“The growing awareness of the impending disaster cannot, in itself, halt the process.” A quote from E.J. Mishan, The Costs of Economic Growth, p. 97. Even should a farmer who is barely scratching a living from the soil understand that overpopulation and poor farming practices are major contributing factors to our ecological suicide, it will likely not be in his best personal interest to have fewer children or stop tilling the soil. Even if he knows that he is one more drop in the bucket of our collective demise, even if he fully understands the global dimension, he cannot do anything different, except as a completely altruistic gesture. He may need children to insure his survival in later years. He may be too poor to afford fuel to cook his food or heat his home, and therefore he must burn the stubble from the fields and the dung from his animals, the very matter that should feed his soil.
According to a number of analysts, including Dr. Pimentel at Cornell University, humans are destroying farmland at the rate of 10,000,000 hectares a year. That’s 25,400,000 acres a year. That’s an area of fertile land the size of the whole of the United States before the end of the century.
Sir Albert Howard, called the founder of the organic farming movement, noted in his 1947 book, The Soil and Health, that what one takes out of the soil, one must make sure gets put back in. However, as Professor Rattan Lal, director at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center at Ohio State University, says, “Miserable, poor, hungry and desperate, they pass their misery to the land.” In these conditions, one does not have the energy or the means to take care of the land. The soils of Africa, particularly, are fast losing their life-sustaining nutrients. And then the land, in a “positive” feedback loop, passes on its impoverishment back to the farmer.
Some seventy percent of the Third World citizens are farmers. And some 850 million people, according to the U.N., go to bed hungry each day. Two to three billion people suffer from micronutrient deficiencies. They are stunted physically and mentally. They suffer from eye diseases, blindness, and die early from a host of diseases—cancer, malaria, measles, etc. 85 million people suffer acute hunger, and 9 million of these die each year of starvation or disease that their malnourished bodies cannot fight.
Still, even as we degrade the Earth’s soil, there is still plenty of food grown on the planet to feed everyone well. Frances Lappe and several co-authors showed convincingly in World Hunger: Twelve Myths that hunger is greatly a political and economic issue. Europe, the United States and Japan import foods from impoverished nations, food that arguably should stay home and feed the malnourished people there. This has been the story during the abundant decades, the last half of the 20th century when oil, water, grains, fertilizers, pesticides were all relatively cheap. Now, as we reach “peak” in all these, when everything is going to become more expensive, can we expect the First World to become suddenly altruistic by abandoning biofuels, abandoning fishing off the coasts of the Third World countries, forgiving national debts, foregoing subsidizing their farmers in the global market, foregoing the eating of meat grown on tropical lands cleared from forests and the transporting of exotic foods, and blithely paying—that is, without military interventions—top dollar for oil. Can we expect the world’s wealthiest billion people to cut back on consumption, to eat less meat, to eat locally grown foods. Probably not, even though these wealthiest are also the best educated, the most informed about our ecological suicide.