From Perpetual Famine to Dieback

Credit: Getty Images

 As likely as any other major event this century will be a dieback of our human family and even the collapse of numerous already unstable societies. Dieback (sometimes also called a die-off) refers to a catastrophic crash, or pruning back, of the population of a species, in this case our own, Homo sapiens. The term is borrowed from botanists who use the term to describe the death, damage, or destruction to a plant, tree, or forest. It does not refer to our extinction or anything remotely similar. In these pages, it will be argued that—within the lifetimes of most of us alive today—there will likely be a catastrophic crash of the human population. Hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of people will experience untimely deaths, dying long before their natural expectations, from starvation, contaminated water, and related diseases. These horrible events may be precipitated by a decade of unusually severe weather, a rash of large scale wars, or a shift in the climate of some of the world’s major food-growing areas.  These have always plagued civilizations, triggering the eventual collapse of many, including some of history’s icons—the Mayan, Aztec, Indus, and Ancient Egypt’s Old Kingdom.

From the Abu Simbel temples in southern Egypt, dating back to the 13th century B.C.

However, they will not be required for our dieback. We have assured it ourselves by adding to nature’s already substantial challenges numerous self-inflicted stressors. We have multiplied and fed upon all the Earth until it can no longer sustain us, and naturally we have done so during a climatic period that has been most hospitable to our kind. We have overshot the planet’s limits for our species, and our numbers must plummet back to sustainable levels, whatever they may be.[i]

Roman Ruin Architecture With Predigendem St. Paul : Giovanni Paolo Panini

Predictions for large-scale famines are hardly new. In his Essay of the Principles of Population, first published in 1798, the economist Thomas Robert Malthus argued that food production could not keep up with the “superior power” of human fertility.[ii] According to him, some countries such as China, India, and those of today’s Middle East had already exceeded their land’s carrying capacity. “The average produce of these countries,” he wrote in the 1826 and last edition of Principles, “… seems to be but barely sufficient to support the lives of the inhabitants, and of course any deficiency from the badness of seasons must be fatal. Nations in this state must necessarily be subject to famines.”[iii] Yet, a century and half later, by 1968 let’s say, the world’s farmlands were supporting not only the one billion people of Malthus’s time, but three-and-half times that number. I choose the otherwise random year 1968 because that was the year that Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich came out with The Population Bomb, in which he announced, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970's the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”[iv] About India, he noted, “I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971, if ever.” And yet, again contrary to sound evidence and reason, the fifty years since Ehrlich’s predictions have witnessed a more than doubling of world population and yet an actual increase in per capita food production and an Indian subcontinent that has been as self-sufficient as most any other region for much of that time.

The toxification of the planet with synthetic chemicals may be more dangerous to people and wildlife than climate change, says Ehrlich. Photograph: Linh Pham/Getty Images

Malthus and Ehrlich may be forgiven their gloomy perspectives. After all, both lived at times when populations had started to grow at historically unseen rates. With English women having, on average, more than five children each, England’s population nearly doubled in Malthus’s lifetime, and it has risen ten-fold (from six and half million to 66 million) in the two hundred years since.[v] Ehrlich witnessed history’s greatest population boom, one that is still exploding at the rate of 9,800 additional people an hour, 235,000 people a day, 86 million a year. Both also witnessed firsthand the dire misery due to daily hunger suffered by untold millions, Malthus in 19th century England, Ehrlich in 20th century India.[vi] Surely, a sensitive soul could be touched to pessimism within sight of so much suffering.

Artist’s reconstruction of the gateway and drain at the city of Harappa. Image credit: Chris Sloan.

However, both were also guilty of mistakes in judgement and imagination. As an economist, Malthus could have been more aware of the powerful demographic and economic developments taking shape in his time.[vii] The fertility rate among Europeans was just beginning its centuries-long descent, and, through mass migrations, Europeans were moving their access millions to the settler states of the Americas and Australia.[viii] Both these demographic shifts had the effect of relieving Europe’s population pressures. At the same time, huge expanses of forests and grasslands in the new settler states as well as in Eastern Europe and Russia were being converted into farmland, from which Europe imported much of the harvests.[ix] It is harder to fault Malthus for his lack of imagination and clairvoyance. In the early 20th century, a century after Principles, two developments completely changed the human landscape. One was the Haber-Bosch chemical process that produced synthetic fertilizer at industrial scales, solving farming’s age-old problem of soil fatigue.[x] The other was the rise of petroleum production and then the development of motors and engines that led to mechanized agriculture, cold storage, and the rapid and inexpensive transportation of produce from farm to table.[xi]

Infrastructure Collapse : Jon Baldwin

Similarly, Paul Ehrlich missed the nascent miracles of the hybrid seeds that had already boosted yields in Mexico and the United States, was beginning to do so in India and Pakistan, and, indeed, had been coined the Green Revolution by William Gaud, an administrator at the U.S. Agency of International Development, in the very same year that Ehrlich’s book was first published.[xii] Ehrlich had fathomed the ramifications of the global population explosion but somehow failed to appreciate the technological marvels responsible for exploding yields of rice, wheat, and corn.

Artist: Eflam Mercier.

