity) the more births in each family.
I believe I have brought this up with Steven before, but have not had a satisfactory answer.
To check out my argument, look at this page of countries by fertility rate. You will roughly see the poorest countries with the highest fertility rate, and the richer ones having correspondingly much lower fertility rates.
Both Italy, the country where I live, and Germany, where I was born, have extremely low fertility rates, and I can assure you that no one goes hungry in either country.
Now I do agree that our exploitation of the planet's resources is not sustainable, and I submit it may be the way we obtain our food that is not in keeping with the times.
In ancient times, people could just roam, hunt and gather what fruits and roots they found and live off them.then came agriculture. That allowed more people to be fed with less land.
we now need to transit to the next step, that is, we need to overcome the agriculture age and start growing our food from an abundantly available resource with a technology that is sustainable. I am thinking of sea water as an abundantly available resource, and microalgae that grow in sea water as a nutritious, complete, and in principle abundantly available source of food. We can always complement with things we hunt and things we farm, but the bulk of our food will have to come from a new, sustainable source.
Next, I believe that it is not food security so much as economic security that makes people look up and say "we want less children". Where economic security is absent, and people live off the land, it is practically indispensable to have numerous offspring, because they are the labor that will sustain an aging couple into their old age until their death. Absent numerous children, a subsistence farmer could starve in old age, and therefore there is every incentive to have more than just one or two children. The children assure future economic survival.
One of the questions that has been asked in the discussion is how COULD the populations of several of the poorer nations be better off in a realistic way. This is a very tricky one that cannot be answered without looking at the basic economic set-up of our society. We have an economic and monetary system that practically obliges any country to expand economic activity unless it wants to see its people starve. The reason our system requires constant economic expansion, and thereby ever-increasing exploitation of natural resources is hidden in the very basic economic set-up.
Our money is issued by private interests, which consider it as their property. These interests ask us to pay a fee (called interest) for the use of their money. Economic activity cannot sustain that fee unless there is a constant expansion of the activity. In order to change this, we will need to change the basics of our economic/monetary system. We need a means of exchange (money) that is not the property of any private interest and that is not weighed-down by the necessity to pay interest for its use. In that way, those countries that are poor today could start working for their own economic prosperity rather than for paying interest on foreign loans or on the very money they are using.
That, in my view, would increase economic security and would obviate the problem of over-population. It would also obviate the problem of over-exploitation of our limited planetary resources, letting things cool down so we could live comfortably while not having to constantly procreate to assure survival. Population numbers would stabilize without having to force either a one-child-policy such as China does, or a diminished food supply, as the prevailing mood of the discussion seems to favour.
You are welcome to post this view of mine to the discussion, although I clearly don't expect you to do so, seeing that the overwhelming majority of participants seems to be looking for ways to explain and justify and back up the view they have taken on, of over population being driven by availability of food.
Kind regards
Seppp.s. I very much enjoyed reading the second linked article in your message on a new renaissance, and can only wholeheartedly agree, that we need a profound change if we are to survive into the future. That change, in my view, is going to be people realizing that they are not just biological mechanisms but the crown of creation. People will realize that their real beingness is a high spirituality, rather than mammalian instincts and they will start acting in accordance with that realization. Part of that change in our way to see things will be to see other species as every bit as important as our own, and we will do whatever we can to no longer destroy the habitat of these other species just to satisfy one of our mammalian needs - that for food.
See also:Reaching for the Future with All Three Hands
Address by Daniel Quinn, Kent State University, Earth Day, 1998
posted by Sepp Hasslberger on Tuesday June 26 2007
updated on Monday March 3 2008<
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