How shall we set the table for seven billion to dine, when there is not enough food for seven billion?
If you do not think this is a question to concern you, I can sympathize. I have been eating my fill, and quite likely you have too. Nobody obliges us to be so hospitable as to provide for all those unfed others out there. You may take the question as an abstract one, or an idle one.
It is not an idle question. Hundreds of millions are starving. Let us be generous enough to ask what to do about it.
You may quarrel with the way I put the question. If some lucky people are well fed and others are not, maybe I ought not to say there is not enough food, maybe I ought to say that the food is not being delivered to the right places. True enough: detailed studies of past famines have sometimes shown that they were not caused by shortage of food so much as by bad distribution of what there was. In the great potato famine in Ireland in the 1840s, it seems there may have been enough total nourishment in the British Isles that everyone could have been fed, and Amartya Sen has concluded the same about the great Bengal famine of 1943: sufficient rice was in Bengal (in spite of the War) that no one need have starved, only the economy was organized in such a way that most Bengalis had too little money to buy rice.
It is true that distributing the food equitably is a challenge, which the world has not always met. Famines of recent years have brought out emergency food shipments; they are sometimes ill-organized, they are sometimes inadequate, they ought to be temporary, but they are recognition of the need. They are attempts to move the food to where it is in short supply. And they do not leave the rich in any danger of undernourishment. More fundamental efforts in the same direction would be good. Over and above these emergency measures, the economy should be rebuilt so that local shortages in Ireland or Bengal or Ogaden can not arise in the first place while food is abundant anywhere. There is lots to say about getting the food passed around equitably; the world economy has quite a way to go before it does a decent job at it. Shifting hundreds of thousands from Central America and Bangladesh to North America may also help, and we should keep migration in mind too. But at present, 2011, sharing the provender is not the whole issue. No matter how we share the world’s food around, there is not enough of it in total.
How do I know this and do I really know it?
I have not counted up these totals, so it is not my word I am asking you to take about them. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations counts up the totals, and they have enough well-trained and sensible people working at it. There are also, happily, well-trained and sensible experts outside the FAO looking at their calculations critically, and some of those helpful experts like Lester Brown summarize the facts for us. We can get the overall picture if we choose to. There really is not enough food.
One answer you sometimes hear to my question is that food production is increasing so fast that hunger can be overcome. This consolation is an illusion, I am afraid. The Earth’s arable land is mostly farmed already. Some of it must be set aside for other uses: forests must be preserved, in particular, and indeed there are some regions like Borneo, Madagascar, and Amazonia where probably too much forest has been cleared and the original forest cover needs to be restored. We may try to increase the total land under cultivation, but it looks hopeless. The Great Indian Desert advances on Delhi, and Gobi Desert dust storms sift ever more heavily down on Beijing.
We have to deal with unprecedented climate change in this century. We don’t know what it will bring, but in spite of the great uncertainties, we can see that its net effect will almost certainly be to restrict agriculture. No expert thinks it possible that the Sahara will shrink, that the Sahel will recover its former fertility, or that the deltas of the Nile and Brahmaputra will increase their bounty. Most experts think the arable land will decrease markedly as average temperatures rise and ”extreme weather” becomes more prevalent. Losses are much more likely than gains.
As you know, water shortage is another growing constraint on agricultural output. Under our feet as I talk, the level of the Ogallala aquifer is as low as it’s ever been, and the anticipated climate changes are quite likely not in the direction of recharging it. Mountain glaciers are diminishing, especially in the Himalayas and Andes but also upstream from here, reducing their ability to retain winter precipitation to supply spring floodwater for the plains. People’s need for water will compete with farms’ need for water. It is not pleasant to choose between doing without drinking water and doing without dinner, but do not worry, you will not have to face that difficult choice, we will be doing without both.
There was optimism for a while about increasing agricultural production by intensive use of fertilizers. We were summoned to applaud what was called the Green Revolution. The hype was overdone, and perhaps there is no need for me to recall the episode at length. Where the Green Revolution was most fully implemented, in Punjab, it certainly increased yields, and profits to a few– and the massive ejection of farmers from the land. It was not a cure-all. The hope for a technological fix of agricultural productivity today is surely not high, however shrilly Monsanto tries to maintain the hype.
