Jeffrey Sachs: We’re having a very big problem feeding a world population of 6.8 billion people. First of all, there are about 1 billion people who are chronically hungry, but more than that, the way we produce food is having very dangerous effects on the whole world’s environment.
How many people in the world today are hungry?
Jeffrey Sachs is director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute. He spoke to EarthSky at a meeting of agriculture experts in fall 2009, about the challenge of feeding people today, and looking ahead to a projected population of 9 billion people by 2050.
Jeffrey Sachs: We have to take very seriously the question of how we make the food supply, the population, and Earth’s ecosystems work compatibly and sustainably.
Sachs, who has led global initiatives to counteract hunger, is concerned that in the future, the demands of the human population will outstrip the Earth’s ability to provide food. Agriculture already takes up 40% of the world’s land surface. Plus,
Jeffrey Sachs: About 70% of consumption of freshwater is for irrigation for agriculture.
Dr. Sachs said our heavy use of resources, along with intensive methods of farming, degrade the environment over time. These practices aren’t sustainable into the future. Sachs believes that in order for the food supply to meet the demand, we must slow down population growth, and at the same time, invest in agricultural research.
Jeffrey Sachs: We need to direct our attention to practical solutions, and we can make tremendous headway if we do that.
Dr. Sachs told EarthSky that the warnings of Thomas Malthus, who in 1798 predicted that the demands of human population will outstrip Earth’s ability to feed them, are still true today.
Jeffrey Sachs: Given the tremendous burden of food production on earth’s ecosystems, given the fact that we have not properly fed all the people on the planet, given the fact that the
pressures are going to increase, Malthus’ specter, his warnings, continue to loom large.
Sachs said that many people believe that Malthus has been proved wrong in the past century. But Sachs quoted Norman Borlaug, founder of the Green Revolution, as saying that the success of the past century is only a “breathing space” to deal with the need to slow population growth.
Jeffrey Sachs: We have nearly 7 billion people, and they’re on the search for enough food, water, energy to meet their needs, to make economic progress. But when you add it all up, we are already a globally unsustainable world society. Climate change, water stress, environmental degradation, species extinction. All of this is now impinging on us in many ways that are becoming more and more painful and dangerous over time.
Jeffery Sachs talks with Norman Borlaug, Nobel laureate and “father of the Green Revolution,” about how to bring about an African Green Revolution.
Watch Video: http://www.earth.columbia.edu/videos/watch/109
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Today, with no movement in technology, we can easily feed between 20 and 29 billion people. On this earth. With this ecosystem. Anyone that invokes the name of Malthus should be suspected of being a fool or having an agenda. Malthus was the first Chicken Little.
Fortuneatly for us, the sky is not falling. Right now, the folks that are hungry, are hungry because of government policies. Period. More government will mean more hungry people. If you really want to fix this, you allow people to earn money and save it. When they get enough capital together, they can buy land and husband it. Maybe hire others to work it. If it is their land, their risk, theiur sweat and blood, they will learn from their mistakes and build a vibrant wconomy and produce a bonanza of wealth.
If, on the other hand, you depend on the hand of government bureaucrats, you will have bloated management and starvation. Really.
Our problems are not technological nor environmental. They are political.
There is a lot of merit to Mr. Napier\’s comments. There are many factors that contribute to the problems being discussed here. Not just the number of people on the planet.
Nonetheless, the reason I feel that the expanding human population must be addressed is that doing so would also allow a \”breathing space\”. Picture a boat meant for 10 people. Now, imagine there are only 7 people on it. That boat can now \”weather\” conditions that would cause the boat to sink if it had 10 people on it. That is the kind of breathing space that a stable, if not shrinking, global population can provide.
Also, a stable global population would allow efforts to solve problems of nutrition, pollution, and energy needs to be more effective. Such efforts would be more effective because these problems would no longer be moving targets. Their scope and severity would be much more stable, and more effectively addressed, if we had a stable global population.
I fear the people in possession of the awesome power that is being derived from the colossal scale and soon to become patently unsustainable growth of the global political economy are greed-mongering manipulators of democratic principles and practices who do not care about anything more than profits and accumulating material things. Their incorrigible idolatry of business-as-usual, wealth concentration, conspicuous consumption and unconscionable hoarding has reached so huge a scale and unsustainble a growth rate that the very future of the children is being put at risk. Perhaps necessary change toward the survival of offspring and sustainability, rather than the ruin of Earth as a fit place for human habitation, is in the offing.
The greatest downfall of mankind is it’s inability to understand the Exponential Function. It’s simple arithmetic. Please see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY