In An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Thomas R. Malthus argues that population growth is disproportional to the increase of means of subsistence, which leads to (temporary) poverty, competition (in the Darwinian understanding--> I love how the topics of my classes coalesce!), falling prices of labor etc.
200 years later, Anup Shah tries to show in his essay Ecology and the Crisis of Overpopulation: Future Prospects for Global Sustainability that Malthus' basic assumptions were wrong.
Contrary to Malthus' assumption that food poduction increases arithmetically, Shah points out that this processs is not as easy as Malthus explained it because factors such as land availability and technical progress highly influence and possibly increase food production. For example, Malthus undervalued the agricultural potential of newly discovered places of the Earth (America, Australia). Yet, all this could lead to the conclusion that the Malthusian scenario (we outstrip resources) is only postponed.
However, Sha also refutes Malthus' argument that there is the preference to have more children than fewer if the ecological situation allows it by referring to a demographic transition happened in the Western World: the fertility rates fell instead of increased as soon as Western Europe grew proseprous.
According to Shah, this is evidence that the future of the predicted catastrophe is uncertain.
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Shah's point of view made me sceptical, I thought he was a bit too optimistic and also concentrated primarily on the Western developed world.
ReplyDeleteThe department of Economics and Social Affairs of the United Nations state that the population growth rate 2005-2010 was +1.18 percent worldwide (0.34 in more developed countries, 1.37 in less developed countries, 2.30 in least developed countries). The tendency, however, is indeed a decrease, which really astonishes me.
At the same time, the Food and Agriculture Organizations of the United Nations says that "the global economic slowdown, following on the heels of the food crisis in 2006–08, has deprived an additional 100 million people of access to adequate food. There have been marked increases in hunger in all of the world’s major regions, and more than one billion people are now estimated to be undernourished."
I was also looking for data if we can feed the world, i.e. if we theoretically produce enought food to feed the worldwide population, but had some difficulties to find reliable data. But I think we will talk about this in case study 5 anyway.
For more information:
http://esa.un.org/unpp/index.asp?panel=2
world population (including a lot of variables, such as country, year, gender, age etc.)
http://www.fao.org/
(Food and Agriculture Organizations of the United Nations)