But not for the reasons you might think.
I no longer think that overpopulation or the ecological devastation that comes from overconsumption are going to be problems for much longer. I now expect world population to peak between 7.5 and 8 billion people by 2025 or 2030, and then start declining. I also think that the human activity that is currently damaging the natural world is going to start diminishing at the same time.
The reason I believe this "good news" is about to unfold is that we are already experiencing a collision between climate change and world oil supply limits (aka peak oil) that is going to have an increasingly negative impact on the stability of the world's food supply from now on.
We've all seen the reports of extreme weather events hitting the world's grain crops - especially the floods in Australia, and droughts in Russia, Northern China and Thailand. This instability in rainfall patterns is one of the two impacts of rising atmospheric CO2 that will keep getting more pronounced as the decades go by. It will, on balance, reduce the total amount of grain that the world's great growing regions can produce.
The other effect of rising atmospheric CO2 is the gradual acidification of the oceans. That process is showing signs of reducing the food available at the bottom of the food chain (plankton) even as humans have pretty well fished out the top of the chain. 90% of the large fish in the oceans are already gone - we've eaten them.
The other unfolding story that will impact the world's food supply is Peak Oil. We are now at Peak Oil. For the last six and a half years - since the middle of 2004 - the world's oil production has been on the "bumpy plateau" long predicted by peak oil analysts. Despite monthly average prices gyrating between $40 and $135 over that time, production has varied from the average of 73 million barrels per day by only 2%:
Worse than that, the amount of oil available on the world market seems to be declining as producing countries keep more of their production for their own use, leaving less to export. The following graph shows the actual volume of the international oil market for the past 45 years, and a couple of projections for the next 20 based on some fairly conservative assumptions. The mechanisms behind this behaviour are well understood. The main unknown quantities at this time are how fast the underlying production will decline, and how much influence rising prices will play in modifying our use of oil. I suggest you think of these projections as "well founded speculation" for now, and use them to try and frame your thoughts about what this kind of event could mean to the world.
Why is this an issue for the world's food supply? After all we only use on average between 2% and 3% of our energy for agriculture. Obviously we should be able to work around a problem like this with no trouble. Well, the problem is that it's not just the planting, growing and harvesting of food that's important. As I described in
another post, the food system as a whole (which includes all processes and infrastructure involved in feeding a population: the growing, harvesting, processing, packaging, transporting, marketing, consumption, and disposal of food and food-related items) probably consumes
between 20% and 25% of the world's oil - largely for transportation. As people are fond of pointing out whenever problems with global food production are raised, what we have is not so much a production problem as a food distribution problem. So anything that makes food distribution more problematic (e.g. by raising the cost of distribution) is going to impact food availability and prices. And anything that raises food prices hits the world's poor the hardest, driving them out of the marketplace. And that is a fancy way of saying "regional famines".
We now have a world food supply system that is under pressure from both ends. Climate Change is already reducing harvests and will continue to do so into the future, while Peak Oil is making the distribution of the food that is grown steadily more expensive.
On the demand side we are still adding 80 million people per year to the world, the equivalent of another Egypt every year. That adds the requirement for an irreducible amount of new food production and distribution - another 30 million tonnes of grain every year. While the
percentage growth rate of our population is in fact declining, the number we are adding each year is remaining constant at 80 million. This is a picture of a global life support system under enormous strain, attacked on both the supply and demand sides by inexorable forces.
Will this situation result in a Malthusian crisis? Well, if I had to lay a bet, I wouldn't bet against it. Here's why.
Let me say at the outset that we have indeed learned a lot since the days of Thomas Malthus in the 18th century. Norman Borlaug's incredible research has given the world much respite from hunger for the last 60 years.
However, science has also progressed in other areas. We have become much better at efficiently using up the world's resources, especially fossil fuel - oil and natural-gas derived fertilizer - that was one linchpin of Borlaug's Green Revolution. Due to peak Oil and the net export crisis that first leg of our food-production tripod is showing signs of getting shorter. The second leg, water, is now under pressure both from climate change and from the depletion of aquifers world-wide. The third leg, intrinsic crop yields (related to the crop itself and not to operational factors like fertilizer, water and pesticides)
have not increased significantly in the last 20 years or more, despite Herculean efforts with hybridization and even genetic engineering. The crop yield increases we have seen over the last 30 years are related to operational factors like mechanization, fertilizer and water - the very factors that are now threatened by peak oil and climate change.
Because of its growing impact on the global food system, the convergence of climate change and peak oil has enormous implications for population growth. I think it's entirely probable that we are near the upper limit of human population growth even now. I would expect that as the converging crisis begins to bite harder over the next (few?) years, food production will plateau and may even begin to fall. Some time soon afterward (perhaps within 5 years of the crisis fully manifesting) the global population growth rate will begin to drop precipitously, reaching zero perhaps 5 to 10 years later. At that point our population will begin to fall.
Despite our best intentions around family planning, educating and empowering women and raising the material circumstances of the poorest among us, these efforts are already being overtaken by the circumstances I describe here. We must continue these ameliorating efforts with the utmost urgency, however, because the more successful we are the more people we will be able to protect against the worst effects of the coming food storm.