Now this alarming picture is familiar. What I have told you so far you have heard before. You have heard of the World Food Shortage, you may even have heard it called a problem, by the UN or other responsible agency. I promise to go on to less familiar things. Before I do, I want to insert a remark about the credibility of such projections.
When you hear these gloomy forecasts, from me or Bill McKibben or Lester Brown or the Food and Agriculture Organization, there will now and then be some specific items that you think might be wrong. What do I recommend you do about them? Do I admonish you to take the scientists’ word for the whole lot, like an obedient child? I do not.
How can this be? I heed the authorities and yet I say not to believe what they say? Am I being illogical or maybe indecisive? Maybe I am just placating the hostility of some listeners toward unpleasant messages or anyway softening the blow?
None of the above. For the most part we know how the authorities arrive at their conclusions. Even the complex and subtle mathematical models of future climate and future hydrology are public, and many of us have given them some thought. They are to be taken seriously. At the same time I remind you that they are not certain. Even the simple counts are sometimes rough totals, and the scientific inferences are that much harder to wrap up with confidence. On one hand, then– I rely on what I learn from the vast network of scientists communicating as clearly as can be, and I am sorry some others do not, I am sorry that some fellow citizens turn against science and reject its teaching. But on the other hand – I know that precision is elusive, that trends can reverse, and that models can mislead, and I am sorry that some fellow citizens think predictions of science are fixed and unchallengeable. Give the studies and the projections the confidence they deserve, but not more!
I am not conceding that the authorities are sometimes wrong, I am insisting and reemphasizing that the authorities are sometimes wrong. This is not a reservation to my message; it is a part of my message. Where you think a specific detail in a forecast is doubtful, pick away at it and see what you can learn. The forecast consists of the details.
But please, please, do not use the uncertainties as an excuse for looking away from the future. This is the world we’re talking about, the real world. The denialists would have you pretend we can not wrestle with the world’s dilemma, but they do not have any other world than this. Do not kid yourselves.
The forecast is that the world will not produce enough food for seven billion people, and that the world population will be nine billion by 2050. So billions of people will live without food? I do not believe it. Or everyone will go on a very local diet? That will not work so well either. Seems the predictions do not jibe!
We hear these incompatible predictions every day, from the wise heads and politicians. How come most of them do not point out the incompatibility? Why are they shy about drawing conclusions from the contradiction? I sympathize with them. If politicians were frank about it, it would sound as if they thought that people need to be got rid of, and that is not going to be welcome to their constituents.
Some prophets of doom like Garrett Hardin do indeed say that shortages are inevitable. Garrett Hardin calls on the haves to harden their hearts (a pun on his name, maybe?) and refuse to share with the have-nots. He would let those who are without food go ever hungrier until they are no longer able to disturb us with their wails. I am asking you to face reality, but not to harden your hearts. I am more on the side of the Passover invocation, “Let all those who are hungry come and eat.” Maybe the doom-criers will class me with the soft-hearted. All right, let them. Soft-hearted? I can live with that.
But I refuse to close my eyes to our plight. You remember forty years ago a study of the world economy by Dennis Meadows and his team argued that the limits to growth would be reached in about forty years. The standard joke is that if you tell a politician to act because the end is coming in forty years, he will put you off and tell you to come back in thirty-nine years. I’m saying that in 2011– the time is up. We can not survive without food, and there is not enough food, there is not going to be enough food.
The population will decrease.
There is a healthy movement of social criticism that goes by the name Zero Population Growth. It is associated with the names of Paul and Anne Ehrlich and Kingsley Davis (no relation). My sympathy for it is clear, but I am saying more. I say, “Let those who are hungry come and eat.” And I see that this is possible only if there are distinctly fewer than seven billion of us, and much fewer than the projected nine billion. Zero Population Growth is not enough.
