The world is not overpopulated; it's just overly capitalistic and puts profit over everything else. Saying that it's overpopulated just gives reasons for people to privatize and be more greedy, as if there isn't enough to feed everyone, as if we need to fight against each other to survive. The reality is that there's more than enough for every single person on the planet. The problem stems from the global political economic system, not a lack of resources.
Are there too many people for the available food supply?
With the cover of Earth 3.0 depicting a fish bowl teeming with goldfish, the symbolism is hard to miss. For many people, the global food crisis that caused huge increases in chronic malnutrition alongside food riots in over 30 countries last year only underlined the fact that there were just too many people and not enough land to feed them. Maybe Malthusian arguments have been repeatedly and self-evidently wrong in the past, but this time is different—humanity has finally reached, exceeded, or will soon exceed, the total number of humans the earth can possibly feed.
Obviously, population is not a completely irrelevant consideration when it comes to food provision. It would be anti-materialist to argue otherwise. But we are not talking about some hypothetical future population number; with almost 1 billion people suffering chronic malnutrition we are talking about whether or not we have exceeded the capacity of the earth to feed everyone right now.
The reality is that overpopulation arguments come at a time when enough food is produced globally, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), to more than feed everyone. At the beginning of the food crisis in 2007, the world’s farmers produced 2.13 billion tons of grain, which included record or near record levels of rice, wheat, and corn.16 According to a World Bank report,
droughts in Australia and poor crops in the E.U. and Ukraine in 2006 and 2007 were largely offset by good crops and increased exports in other countries and would not, on their own, have had a significant impact on prices. Only a relatively small share of the increase in food production prices (around 15 percent) is due directly to higher energy and fertilizer costs.17
The FAO’s June 2009 Report states that food stocks are back from their lows last year as a result of a bumper food crop: “With the second-highest recorded cereals crop expected this year and stocks replenished, the world food supply looks less vulnerable to shocks than it was during last year’s food crisis.”18 In a quite shocking revelation given the extra tens of millions of people thrust into trying to survive starvation last year, the report states that “even larger crops than originally forecast” were harvested making 2008 the highest production year on record.
The increased global production was sufficient to meet demand for food and other uses but also facilitated a replenishment of global reserves to pre-crisis levels. With the new 2009–10 marketing seasons commencing, prospects continue to be positive, as world cereal production is expected to be the second largest ever, after last year’s record.19
Even at the height of the food crisis last year when the number of seriously malnourished people rose to 963 million, from 923 million in 2007, according to the UN—?almost one in every seven people on the planet—there was more than enough food available to give every single person 2800 kilocalories per day, enough to make every person on the planet overweight. By 2030, with population growth continuing to decline and agricultural output predicted to rise, the UN forecasts enough food will be grown worldwide, despite a global estimated population of 8.3 billion, to give everyone 3050 kilocalories per day.20
Contrary to those who argue population continues to grow exponentially or geometrically, the rate of population growth peaked in the 1960s and has been declining ever since. The rate is set to decline further from the 1.7 percent it has been over the last 30 years to 1.1 percent. World population, rather than increasing exponentially, is predicted to continue to slowly rise through this century before leveling off at around 9 billion.21 In fact, according to the latest report from the U.S Census Bureau, “An Aging World: 2008,” the fastest growing segment of world population is the over 65 age bracket. For the first time in human history, the over 65 demographic is predicted to outnumber children under five within ten years.22
As a side point, it is noteworthy that in all the debates about curtailing population growth, there is no campaign against the French and Australian governments paying women to have a third child in order to avert national population decline, even though both countries have far higher per capita environmental impacts than any developing country. It is also noticeable that these governments would rather pay women to procreate than relax ever-stricter immigration controls and allow in more workers to offset the decline.
The reason that food reserves have declined over the last 15 years is not because there is not enough land to grow crops for the extra people. The problem comes down once again to social relations. Under neoliberal deregulation, developing countries were pressured by the IMF and the World Bank’s Structural Adjustment Programs to move away from food self-sufficiency and assured that the market would take care of any shortfalls. In order to keep up with their debt payments to Western financial institutions, countries of the Global South were told that they had to grow certain crops—ones that earned cash but couldn’t be eaten such as coffee and flowers—that held a “comparative advantage” for them on the world market.
This meant that they could drop all their trade barriers and, in theory, still be able to compete on the world market while earning the capital to develop and pay off their debt. Quite the opposite happened. Local farmers were driven out of business and off the land into burgeoning city slums, land degradation expanded because the crops now being grown were not suited to the soil, and farmers were pushed onto more marginal land, thereby accelerating soil erosion. The farmers who remained were now in debt due to the amounts of fertilizer and pesticide they had to use (and the IMF-forced conditions for the suspension of fertilizer subsidies), and water use for the necessary irrigation of high water-demand crops shot through the roof. Some of this is documented in the excellent film Life and Debt, which focuses on the effects of “free trade” arriving in the Caribbean and the devastating effects on local agricultural production.
Since the 1980s, IMF- and World Bank-imposed Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) have been imposed on 90 developing and transitional economies. It is impossible to explain how the home of corn domestication, Mexico, could have become a net importer of U.S. corn without looking at the role of the coercively imposed SAPs and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which drove 15 million Mexican farmers from the land.23
International Socialist Review
Topic: Are We Flucked ?