Population Growth, Food Security and Agribusiness Leviathans

Scientific evidence from Hopfenberg and Pimentel indicate that the size of the human population on Earth is a function of food availability. More food for human consumption equals more people; less food for sustaining life equals less people; and no food, no people. This is to say, the population dynamics of the human species is essentially common to, not different from, the population dynamics of other living things.

As UN Secretary-General Annan noted in 1997, “The world has enough food. What it lacks is the political will to ensure that all people have access to this bounty, that all people enjoy food security.”

Please examine the probability that humans are producing too much, not too little food. The problem we face is the way increasing the global food supply leads to increasing absolute global human population numbers. It is the super-abundant, large scale harvests that are making it possible for population numbers of the human species to explode beyond the limits imposed by a relatively small, evidently finite and noticeably frangible planet with the size, composition and ecology of Earth.

The spectacular success of the Green Revolution over the past 40 years has “produced” an unintended and completely unanticipated global challenge, I suppose: the rapidly increasing supply of food for human consumption has given birth to a human population bomb, which is exploding before our eyes.

A formidable threat to future human wellbeing and environmental health could be caused by the unbridled, corporate overproduction of food on the one hand and the failure of the leaders of the human community to insist upon more fair and equitable redistribution of the world’s food supply so that “all people enjoy food security”.

Let's reflect upon words from the speech that Norman Bourlaug delivered on the occasion of winning the Nobel Prize, "Man also has acquired the means to reduce the rate of human reproduction effectively and humanely. He is using his powers for increasing the rate and amount of food production. But he is not yet using adequately his potential for decreasing the rate of human reproduction. The result is that the rate of population increase exceeds the rate of increase in food production in some areas."

Plainly, Dr. Bourlaug states that humanity has the means to decrease the rate of human reproduction but is choosing not to adequately employ this capability to limit human population numbers. He also notes that the rate of human population growth surpasses the rate of increase in food production IN SOME AREAS {my caps}. Bourlaug is specifically not saying the growth of global human population numbers exceeds global production of food. According to recent research, population numbers of the human species could be a function of the global growth of the food supply for human consumption. This means that the global food supply is the independent variable and absolute global human population numbers is the dependent variable; that human population dynamics is most similar to the population dynamics of other species.

The human species might not be threatened in our time by a lack of food. To the contrary, humanity and life as we know it could be inadvertently put at risk by the determination to continue the dramatic, large-scale overproduction of food, such as we have seen occur in the past 40 years.

Recall Bourlaug’s prize winning accomplishment. It gave rise to the “Green Revolution” and to the extraordinary increases in the world’s supply of food. Consider that the sensational increases in humanity’s food supply occasioned by Bourlaug’s great work gave rise to an unintended and completely unanticipated effect: the recent skyrocketing growth of absolute global human population numbers.

If we keep doing the “big-business as usual” things we are doing now by maximally increasing the world’s food supply, then a colossal ecological wreckage looms.