Now the slogan Zero Population Growth is comparatively recent, but the doctrine of population restraint has been on the agenda since my grand-parents’ generation, and during those many decades there has been good observation of populations not undergoing either famine or unrestrained explosion. It turns out that stable populations have been observed. Some populations, if left alone, even shrink: France in the 1930s, or both Germanys in the 1960s, for example, if immigration is not counted. Or Russia today. It is fairly well known how populations limit themselves. It is known, for example, that liberation of women helps produce this result: educating women on a par with men, giving women respect and responsibility. It is known and evident that availability of contraception helps. Other factors have been identified but are less plainly established. It is observed, though less evident, that good medical care does not bring on reckless expansion. Given good medical care, an average family size of 2.1 children per woman gives level population– zero “natural increase”, as it is often phrased.
More reproduction gives positive “natural increase”, of course: exponential growth. Less reproduction gives negative “natural increase”: exponential decline in population. I am sticking to mathematician’s usage here: some people when they say “exponential increase” mean extravagantly huge increase, but we just mean increase in proportion to size. The popular usage is derived from the correct concept that if the population increases by, say, 20% in each generation, which does not seem so huge, and continues to do so, then it will have increased by 72.8% in three generations, which does seem huge. Compound interest. Likewise for exponential decrease: as you know, it does not mean precipitous decrease. You can figure it out. If the population decreases by 20% in each generation, and continues to, then it will decrease by 48.8% in three generations.
If I am talking about a decrease from seven billion to a size, which the planet can support, and if it seems urgent to do it in only a few generations, then I am talking about a substantially negative rate of “natural increase”. I recalled that we have seen some societies finding it normal to let population decline, but not to decline so steeply.
Why is it that you have heard all the components of my message, even to the point that they are banalities, and yet you have not heard them put together and looked in the face? It is not because decreases in population are necessarily catastrophes. They are often catastrophes, true, and I have mentioned some such bad experiences; but I am bucking a deep prejudice in favor of growth, and it is not derived from (say) the Irish potato famine.
The Great Recession of 2008 was painful for many people, and any politician would want to claim to work for recovery from it. Fair enough. But they always measure the recovery by growth. Growth of something, not always of the same thing – but growth. Correspondingly, the recession is measured by something having diminished, maybe Gross National Product of each nation. A really bad recession or depression is called a crash. The same word is used for a marked decrease in population: it is called a demographic crash. So in formulating our needs as I do, I am stuck with a word, which seems to denote something catastrophic.
I have no choice, this is the language we speak. Yes, I’m saying we will surely have a population crash, and it is dishonest of our politicians (and those of every other country) not to face it. A worldwide population crash. The problem is to keep it from being a catastrophe.
If you imagine a rapid decrease in population, you do tend to think of world war, or mass starvation. Well, we already have shamefully high levels of war and starvation, but you tend to think of even higher levels. Granted, that is the known way to reduce human numbers: war, famine, tyranny, and plague. The challenge is to find other routes to the same endpoint. Yes, there will be fewer people around in 2112; the challenge is to make this crash landing a soft one.
Chris Hedges likes to recall the joke about the man who jumps from the Empire State Building and says as he passes the 40th storey, “So far so good!” Is that the right metaphor for denialist leaders today? He is right that a policy of drifting is suicidal now, but the strenuous efforts our politicians and proprietors make now for growth are in some sense worse than drifting: where the urgent need is to find good ways to contract human society, they are not just passive, they are striving in the wrong direction, namely growth. Falling past the 40th storey, they are trying to accelerate!
Try a different metaphor. We are in a position like Apollo 13 – or, for that matter, any spaceship coming in to land on Earth. It will get there: it is on such a course that its altitude must decrease: it is sure to crash, if you insist on putting it that way. With delicate steering, it may splash down safely, but steered wrong it will be demolished. This is a better metaphor because there should be some courses that work out. But we do not know what they are.
Steering right will be hard. It is a betrayal by our ship-steerers that they are not even trying to solve this problem. They are stuck in a system, which does not allow for a policy of negative growth.
