Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 30, 1994 TAG: 9402250037
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: B-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
To doomsayers, such growth spells catastrophe. Inevitably, the number of people will come to outstrip the Earth's capacity to provide minimum sustenance for all.
To optimists, human inventiveness will adjust and provide. The more people, the more minds and hands at work to devise and implement survival strategies.
Who's right?
For many years, the optimists, more or less.
To be sure, the world has seen plenty of malnutrition and sometimes worse. But serious food shortages could be attributed to distribution problems, political repression, wartime disruptions and the like.
Meanwhile, technological advances - chemical fertilizers, new strains of grains, industrialized fishing techniques - were enabling the world's farms and fisheries to more than meet the challenge of the population explosion, producing more and more food per capita.
The doomsayers seemed to have committed a fundamental error: projecting population growth in an unchecked upward curve, but - failing to account for the likelihood of productivity improvements - projecting future food supplies in a straight line.
Lately, though, the rosy optimists' bloom has begun to fade. Growth in global food production has been slowing - at a time when higher growth rates in global population have resumed.
According to figures collected in "Vital Signs 1993," a publication of the Worldwatch Institute:
The world's seafood catch, after nearly quintupling between 1950 and 1989, has dropped slightly each year since.
World meat production, after quadrupling from 1950 through 1989, and nearly doubling per capita, has not grown enough since to offset population growth, resulting in a decline in meat production per capita.
Grain production, after tripling between 1950 and 1989 and growing by nearly a third per capita, has since leveled off in absolute terms and is down 5 percent per capita.
Per-capita production of soybeans - important as a protein supplement for livestock - tripled from 1950 through 1989; per capita, soybean prduction has not grown since.
Granted, Worldwatch's post-1990 data are for only three years, a small period from which to try inferring any trend. Granted, too, the collapse of the former Soviet Union and subsequent chaos have been extraordinary events inhibiting food production since 1990.
Nevertheless, the world's topsoil is being washed and blown away at an alarming if uncounted rate. (Only the United States bothers to keep track.) The 100-million-ton seafood catch in 1989 is thought by scientists to be the ocean's highest sustainable yield, exceeded only at risk of reducing future seafood supply. No new technologies, nothing like the fertilizer revolution anyway, are in sight that would dramatically increase per-acre soybean and grain yields.
Of course, the fact you can't see them now doesn't necessarily mean there are no major new food-production technologies waiting to be spotted. Still, it would be well to refocus attention on the number of people coming into the world.
One lesson from past efforts is that population control and coercion don't work. Education, improved status and expanded options for women, and increased access to family planning are the keys. Yet there is resistance to all these advancements.
The time has come to take a tip from both the optimists and the doomsayers. Let us employ human ingenuity to figure out ways to reduce population growth.
by CNB