Outgrowing the Earth Part 3

OUTGROWING THE EARTH

THE FOOD SECURITY CHALLENGE IN AN AGE OF FALLING WATER TABLES AND RISING TEMPERATURES

LESTER BROWN

EARTHSCAN          2005

PART III

Chapter 2: Stopping at Seven Billion

In early 2003, UN demographers announced that the HIV/AIDS epidemic has reduced life expectancy for the 700 million people of sub-Saharan Africa from 62 to 46 years. For the first time in the modern era, the rise in life expectancy has been reversed for a large segment of humanity, marking a major setback in the march of progress. Is this an isolated development? Or does this reversal mark the beginning of a new era where the failure of societies to manage other life-threatening trends, such as falling water tables and rising temperatures, will also disrupt progress and reduce life expectancy?

• Over the last three decades, some 35 European countries and Japan have reduced fertility and achieved population stability.
• In countries with the highest HIV infection rates – Botswana, South Africa, and Swaziland – rising death rates are projected to shrink populations in the decades ahead.
• After peaking at an all-time high of 2% in 1970, world population growth slowed to 1.2% in 2004.
• Even slower-growing populations are still outstripping the carrying capacity of the earth’s natural systems – its fisheries, forests, rangelands, aquifers, and croplands.
• Whether the population-driven demand on a fishery exceeds the sustainable yield by 1% or 10% a year makes little difference over the long term. The end result is the same: depletion of stocks and collapse of the fishery.

For some areas, population growth now threatens food security. In developing countries, land holdings are parceled out among heirs with each successive generation until they are so small that they can no longer feed a family. The pressure of a larger population can mean a shrinking water supply, leading to hydrological poverty – a situation where there is no longer enough water to drink, to produce food, and for bathing. The continuing growth of population in resource-scarce, low income countries is undermining future food security in many of them.

A new demographic era

Nearly 3 billion people are expected to be added to our world during the first half of this century – slightly fewer than the 3.5 billion added during the last half of the 20^th century.

• Whereas growth in 1950-2000 occurred in both industrial and developing countries, the growth in the next 50 years will be almost entirely in the developing ones.
• Big additions are projected for the Indian subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa, which together will account for nearly 2 billion of the 3 billion total increase.
• Populations of Botswana are projected to decline by 43%, of South Africa by 11% and of Swaziland by 2% due to rising mortality.

Are these three countries an aberration or are they merely among the first of many countries where HIV/AIDS, spreading hunger, the loss of water supplies, and possibly civil conflict lead to rising death rates and population decline?

• The two largest countries – China with a population of 1,275 million in 2000 and India with a population of 1,017 million – will trade places as India’s population, projected to grow by over 500 million by 2050, overtakes that of China sometime around 2040. (See Table 2-1)
•  The three countries on the list with the greatest growth, with each expected to more than double by 2050, are Pakistan (143m/349m), Nigeria (115m/258m), and Ethiopia (66m/171m).
• The three newcomers on the top 20 list in 2050 – the Democratic Republic of the Congo (to 152m), Uganda (to 103m), and Yemen (to 84m)  – are each projected to triple their populations by mid-century.

What these demographic projections do not take into account are the constraints imposed by the capacity of life-support systems in individual countries. In many cases, the projection clearly exceeds the country’s apparent ability to support its population. For example, the notion that Yemen – a country of 21 million people, where water tables are falling everywhere – will one day be able to support 84 million people requires a stretch of the imagination. Is Pakistan, with 158 million people today, likely to add nearly 200 million by 2050, making it larger than the United States today? And is it really possible that Nigeria will have 258 million people by 2050 – almost as many as the United States has now?

Population, land, and conflict

As land and water become scarce, we can expect mounting social tensions within societies, particularly between those who are poor and dispossessed and those who are wealthy, as well as among ethnic and religious groups, as competition for these vital resources intensifies. Population growth brings with it a steady shrinkage of life-supporting resources per person. That decline, which is threatening to drop the living standards of more and more people below survival level, could lead to unmanageable social tensions that will translate into broad-based conflicts.

Worldwide, the area in grain expanded from 590 million hectares (1,457 million acres) in 1950 to its historical peak of 730 million hectares in 1981. By 2004, it had fallen to 670 million hectares. Even as the world’s population continues to grow, the area available for producing grain is shrinking.

Expanding world population cut the grainland area per person in half, from 0.23 hectares (0.57 acres) in 1950 to 0.11 hectares in 2000. (See Figure 2-1.) This area of just over one tenth of a hectare per person is half the size of a building lot in an affluent US suburb. This halving of grainland area per person makes it more difficult for the world’s farmers to feed the 70 million or more people added each year. If current population projections materialize and if the overall grainland area remains constant, the area per person will shrink to 0.07 hectares in 2050, less than two thirds that in 2000.

