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Curzon
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Curzon

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September 12th, 2006

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Malthus, eat your heart out

I’m halfway through Jared Diamond’s Collapse as I write this, and the tales of societal implosion in Greenland, Easter Island and elsewhere make me dread the future. In my (expected) lifetime this planet’s population will grow from 4 billion to 9 billion. With the rapid increase in resource consumption on all levels on every corner of the planet, I can’t help but fear that the impending decline of resources will result in a massive systems failure, a breakdown of civilization, a population diefoff… and… what’s the word I’m looking for… yeah, a collapse.

But in the meantime, Slate has this article which reminds me that the human species faces no danger of running out starvation in the near future. Far from it—we are feeding ourselves to death.

In 1894, Congress established Labor Day to honor those who “from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold.” In the century since, the grandeur of human achievement has multiplied. Over the past four decades, global population has doubled, but food output, driven by increases in productivity, has outpaced it. Poverty, infant mortality, and hunger are receding. For the first time in our planet’s history, a species no longer lives at the mercy of scarcity. We have learned to feed ourselves.

We’ve learned so well, in fact, that we’re getting fat. Not just the United States or Europe, but the whole world. Egyptian, Mexican, and South African women are now as fat as Americans. Far more Filipino adults are now overweight than underweight. In China, one in five adults is too heavy, and the rate of overweight in children is 28 times higher than it was two decades ago. In Thailand, Kuwait, and Tunisia, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are soaring…

Technologically, this is a triumph. In the early days of our species, even the rich starved. Barry Popkin, a nutritional epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina, divides history into several epochs. In the hunter-gatherer era, if we didn’t find food, we died. In the agricultural era, if our crops perished, we died. In the industrial era, famine receded, but infectious diseases killed us. Now we’ve achieved such control over nature that we’re dying not of starvation or infection, but of abundance. Nature isn’t killing us. We’re killing ourselves.

Comments to this entry

snow
September 12, 2006
7:13 am
Isn't the population supposed to peak around 9 billion and then begin to decline? It seems that there will continue to be many problems including pollution and increasing competition for resources, but I have faith in human ingenuity to pull humanity through it all (though there may be some severe crunches along the way).
von Kaufman-Turkestansky
September 12, 2006
4:23 pm
Exactly. Indeed, it seems likely that the overabundance of cheap crap may indeed be a Malthusian response. What better to shorten the lifespan of millions than trans fats?

Snow, we all hope that human ingenuity will carry the day. But isn't rational to want to reduce the impact of those severe crunches?

Population projections have a lot of ifs. The UN projections range from 7.68 billion to 10.65 billion in 2050 (http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/WPP2004/2004Highlights_finalrevised.pdf) Interestingly the devloped world's population stays pretty much constant in all the scenarios.
Mitch H.
September 12, 2006
5:51 pm
Didn't you see that article that made the rightblog rounds last month? The authors argued an interesting counterintuitive, that the understanding upon which Diamond was building - that Easter Island was a classic human-abuse collapse scenario - is not borne out by the current research. Human resource exhaustion didn't deforest the island, a Polynesian rat infestation did, and there was never a catastrophic human-population collapse, at least before genocidal Europeans arrived on the scene.
Sembawang Squid
September 12, 2006
7:45 pm
Say Mitch, maybe Diamond was off the mark about the cause of the demise of the Rapa Nui palms. But what's the deal with the "genocidal Europeans" slur? You think if the exploration shoe was on the other foot things would have been any more warm and fuzzy?
Curzon
September 13, 2006
12:11 am
Mitch: That article is pushing an "alternative" theory not accepted by majority scholarship, and it sounds like nonsense: that rats deforested the island, killed or starved all the people, and built enormous statues in the process. (And I'm more baffled than offended by the genocidal Europeans comment.)

As for societies imploding, Easter Island is just one of dozens of examples that Diamond brings up in his book: Pitcain, the Anasazi, the Maya, Cambodia, Greenland, Tikopia, Haiti, Rwanda, etc etc. Even if Easter Island was destroyed by a rat infestation, the theory is no less sound.
Sonagi
September 13, 2006
12:16 am
There is a difference between being underfed and being malnourished. Americans are heavier than Asians, but Asians probably have better nutritional profiles - more vitamins, minerals, and essential nutrients - because they eat more nutrient dense foods like fresh produce. It's not so much a case of eating too much as eating too much nutrient-deficient processed, refined food. Nobody ever got fat on broccoli, carrots, and apples. It is ironic that never in our history have we had the capacity to eat so well, yet even in developed counries, we eat worse than our grandparents and great-grandparents. I was browsing some old photos of school staff from the 1940s and 1950s. Back then, most of the teachers were slim - the equivalent of women's size 4-6 today.

