Nine Billion Ain’t the Start of It

Any number multiplied by 27 billion will be fairly big, so the prospects of the planet coming up with three meals a day for nine billion humans on the planet some 40 years from now has some people worried.

The worrying went mainstream during 2007 when a sudden hike in the price of groceries fomented food riots in over 40 countries, and many thought this was an omen of a resource-crunched future. But then global recession put a lid on food prices and food scarcity dropped from the news. Those still worrying over resource and population crunches are about the only population in the world that is dwindling.

Some of them met at the University of Toronto two-day conference sponsored by two esteemed peace groups of a scientific and progressive hue, Pugwash and Science for Peace.

To my pleasant surprise, the opening session was not a rehash of the oldtime population bomb harangues associated with what used to be called the “population control” movement. Indeed, since 1994, when a United Nations conference repositioned the population issue as a human rights, women’s equality and environmental protection issue, population has been as much about social policy as numbers.

Susan McDaniel, a ranking expert in demography from the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, made sure the hundred people at the opening session on November 20 knew that population theories had come a long way, baby.

Numbers alone can’t be blamed for that many problems, she says. Countries with low populations, such as Canada, still have pollution and hunger, for example, while typhoons, drought and other calamities strike crowded and uncrowded countries equally.

Elite organizations like to identify over-population as the world’s number 1 problem because “population growth is about the only environmental issue that the rich can’t be blamed for.” She also stressed that the best contraceptives against overpopulation were not condoms, but “the education and empowerment of women,” which few population programs sponsored by wealthy nations devote resources to.

For someone like me who’s new to population issues, the most startling opening night speaker was Robert Hoffman, president of whatIf Technologies, a consulting company that specializes in crunching numbers and turning them into graphs for major corporations and government departments — what the pro’s call simulation and scenario modeling.

He stimulated remodeling of my scenarios, that’s for sure.

The big problem is not the sheer numbers of population growth, Hoffman argues.

Moderate United Nations estimates show a trendline that doesn’t level off until 2050, when the world will be home to 9 billion people. That’s almost a 50 per cent increase in population, and will lead to a 50 per cent increase in demand for food and other resources. But that’s not the half of it. The big bulge is not just people but old people – what demographers call dependents.

The ageing problem gets worse the more the fertility problem of too many newborns gets better. By 2050, the ratio of seniors to working age people will double. There will be so many dependent seniors that each working age person in the world will have to provide for the equivalent of two-thirds of a non-productive person on top of their productive selves. Don’t worry about today’s “sandwich years” of boomers, sandwiched between child and parental dependents, which only lasts a decade or so until kids grow up and parents pass on. This may be the new normal for an entire working life.

To make matters worse, that jump in demand for increased productivity of working age people will coincide with an inevitable decline in factors that produce productivity, especially around food. Just as people had their eye on the wrong ball when they followed fertility rates rather than age distribution, ag and food experts tracked productivity of plants rather than land – a little bit of hubris that comes from thinking human ingenuity and tinkering, such as genetic engineering, can get the smartest critter that ever lived on Planet Earth out of any problem.

The problem is that land, on which even genetically engineered plants grow, will be plummeting in productivity. High-quality land is going to suburban sprawl and fuel crops, medium quality drylands are being lost to drought (think Australia and the North American prairies), while low-quality land from former rainforests is expanding. Declining land quality dictates that yields will take a hard fall by 2020, Hoffman’s figures show.

That’s a decade-away deadline no-one’s thinking about as we sleepwalk toward next month’s Missing in Action event in Copenhagen next month.

The long and short of it? “We have to do other things besides reduce population,” says Hoffman, who recently became a member of the Club of Rome, a global organizations of heavy thinkers on resource depletion.

We have to stop sprawl over prime land as of today, he says, and stop using scarce land to grow crops for car fuel, he says. We also need to stop factory-farmed livestock, because grain-fed livestock use up far too much prime land for the nutrients they provide. When it comes to inefficient land use, “the real population crisis is livestock, not people” he says.

(adapted from NOW Magazine, November 26-December 2, 2009)