Having less cropland per person not only threatens livelihoods; in largely subsistence societies with nutrient-depleted soils, it threatens survival itself. Tensions among people begin to build as land holdings shrink below that needed for survival. The Sahelian zone of Africa, the broad swatch of the continent between the Sahara Desert and the more lush forested land to the south, which stretches from Sudan in the east through Mauritania in the west, has one of the world’s fastest-growing populations. It is also an area of spreading conflicts.

• In Nigeria, where 130 million people are crammed into an area not much larger than Texas, overgrazing and overplowing are converting 351,000 hectares (1,350 square miles) of grassland and cropland into desert each year.
• The conflict between farmers and herders in Nigeria is a war for survival. The New York Times reported in June 2004, “in recent years, as the desert has spread, trees have been felled and the populations of both herders and farmers have soared, the competition for land has only intensified.
• The division between herders and farmers is also often the division between Muslims and Christians.
• This competition for land, amplified by religious differences and combined with a large number of frustrated young men with guns, has created what the New York Times describes as a “combustible mix” that has “fueled a recent orgy of violence across this fertile central Nigerian state (Kebbi). Churches and mosques were razed. Neighbor turned against neighbor. Reprisal attacks spread until finally, in mid-May, the government imposed emergency rule.”
• Similar divisions exist between herders and farmers in northern Mali.
• Water, too, is a source of growing tension. Some of the most bitter disagreements are taking place within countries where needs of local populations are outrunning the sustainable yield of wells.
• In competition between cities and the countryside, cities invariably win, often depriving farmers of their irrigation water and thus their livelihood.

The projected addition to the earth’s population of 3 billion people by 2050, the vast majority of whom will be added in countries where water tables already are falling and wells are going dry, is not a recipe for economic progress and political stability. Continuing population growth in countries already overpumping their aquifers and draining their rivers dry could lead to acute hydrological poverty, a situation in which people simply do not have enough water to meet their basic needs.

The demographic transition

In 1945, Princeton demographer Frank Notestein outlined a three-stage demographic model to illustrate the dynamics of population growth as societies modernized. (See Figure 2-2.) He pointed out that in pre-modern societies, births and deaths are both high and essentially in balance with little or no population growth. In stage two, as living standards rise and health care conditions improve, death rates begin to decline. With birth rates remaining high while death rates are declining, population growth accelerates, typically reaching 3% per year. Although this may not sound like much, 3% a year results in a 20-fold increase per century. As living standards continue to improve, and particularly as women are educated, the birth rate also begins to decline. Eventually the birth rate drops to the level of the death rate. This is stage three, where population is again stable.

Of the 180 countries in the world today, some 36, with a combined population of 700 million people, have made it to stage three. With births and deaths essentially in balance, they have reached population stability. This leaves more than 140 countries – and 5.6 billion people – in stage two. Many with rising incomes and steadily declining birth rates are moving toward the population stability of stage three. Among them are China, Thailand, South Korea, and Iran. But many others in this group are not doing as well. After two generations of rapid growth, progress has largely come to a standstill. Living conditions in these largely rural societies are either improving very little or are deteriorating as family plots, divided and then subdivided, have left many families with too little land to sustain them.

• A task force tried to determine the indicators that could help anticipate state failure/social disintegration/collapse of order in a society. Of all the indicators analyzed, high infant mortality correlated most closely with political instability.
• The second best indicator of political volatility was a disproportionately large share of the population in the young adult category, those in their late teens and twenties.
• The prospect that large numbers of young adults would foster social conflict and political instability was much stronger in societies where educational and economic opportunities were lacking.

Once countries have moved into the final stage of the demographic transition, when both mortality and fertility are low and essentially in balance, the chance of civil conflicts diminishes sharply. This suggest that it is in the global interest to help those countries that are stalled in stage two to get moving and make it into stage three as soon as possible.

• Countries that remain in stage two, with its rapid population growth, risk being overwhelmed by land hunger, water shortages, disease, civil conflict, and other adverse effects of prolonged rapid population growth.
• Yemen, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, and Afghanistan all fall into this category.
• Among the countries that are slipping back into stage one – where high death rates offset high birth rates, thus preventing any population growth – are Botswana and South Africa.
• Within the next two decades or so, most of the countries in stage two will either have made it into stage three or fallen back to stage one.

 

The demographic bonus