The world's population is set to follow a sigmoid curve and double, or perhaps triple. Will the food it produces will do the same - sustainably? Or do we need to think more seriously about `population control' and if so what are the politics behind this? In November The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) will host a World Food Summit to discuss `the eradication of hunger and malnutrition and the achievement of lasting food security'. The critical indicator is grain, which provides, directly and indirectly, about two thirds of all food energy, annual consumption varying between 200 kg per head (India) and 800 kg (USA), 327 kg being the world average.
The grain the world produces depends on the yield per hectare, and the area on which crops can be grown. Since the world's total cropland cannot be increased, gains being more or less matched by losses, cropland per head is steadily falling as population rises, so that there is already only 0.6 of an acre (0.25 ha) for each of us, with water an even greater constraint than land. Future population increase will therefore have to be fed by doubled or tripled yields. These may turn out to be more difficult to sustain indefinitely, than to reach in the first place.
Bread for the world. From 1950, when data first became available, global grain began by increasing faster than global people, so that during the 1950s and 1960s grain per head rose, the real price of grain fell, more grain was fed to animals and diets improved. However, as the figure shows the race between rising yields and falling area harvested from cereals per head is not going as well as it did. [1,2] In 1965 yields were increasing at 3% annually, and global grain per head at 1.5% annually. By 1991 yield increase had fallen to about 1% annually. Meanwhile, since 1984 the trend in grain per head has been negative. Good arguments have been advanced for some of the recent negative trend in grain per head being at least partly due to land being temporarily taken out of production, or switched to other crops, so all is not quite as gloomy as might appear at first sight.
The critical questions are however:
(i) Has the fall in the rate of increase of the global grain yield now bottomed out at an increase of about 1% annually,
(ii) or do the figures since 1991, which are averaged over a smaller number of years, represent a real and continuing fall?
(iii) How much of the fall in grain per head is due to `production fatigue' in that the land is having difficulty growing more, and how much to weak demand, in that those who could pay more cannot eat any more?
Nobody knows. Meanwhile population increase is now 1.5% annually, it will be 1.3% in the 2000s and 1.1% in the 2010s. Small changes in yield growth are critical, in that over 30 years a change of a tenth of a percentage point cumulates to represent food for 250 million people. Price rises could increase both yields (yet more fertilizers) and area planted (more marginal land ploughed), but by how much, at what price? How can the incomes of the poor be increased so that they can pay that price? If they cannot pay, will the rich help them, now that the developing countries are major and increasing net food importers?
Forecasts are inevitably short term, and become increasingly unreliable after 2020, a major unknown being the future needs of China. [1,2] There is no knowing what will happen by say 2050, at date which a third of those now born can hope to see. We are warned to "...be wary of expecting too much from any single source, such as the seeming wonders promised by genetic engineering...". [1] The most useful wonder would be an abundant source of clean cheap energy with which to desalinate and pump water. Altogether, it looks as if the global race between population and food is, at best, going to be rather too close, and for the poorest, in that prices are already rising, [3] it is already being lost. Meanwhile grain stocks are below their minimum safe level, so that short term global food security is now precarious. [3]
Demographic entrapment. Locally, the food situation is dire. The rising population of an agricultural community can happily exceed the carrying capacity of its local ecosystem (as many have), if meanwhile it develops an economy which produces goods and services for export and exchange, or its people can migrate. If however as its population rises in excess of local carrying capacity, its economy fails to develop sufficiently, and its opportunities for migration are inadequate, it is `demographically trapped'. [4] It is also trapped if, because its population is set to increase, this can be expected to happen. Such trapped communities appear to include much of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of south Asia. They are faced with the options of stunting and the prospect of starvation (Malawi) [5] or slaughter (Rwanda), [6] and the need for indefinitely increasing food aid at prices that donor organizations may have difficulty paying.
We have argued elsewhere that, although `disentrapment programmes', [6] must do everything possible to increase carrying capacity, migration, economic development and trade, trapped communities are likely to be faced with the dilemma of `population control' on the one hand, even to the point of 1-child families, and of eventual starvation or slaughter on the other. This dilemma, and the fact that far from Africa developing, much of it is `dedeveloping', make demographic entrapment taboo to all the United Nations (UN) agencies and to most of academia.
Yet
in the event, it turned out to be a political conference which evaded
the demographic dimension of population policies, by taking an individual
rather than a societal approach, and by allowing the feminist agenda, particularly
female empowerment, to dilute population objectives. `Cairo I' did not
address the problem of rapid population growth that many poor countries
consider their first priority. It failed to realize that, in a trapped
community, a woman's right to determine the number and spacing of her children
may mean that they and others starve. `Cairo I' said nothing about global
food security, or local about demographic entrapment, and aimed for a population
trajectory between the UN low and medium projections, or between 7 and
8 billion by 2030, a target which is largely meaningless because it set
no targets by countries. See also Figure 4 page 20.
What then were the political processes which enabled the crucial equation of people and food to be avoided locally and globally, even by academia? [8] McIntosh and Finkle [7] observe that the United States, the Holy See and the feminist movement were the three most organized, best disciplined and most effective participants in the conference, that historically the US state Department has considered population in the light of US and global security, and that: "Once formed the US position was advanced with determination and skill through every available channel".
The case for CAIRO II. Such then were the politics of Cairo I, which aimed to set population policies for 20 years. We suggest that it needs to be recalled long before this as `CAIRO II', well in advance of the presumed next conference elsewhere in 2014, with the trapped communities, the agronomists, the greens, the demographers, China and Japan (the largest provider of development aid) all playing major roles. It will need to be less acutely sensitive to the `political correctness' of the day, and to take development issues, particularly demographic entrapment, much more seriously, dealing as they do with the distribution of wealth and power, and who eats what. It will also need to remind us that while not physically tightening out belts, we need to need to eat a more `photon-efficient' (grain efficient) diet with fewer animal products, thereby easing both the upward trend in price of grain, and our personal demands on the ecosystem.
There is much preparatory work to be done. Prepcoms need to consider the legitimate incentives and disincentives that are now required to assure a 1-child world, in the difficult task of reaching the best compromise between the human rights abuses of China resulting from too much population control, and those of Rwanda where there has been too little. The UN now needs to consider how much grain can be provided to trapped communities while they bring their populations to within their carrying capacities, while it does all it can to improve their economies and increase their exports.
Most difficult of all, `CAIRO II' needs to consider a sustainable Northern lifestyle in the context of the needs of the South, and of the planet as a whole. The world population now grows at 10,000 people an hour - 93% of it in the South. Each baby born needs to be assured of the 25 tonnes of grain that he or she will need during their lives. Both the forthcoming World Food Summit and `CAIRO II' must come to grips with how this is to happen - reliably.