Who says Mother Nature can't feed 9 billion?

johntheexpat

One of the themes that keep on recurring in this little corner of AVF is that the World can't feed 9 billion people and population control should be introduced.  However nobody ever says who should either be controlled or who should do the controlling.
But I disagree.  
Certainly dear Old Mother Nature would have problems with 9 billion of us carrying on like those of us in the Western World,
But if we weren't so bloody selfish:
if we realised that a small quantity of meat a couple of times a week was enough,
If we didn't throw back half the fish that are caught (Join Hugh's Fish fight via this thread)
If we didn't waste millions of tonnes of food every year in the UK alone,

then we could go a long way to easily providing enough to 'Feed The World' as the old cliche goes.

It really does beggar belief in this day and age that we send food to landfill rather than the pig farms, like we did when a lot of us were younger.  Foot and Mouth is the reason given, but it is a commercial disease, with no effects on humans (AFAIK) and there is a vaccine against it.  So the food is wasted.

Half the fish caught are sent back to the depths dead, for no good reason other than damn fool quotas.  So the food is wasted.

And it goes on and on with dozens of examples of gratuitous waste.

Then throw in advances in farming and food technology.  Persuade people to eat potatoes rather than rice and problems with water for irrigating the crops are greatly reduced.

Of course Mother Nature (with our co-operation) can feed 9 Bn of us.  That's a no-brainer.

DPinBucks

All of what you say is true, but why stop at 9bn? If we keep on growing, at no matter how low a rate, then we will reach any given population figure in time. Where do you reckon the limit is?

Have you read or looked up Malthus? He had some odd ideas, but his basic one is sound: populations cannot grow indefinitely. Malthus' thesis was that natural disaster or famine eventually halts growth, but do we want that to happen to us? Surely it's better to do it by controlled methods, which don't cause any human misery?

sidicks

That's the key - clearly exponential population growth is unsustainable so we need a 'fair' may of managing things.

Kebabhead

Feeding a population of 9 billion is only part of the problem

Where are you going to house all this people not to mention the bigger drain on natural resources

johntheexpat

It does seem to me, based on the First World experience, that once populations reach a certain level of affluence/education/sophistication, call it what you will, then society itself levels off the population growth.  So, the calls for population control are presumably not aimed at us in the West?  Which leads to a rather unpalatable conclusion.

The only other alternative then is to assist the rest of the world in its quest to reach the level of development where the societies themselves decide to limit numbers.

But that in itself, assuming the level required is 'at the 1st World's current level', would put an enormous and probably unsustainable drain on resources.

So, its a bit of an enigma.

NikB

I think personally there should be population control in the west. Examples such as the american woman who has 13 kids or here families on benefits with 8 kids should not be allowed. Whilst it would be difficult to control and the measures required drastic it could save us from disaster in the future. Control is needed everywhere. I would like to think that if healthcare improved in 3rd world countries then there would be fewer children dying and hopefully a lower need to produce more offspring in the hope of increasing chances of survival.

Global soil quality is declining and fresh water is becoming less easily available. So if we cannot grow more crops then we cannot expect to expand our population. Look at what has happened to the price of cereals in recent years - I admit that much of this may be due to the expansion of crops for biofuels.

If global temperatures rise as predicted then available land for growing crops will be decreased by flooding low lying coastal lands and making regions further away from the equator too hot to support sufficient crop growth.

In addition a ban on GM crops which could possibly solve some of these problems (such as drought resistance) will provide a substantial stumbling block.

Miyazaki

I totally agree.

The only real way you could do it is through taxation, almost like the reverse of the current benefit system.

First kid is free, second kid gives you 200% to council tax, 3rd kid 400%, 4th kid 800%, with people who don't tax to pay council tax having to pay 100% after having their first kid. You could also triple NI for each child and/or halve the amount of benefit for each child for those on benefits.

The human population explosion is likely to reach 12 billion by the year 2100.

For everyone to live as we do in the UK, the Earth can only support 1 billion people, increasing the population will make everyone suffer.

In this country alone, we consume all the food we produce by April, meaning that we need to import for the rest of the year.

For the 3rd world, I have no idea how you could manage population more effectively, they are going to have the biggest increases in population and they are also going to suffer the most.

johntheexpat

But isn't our society, our progress and thus our affluence based on the concept of an expanding population?  And when the population doesn't expand, the UK needs to import people to do all the jobs that are generated.  At the height of the boom a few years back, 1 in 8 UK jobs was held by an immigrant.  Now if we hadn't have been able to use those people the country would have been in trouble years ago.  Restaurants would have closed, warehouses couldn't have operated, the NHS would have collapsed etc etc.  (I knew of one warehouse in the Midlands, supplying plumbing stuff, that at one stage was something like 80% immigrants on the night shift and a high % on day and afternoon shifts).
Who would join an Army/Air Force/ Navy if there were great, well paid jobs just waiting to be filled?
So if we indulge in population reduction then how long would it be before we run out of workers?  Who would look after the aging  population?  Who would be there to add the cream to the daily cake, if there are only enough people to do 'essential' jobs.  ie life would be poorer.

As I see it, the very fabric of society is based on at the very least, a stable population.  Calls for reduction are a complete non-starter I'm afraid, both ethically and economically. Just my opinion though.

NikB

The reason we need immigrant workers has little if anything to do with the size of our population. The problem is our society has made people lazy and the benefits system makes it so that many people are better off sponging off the state then they are working. Remove those benefits and you lose the need for an immigrant workforce.

I'm also not saying we necessarily need to reduce our population - here at least. However we do need to keep it steady and given that life expectancy is much higher we don't need anything like the number of offspring we needed in victorian times to hope that we'd produce a sufficient next generation.

johntheexpat

I'll beg to differ.  1 in 8 jobs is way more than the very small number of professional scroungers, which is grossly overstated by the tabloids.  They hunt them down and report on them with a rare vigour.  (If they had hunted down cheating MPs with the same vigour, that story would never have been what it was.  But poverty stricken scroungers are a subject they know will get Angry of Tunbridge Wells frothing at the mouth so they go out of their way to find them).

But going back to the theme, a reducing population would cause way more problems than it would solve.  (The economy revolves around house prices, for example.  Less people.......).

And if we can't/won't reduce our own population, nobody on the planet is going to.