Population and Food Production

[CorporationsRule]

A freind adapted this from the essay posted at the end"

Few in academia or the public at large would disagree that population pressures are one of the driving forces behind current social maladies plaguing the global populace. We hear that people are running out of fresh water. Billions are without it and this leads to disease, especially among children. Thirty thousand children die each day from diseases that could have been prevented with adequate water resources. We hear that we’re running out of forests and fossil fuels. Rainforests are clear-cut at a rate of 214,000 acres (86,000 hectares) per day. And, even though there are programs of forced and coerced population control that encourage infanticide and abortion and pregnancy prevention – the numbers of humans still rise. We also hear that people are starving to death and that whole portions of the earth are becoming barren and depleted through intensive farming to feed the growing populations. What we didn’t hear, until now, is that we actually have enough food and it’s this unwarranted race to produce more that is not only depleting soils – it’s actually causing the population explosion.

In a recent paper, published by researchers working at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina and Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, “experimental and correlational data indicate that human population growth varies as a function of food availability”.

It seems, for generations agricultural policies and population theory have been guided by a scientific misunderstanding. Since the theories espoused by the English economist Rev. Thomas Malthus in 1798 (Essay on the Principle of Population), the general assumption of the civilized world has been that we must continue to increase food production in order to ensure supply for an ever-rising population. A task we have successfully accomplished, producing a global surplus each year even as populations exceed six billion human beings. Malthus, even then, saw that human populations grew exponentially and given time would outpace their ability to supply enough food. The Reverand saw this perpetual race as a test from "God" against the laziness of the masses and suggested the family size of the lower class ought to be regulated such that poor families would not produce more children than they could support. It’s easy to see, from perusal of modern headlines, that these “Malthusian” ideas and programs have persisted for centuries, to the present.

Newer understandings from the field of ecology, as well as successive famines from localized food shortages, taught scientists that human populations could be limited by a reduction in resources. This, in ecology, is known as Leibig's law or the law of minimum: “a population is constrained by its most limited resource”. However, it took several more years of research before respected universities were willing to say that the inverse is also true: "An increase in resources (like food) will result in an increase of population". Before this concept became part of empirical data, visionary generalist authors like Peter Farb and Daniel Quinn were noted for exploring the subject. Farb is arguably most known for his subtly subversive “paradox”: “intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population.”

This new realization explains the repeated and serious difficulties faced by "family planning" and "population control" programs and highlights the fact that all these efforts will be futile unless coupled with an effort to correct the fundamental catalysts of population explosion.

The paper, though academic, is definitely worth reading for a detailed understanding of a theory that is destined to become fundamental in studies of socio-anthropology and the history of the civilized world. Not to mention, the theory’s relevance to the future course of revolutionary change. This news will certainly not sit well with giant ago-industry, but we can only hope that governments (or those who alter governments) understand the significant implications of these “new” findings. The authors of the paper quote Quinn to express the opinion that this IS a surmountable obstacle for humanity.

"If six billion people can be fed by totalitarian agriculture, then the same six billion can be fed by sustainable agriculture. The difference between totalitarian agriculture and sustainable agriculture is not technique or output (since a turnip is a turnip however it’s produced) but rather program. The program of totalitarian agriculture is to increase food production in order to outpace population growth that is fueled by the very increases it produces, and this is what makes it unsustainable.”

meme_mutation

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The original paper authored by Russell Hopfenberg and David Pimentel can be downloaded in PDF format: http://www.ku.edu/~hazards/foodpop.pdf

Abstract: Human population growth has typically been seen as the primary causative factor of other ecologically destructive phenomena. Current human disease epidemics are explored as a function of population size. That human population growth is itself a phenomenon with clearly identifiable ecological/biological causes has been overlooked. Here, human population growth is discussed as being subject to the same dynamic processes as the population growth of other species. Contrary to the widely held belief that food production must be increased to feed the growing population, experimental and correlational data indicate that human population growth varies as a function of food availability. By increasing food production for humans, at the expense of other species, the biologically determined effect has been, and continues to be, an increase in the human population. Understanding the relationship between food increases and population increases is proposed as a necessary first step in addressing this global problem. Resistance to this perspective is briefly discussed in terms of cultural bias in science.

[pedro san pedro]

whilst i would agree that we need to examine the methods in which we produce food, i would disagree that our current surplus is driving population growth.

yes, we currently produce about 1 1/2 times the amount of food we currently need -but this food is not evenly distrubuted. it tends to be the places where food is scare that population growth is highest -ie the 3rd world. infact, europe, one of the food "wealthy" areas of the globe, is predicting population decline.

i would argue that it is issues linked to poverty that are causing this population explosion.

[CorporationsRule]

"i would argue that it is issues linked to poverty that are causing this population explosion."

Okay...do that then.

[redstar2000]

According to UN estimates (for what they're worth&#33, the rate of population growth has been declining for some time (it's still "too high").

Demography has been a notoriously bad predictor of future populations...we evidently know far too little about what makes people decide to have kids and how many.

I heard that a large proportion of food produced in the world today is wasted -- it ends up feeding insects and rodents instead of people.

So it's a pretty complicated situation; I doubt if matters would be helped any by growing less food.



The Redstar2000 Papers
A site about communist ideas

[MiDnIgHtMaRaUdEr]

I would wish a slow painful death on anyone who tries to prevent people from producing food when there are people so many people starving to death.

[CorporationsRule]

Why does comunism so readily worry about alienated labor, but fail to evolve along with science (as Marx would have) to come to realize that alienation from one's food source is just as detrimental to human freedom?