The failed predictions of widespread famine famously made by Thomas Malthus for the 19th century and Paul Ehrlich for the 20th century have cast a long shadow over, if not completely discredited, similar perspectives. This is both understandable and unfortunate. Understandable because repeated failure usually suggests a mistake in theorem and because depictions of apocalypse have become so commonplace—indeed, such a regular feature of a world-weary chic—that a little optimism seems refreshingly sincere. It is unfortunate because we are dismissing a horrible truth: overpopulation and famine are not distant mirages; they are present day realities.
For the past half-century, humanity has experienced a quiet, nearly invisible, yet unremitting famine, if we mean by famine large-scale hunger and starvation. At any given moment, 800 million to a billion people are severely malnourished calorically; at least three million children die of hunger each year; and an unimaginable two to three billion people suffer blindness, anemia, and physical and mental stunting from deficiencies of the micronutrients zinc, iodine, iron, and vitamin A. Unlike famines of the past, the current famine has not been concentrated in any one country, but rather has proceeded as a chronic event spread across the globe, thereby losing the kind of solidity that our minds need in order to recognize and name and it. To rescue it from vague abstraction, I name it a perpetual famine.
Relativity and scale go far in explaining its obscurity. In the well-documented 1943 Bengal famine, the three million people who starved to death represented a significant portion of the province’s 22 million people. Three million children scattered among 7.3 billion people is far less noticeable, even if it happens every year. And the 800 million merely hungry people make up a relatively small fraction (a little more than one in ten) of the entire human population. It is often proclaimed as a source for optimism that this fraction has been steadily dropping while crop yields, lifespans, and wealth have all been simultaneously rising. Less often mentioned is that the actual number of those hungry has remained unchanged. For decades, the number of hungry has stood at somewhere between eight hundred million and a billion people. Eight hundred million people suffering the daily pangs of hunger adds up to unprecedented, nearly unimaginable suffering. In the time of Malthus, there were barely this many people alive in the world—hungry, sated, and otherwise. So, to be clear, the lives of billions have improved, and the lives of other billions involve great material and existential suffering.
Hunger and famine persist despite the fact that we have already turned much of the Earth into a vast feed trough for our species. Of the planet’s land surface that is not ice, mountain, or desert, we have appropriated over half for our crops, livestock, and infrastructure. We farm the most fertile lands. The rest of what is possibly arable lies mostly under rainforests, cold boreal forests, and the Brazilian Cerrado, none of which harbor soils fertile enough for sustained agriculture.
And, spectacularly successful as the Green Revolution’s hybrid seeds were in averting Ehrlich’s predicted famines, they may well have actually set up humanity for greater horrors. The higher crop yields fed—however inadequately—a human population that has swelled from two and half billion people in 1950 to almost three times that number today. The United Nations’ latest “medium” projections now forecast a population of some 9.6 billion by 2050 and nearly 11 billion by 2100. If the Earth is already straining under our load, how can it continue to sustain the lifestyles of the world’s billion-and-a-half “haves,” improve the lot of the billions who are now impoverished, and support the billions who will be added to our numbers this century?
It is regularly noted that hunger persists despite there being plenty of food in the world. The problem, according to this view, has been civilization’s incompetence at distributing the food. However true, this is hardly a source for optimism. If we have not been able to feed all our human family at 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 billion when there was plenty of arable land and abundant resources, our prospects are far less promising at 8, 9, 10, and 11 billion with less arable and less fertile land, with less water for irrigation, with more expensive energy, and with less accommodating climates.
To address two other common misconceptions: first, the economic success of prosperous, densely populated states such as Monaco, Singapore, Japan, and the Netherlands is often cited as evidence for the viability of large global populations. What is missed from this view is the obvious fact that the lands within the borders of these states do not support their populations. Instead, they use their wealth to buy and otherwise appropriate the food, timber, fossil fuels, and minerals from other places, often poor countries, many of them African and many of which cannot feed their own people. These poor countries are being further impoverished by the economic transactions made between self-serving oligarchs in the poor, exporting countries and the financiers and businesspeople in the wealthy, importing countries.
Contrary to a second misconception, there are no under-populated countries in the world, outside of perhaps New Zealand and Canada. As evidence, note the unremitting, ubiquitous environmental degradation and the sobering fact that, of the 196 countries in the world, only some half-dozen countries are actually significant net food exporters. Furthermore, countries such as Russia, Japan, and Germany that are experiencing exceptionally low fertility rates and decreasing populations are still highly overpopulated and will be for many decades to come. The concerns of nationalists within those countries revolve around the economic and political discomfort of aging populations, not about human sustainability and the ecological damage their large, wealthy populations inflict on the planet.
Malthus’s realizations about the reproductive powers of our species were instrumental in Charles Darwin’s own formulations regarding all living creatures. Ehrlich is an esteemed professor at Stanford University who has made considerable contributions in the fields of biology and ecology. The mistakes of these two luminaries were less of perspective and more of audacity. It takes great audacity—call it hubris, if you wish—to funnel reality’s baffling chaos and complexity into some narrow, substantial, and meaningful prediction about the future. However, by dismissing their contributions and disparaging their perspectives, we are likely making an even more egregious mistake. To wisely meet the challenges of the future, we must proceed with eyes wide open, neither underestimating the magnitude of our challenges nor overestimating our past accomplishments.