Is it not a shame that Japan did not show the way. In the 1990s its economy stalled, and in retrospect I believe that the great country had an opportunity to give the rest of the world an object lesson in contracting gracefully. They already had a lifestyle producing negative natural increase. They had good internal communication and a high level of education, so their chances of trying out new policies were as good as anyone’s will be. They did not try: they reacted the way we were all exhorted to react to the 2008 recession, by casting about for ways to restore growth. They countered the decline in population by receiving immigrants, though they are not especially good at making immigrants feel at home. The opportunity was lost.
In 2011, Japan has new problems, which need their own solutions, but the solutions might include contraction – of total energy consumption, for instance. Maybe the Japanese will get a second chance to show the world the way.
One reason policy-makers stay away from the imperative need to contract is that local implementation seems defeatist. If my town succeeds in contracting, and the next town is booming, that just demotes my town in importance: expansion continues, just it is someone else’s expansion. If Toyota had done the obvious thing in the 1990s and cut back, it would just be a less important player in the world of today. This is read into the investment market too: the rich look for “growth industries” to fund, as a means to get richer. Those who fund industries in decline just become less dominant in the economy.
This is a strange line of reasoning, when you think about it. It seems to insist that you can not possibly make a rational choice if others are making irrational ones.
Maybe it is a form of the doctrine of the “invisible hand of the market”. The free market will not let us survive? Really? If we need an innovation in policy and find that it can not be justified in profit-and-loss terms, then I would say it is time to change accountants. The World Food Shortage will not go away in deference to the ideology of the free market, so we may have to put the ideology on hold for now and see what needs to be done.
Let me slip in an apology here to the apostles of green capitalism, like Zerofootprint. Corporations do not need to wreck the environment, is their message: corporations can be environmentally responsible like us, and still make a profit. This is a welcome message, and I am glad some of these outfits do make a profit, but my message is not exactly the same as their message. They say to fellow entrepreneurs, “As you can not stop responding to the profit motive, look how to be green despite it.” This is a good consolation, and proves to be consistent with some green projects. I say more gloomily, “Maybe you will have to go to rehabilitation for your profit addiction.” Steering this spaceship down to a soft landing requires concentration. The Zerofootprint guys will find ways to make a buck, sure, but the person at the helm had better have an eye only on the soft landing.
I was talking about these things the other day with another retired professor like myself, and he said, “Is it not funny for us to be sitting here talking about this.” I knew right away what he meant, and I spelled it out: “How come, when hardly anybody talks about the World Food Shortage, here are two guys talking about it who will not be around for the crunch anyway.” Because if the problem is not solved, the crunch will be terrible, but it may not come until he and I would be safely dead. I told him I recall a day in the 1960s when an elder statesman, meditating on the possible extinction of life on Earth by nuclear war, said, well, the planets would still go on revolving in their orbits. A colleague then, hearing this bizarre philosophy, said, “I do not want our government to be run by people old enough to feel that way! I want the people in charge to have young children they care about saving.”
Well, some of us old people have grandchildren, and we would like them and all of you to live full lives even in our absence. There is a paradox here. Today, maybe the threat of doom is simply too dire for a young person to face, and only we old people can be responsible and recognize it. But I do not believe this. I think we can all face reality.
A knottier puzzle is this. Apollo 13 had a unified command. Our governments and economies today, in contrast, have swarms of contestants scrambling for power. If I am right that only a narrow range of policies will get us through the population contraction without terrible misery, then it seems there should be one clear-minded, clear-eyed navigator at the helm. Yet I do not call for autocracy, not locally and not globally. I have struggled all my life for more decentralizing of control than we have in our “Western democracies”, not less, and I am not deserting that struggle now. If it would be hard, maybe prohibitively hard, to find the course with one decision-maker, how are we going to find it if everyone is in charge? This time it seems as though I am really asking too much! What can I offer in the way of a feasible solution?
I do not know.
How dare I describe a most ominous predicament, claim that I am not a doom-crier, and end without a prescription? What kind of vista am I leaving my children with? All I can say in my defense is, at least I am not ducking the issue. I am not understating the gravity of the situation.
This article is an expanded version of a talk at Kansas State University, 2011 April 28.