Stop world population growth or face global collapse

May 9th, 2013

Peter Nolan

Lester R. Brown warns that the world is on the edge. If we do not heed the Earth’s stop signs, we face food scarcity and a worldwide collapse as we exceed the planet’s capacity.

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Chapters of Lester R. Brown’s 2012 book, Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity, are being published on the Earth Policy Institute website where you can purchase the book. Chapter 2, titled the Ecology of Population Growth, outlines the exponential growth to 9.3 billion people on the planet by the year 2050. That is an additional 2.3 billion people needing to be fed.

This population growth causes human demand to exceed the sustainable output of the earth’s “forests, fisheries, grasslands, aquifers, and soils,” resulting in “overcutting, overfishing, overgrazing, overpumping, and overplowing” and threatening civilization worldwide. The demand for grains alone has doubled in ten years, prices have reached all-time highs, only 14 percent of the food price goes to farmers, and we have transitioned from food surpluses to scarcity. In many countries, people must plan on days when they have no meal at all.

Brown’s evidence is:

overcutting–world forests are losing 5.6 million hectares (about 13.8 million acres) annually to firewood, lumber, and paper causing runoff and lost soil
overfishing–80 percent of ocean fisheries are fished at or beyond their maximum output
overgrazing–livestock population has grown, for example in Africa from 352 million to 894 million from 1961 to 2010, depleting grasslands to the point the soil is eroding which leads to deserts
overpumping–half the world’s people are in countries depleting their aquifers which cannot continue
overplowing–highly erodible marginal ground in Africa, the Middle East and Asia is being plowed for cropland that is resulting in abandonment from soil erosion and finally becoming wasteland.

Brown says we are ignoring the earth’s stop signs. Not one country has taken steps to reduce water use despite falling water tables. Countries like the U.S. are reaching their maximum grain output. Unless we face the issues, “we will join the earlier civilizations that failed to reverse the environmental trends that undermined their food economies.” Some have said a worldwide collapse will come by 2030, some by 2020. Brown says it could have happened in 2010 when Russia had the intense drought and lost 40 percent of their wheat crop if it had been in the U.S. instead.

The good news is that all the European countries have stabilized their population through declining fertility, adding to a total of 44 countries worldwide. Two other areas, East Asia (Japan, North and South Korea, China, and Taiwan) and Latin America are rapidly stabilizing their populations.

The bad news is the areas where the population is increasing the most are poor developing countries, the Indian subcontinent (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) and sub-Saharan Africa (Nigeria, Ethiopia). This leads to failing states, or countries that are “overwhelmed by land and water shortages, disease, civil conflict, and other adverse effects of prolonged rapid population growth” and governments that cannot “provide personal security, food security, or basic social services such as education and health care.” The top 20 failing states on the yearly Fund for Peace list, like Afghanistan and Somalia, have high fertility rates.

To get to the crux of the matter, Brown suggests that the challenge is to “accelerate the shift to smaller families, both by eradicating poverty and by ensuring that all women have access to reproductive health care and family planning services.” See the Population Reference Bureau’s World Population Data Sheet 2012 on unmet family planning statistics data sheet. Watch the attached video of Lester Brown talking about the issues in his book Full Planet, Empty Plates.

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