A sedintary lifestyle may also be to blame. In The China Study , it is claimed that the Chinese actually consume more calories than Americans but are slimmer because they burn more calories in daily activities, especially commuting to work/school and shopping since most Chinese do not own automobiles.
Mutantfrog
September 13, 2006
1:53 am
We could be taken down by a shortage of energy or global warming, either of which would lead to famine-but I don't think that simple population increase is likely to lead to a food shortage.

In the Horn of Africa people have already destroyed their environment, and in the face of a still rising poulation are well into a Malthusian crisis, and would have already faced near extinction if not for foreign food aid. This is perhaps a taste of a possible worst-case scenario for global warming, except that there is no United Planets Food Agency to bring us aid from off-world.

By the way, I was pretty surprised by the line "Far more Filipino adults are now overweight than underweight."
I was in the Philippines for a couple of weeks just a few months ago, and it's truly an odd thought to think that a country where so many people live in shanty-towns could be having an obesity epidemic-at least until you realize that in the US obesity is most prevelant among the poor, who eat unhealthy and calorie rich industrially produced food because it is cheaper. Would this be the same dynamic leading to obesity in the Philippines?
Mutantfrog
September 13, 2006
4:02 am
And just an hour or two after I posted that comment, I see this article.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's richest charity, joined with the Rockefeller Foundation yesterday to launch a new development initiative for sub-Saharan Africa that they said would revolutionize food production and reduce hunger and poverty for tens of millions of people.

Modeled on the Rockefeller-pioneered "green revolution" that transformed farming methods and staved off widespread famine in much of the developing world nearly a half-century ago, the initiative coincides with a new round of Western concern about the long-intractable problems of the poorest continent.

Home to 16 of the 18 most undernourished countries, Africa is the only part of the world where food production has decreased in recent years. At the same time, political upheaval and conflict there are seen as providing fertile ground for extremists.
Elizabeth
September 13, 2006
7:01 am
"Americans are heavier than Asians, but Asians probably have better nutritional profiles "“ more vitamins, minerals, and essential nutrients"

Depends on which Asians you are talking about. Most of the Asians who are underweight do not have access to any kinds of meats and few vegetables- they subsist on rice and bread from wheat flour. While I agree that malnutrition is a problem in a number of obese societies, inequality means that the really healthy stuff is hard to get for poor people around the world.

"launch a new development initiative for sub-Saharan Africa that they said would revolutionize food production and reduce hunger and poverty"

I hope it has something to do with, forbidding governments from prevent people from planting stuff, and stealing it when people do plant stuff, and killing thousands forcing people off their land. Because that- not water or anything else- is the number one reason for most of the starvation in Africa.

We know this because amazingly, despite the green revolution in Asia, thousands in North Korea, Myanmar, and China are still starving. Funny how that works.
Sonagi
September 14, 2006
11:53 pm
Depends on which Asians you are talking about. Most of the Asians who are underweight do not have access to any kinds of meats and few vegetables- they subsist on rice and bread from wheat flour.

You're right; I should qualify my statement to say that the average resident of a developed city like Beijing or on the coast probably eats more nutritiously than the average American. Most of the Chinese I saw in the city of Qingdao were average to thin, but not underweight. Judging by the selection and prices at neighborhood green grocer stands, a typical Qingdao family could enjoy servings of fresh greens, carrots, and other common vegetables for dinner along with tofu, eggs, and small bits of meat. While traveling west in the area around Xian, I saw villagers who looked like they didn't eat much more than unleavened bread and a few chunks of fatty mutton.

While I agree that malnutrition is a problem in a number of obese societies, inequality means that the really healthy stuff is hard to get for poor people around the world.

Totally agree with you there. That statement is true for developed and developing countries alike. The US government recently decided to expand WIC to cover fresh produce along with milk and fattening cheese Growing up in a working poor family, we received these heavy, waxy, tasteless blocks of government surplus cheese. Now if Uncle Sam can pay dairy farmers to produce too much milk and cheese and then give it away to poor people, why can't it pay small family farms to produce more vegetables and fruit?
Kenneth
September 15, 2006
4:42 am
Mutantfrog: For a pretty good, albeit left-wing, critique of the Gates approach, see "here":http://www.counterpunch.org/krebs09132006.html. Gates isn't solving anything: he's just buying prestige by throwing money at an age-old problem in an age-old fashion.
sun bin
September 15, 2006
7:28 am
why is malthus such a big deal still today?

1. the population food problem is a very complicated multi-variable mathematical equation
2. malthus offers a first order solution (with no correct such as tech and decrease in fertility, even war)
3. if natural pop increases (i.e fertility>death), human pop will saturate sooner or later. then there is pop decrease -- by different ways, mabye gradually (eg one-child policy in China, low fertility in Russia), or catatrophically (rwanda or WWII) -- which scenario happens first is a matter of complex differential eqtn, plus some historical coincidence.
4. but the fact is, the earth cannot support unlimited human pop.