Roughly two centuries ago, British thinker Thomas Malthus famously predicted that human overpopulation would result in food shortages and mass famine. “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man,” he said. For a long time, his idea that mass famine would overtake humanity was rejected out of hand by those who pointed to industrial agriculture and vastly increased crop yields. Industrial agriculture proved him wrong, or so the textbooks said.
Malthus’s ideas are now back in vogue as global food futures are uncertain, due to a devastating combination of fresh water depletion; drought caused by climate change; the collapse of the world’s oceans; an increase in fuel prices (as global oil supplies peak); soil erosion caused by excessive pesticide use; and the replacement of agricultural lands by biofuel crops.
From 1940 to the present, the world’s human population more than doubled to about 6.6 billion, and is projected to be about 10 billion by 2050. An International Panel on Climate Change report says that by 2080, 1.1 to 3.2 billion people will experience water scarcity, 200 to 600 million will be starving, and 2 to 7 million people each year will experience coastal flooding. The population is expected to plummet after the year 2050 due to famine, drought, disease, and war, exacerbated by climate change and peak oil.
Curbing overpopulation to mitigate climate change is also contentious due to the widely held view that reproduction is an inviolable right, and fears that coercive measures will be used to limit populations, like those used in China. The counterview holds that reproduction ought not to be considered an inviolable right when we’ve already exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet, and the consequences are inevitably so tragic.
One solution is to simply prevent unwanted pregnancies. Contraception is widely viewed as a viable and necessary solution by most people who write on this subject. According to the London School of Economics, contraception is almost five times cheaper as a means of preventing climate change than conventional green technologies.
But there’s a dispute over whether efforts to curb population growth should be a priority while those in the industrial north are still consuming many times more than those in the global south, and are responsible for global warming to a much greater degree.
George Monbiot, columnist for The Guardian and environmental activist, recently criticized those who talk about overpopulation while neglecting to mention the north-south inequity on greenhouse gas emissions. “While there’s a weak correlation between global warming and population growth, there’s a strong correlation between global warming and wealth,” he said.
Responding to Monbiot is Ryerson physics professor Helmut Burkhardt. He says, “It’s important to expose the misconceptions that only overconsumption is the cause of ecological problems, and not overpopulation. A drastic reduction of the few overconsumers, and reasonable and just increase in consumption by the numerous poor will raise the world average consumption of resources in a planet already suffering from ecological stress near the tipping point.”
In other words, even if we greatly reduce our carbon footprints in Canada while China and India continue to urbanize and industrialize, we will not be able to avoid the much-feared “tipping point” of catastrophic climate change, with disastrous consequences for all.
The reality is that if the practice of contraception is not widely adopted, another type of population control will be implemented: mass murder. Richard Heinberg, author of Powerdown, posits several types of future communities. The type he calls “Last Man Standing” neatly describes an all too common attitude among the over-privileged of the world: let the developing world—namely sub-Saharan Africa—die, and we will hoard all the resources for ourselves. This might also be called the fascist solution to overpopulation. The reality is that corporate and government inaction on climate change—including the Harper government’s failures on this front—already represents this morally callous depopulation program, albeit indirectly.
A study titled Fewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost, says that every seven dollars spent on family planning over the next four decades would reduce global CO2 emissions by more than a ton. We are still at a critical point in history when we can rationally discuss sane options, such as contraception and family planning education, and implement them with relatively little cost.
Science for Peace presents a Public Forum on Food and Population on Friday, Nov. 20, from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Koffler Auditorium, 569 Spadina Ave.