The failed predictions of widespread famine famously made by Malthus for the 19th century and Ehrlich for the 20th century have cast a long shadow over, if not completely discredited, similar perspectives. This is both understandable and unfortunate. Understandable because repeated failure usually suggests a mistake in theorem and because depictions of apocalypse have become so commonplace—indeed, regular entertainment for a world-weary chic—that a little optimism seems refreshingly sincere. It is unfortunate because we are dismissing a horrible truth: overpopulation and famine are not distant mirages; they are present day realities.

For the past half-century, humanity has experienced a quiet, nearly invisible, yet perpetual famine… if we mean by famine large-scale hunger and starvation.[1] At any one time, 800 million to a billion people have been severely undernourished calorically. Some six million children under the age of ten die of hunger each year, as do perhaps twice as many adults, mostly women. As a result of deficiencies in essential nutrients, an unimaginable two billion people suffer disabling and preventable maladies, including blindness, anemia, and physical and mental stunting.[xiii] Unlike the acute famines of the past, Civilization’s perpetual famine has not been concentrated in any one country, but rather has proceeded as a chronic event spread unevenly across the globe, thereby losing the concreteness that our minds need in order to name and recognize it. To rescue it from vague abstraction, I name it a perpetual famine.  

Likely, for much of history, perpetual famine has often been the chronic condition into which the horrors of acute famines intermittently visited. Hunger’s pervasive existential presence can be inferred from all the human measures that changed dramatically for the better when food later became abundant. For most of human existence, going right into the 20th century, human stature, weight, and lifespans remained significantly below the human potential.[2] As the human population increased through the millennia, so did the sheer numbers suffering from hunger and its disabilities. Until sometime between the years 1750 and 1800 there had never even been 800 million people living at any one time.[xiv] Since the 1960s there have been at least that many people suffering from hunger, alone.[xv]

What recasts this cumulative suffering to a humanity-level tragedy is that, according to all experts, the billions of undernourished and malnourished people and the hundreds of millions who have starved in the past two centuries have done so at a time of food abundance.[xvi] There have been actually no true food shortages during this time. If mere availability were the only factor that determined everyone’s access to food, then no one would have starved. Sometimes, as in the Great Irish Famine of 1845-1849 and the Bengal famine of 1943, millions starved in plain sight of the grocery stores and granaries.[xvii] Globally, Civilization has produced enough food to provide everyone a sufficient diet… and still billions have suffered terribly for lack of nourishment.

What is being proposed here is that this century will likely be the first in which Civilization will experience true food shortages across the globe. For, what separates this century from all our past is the immensity and intensity of the human impact. It has become global, ubiquitous, devastating at the local level, toxic beyond anything else found in nature, and it has been relentless. Both the Earth’s ability to provide resources and its ability to absorb our wastes have reached their limits. While humans have been for thousands of years slowly unraveling the biosphere’s tight complex weave, we have in just the last century accelerated our impact to such a degree that we are straining the biosphere—that is, a biosphere accommodating to our species—to its breaking point. The rising demands of the additional billions and the improvement of diets for other billions expected in many developing countries—“eating up the food chain”—will further degrade our food-producing capacities and will continue to accelerate the biosphere’s destruction. The coming blogs will address these problems.

A Kenya Wildlife Services (KWS) ranger stands guard around illegal stockpiles of burning elephant tusks, ivory figurines and rhinoceros horns at the Nairobi National Park in April 2016. Carl de Souza—AFP/Getty Images

The human population, the consumption of natural resources, and the release of pollution has increased with each century, each decade, and most every year. Correspondingly, every marker of ecological health finds that the Civilization’s destruction of the biosphere has been escalating and that we are now entering dangerous and historically unprecedented threshold changes to that system. The relevant factors are many, interrelated, and their interactions complex. A short list of those with the greatest likely impact on the biosphere, food security, and the viability of Civilization includes:

•      The human population has more than doubled in just the past fifty years and has grown an unprecedented seven-fold in the past two hundred years. There is nothing in our long past that comes remotely close to either our present numbers or the speed at which we have arrived at them.  

•    During that same time, the consumption of natural resources has increased even faster. Energy use, alone, rose more than ninety-fold.[xviii] That’s more than a ten-fold increase per capita. This helped fuel a nearly twenty-fold rise in global wealth during the 20th century.[xix]

•    This extraordinary enterprise has been fueled by releasing the tremendous energies stored underground in fossil and nuclear fuels. By all accounts, reserves will probably be effectively depleted this century and we will exacerbate our environmental troubles in using them.[xx] Whether alternative fuels can continue powering our high energy lifestyles remains uncertain.[xxi]

•     Although Civilization will be demanding even more from the Earth, we will have less to work with. We have already passed “peak everything,” as Richard Heinberg put it, where “everything” denotes all those material conditions necessary to sustain industrial civilization, including oil, coal, and gas, arable land area and soil fertility, groundwater reserves, wild fish stocks, forests, climate stability, uranium, copper, phosphorus, and other important metals and minerals, as well as most every other important resource, renewable and otherwise.[xxii]

• Climate change due to the warming of the atmosphere and oceans has likely already crossed dangerous thresholds. Consequences are sure to include devastating crop losses, inundation of the world’s great coastal cities, volatile weather events, vast disruptions in terrestrial and ocean ecosystems, and the poleward expansion of deadly mosquito- and tic-borne diseases.

• Both biodiversity and the absolute amount of wild biomass have declined significantly. This simplifying and shrinking of ecosystems leaves them far more vulnerable to stressors such as droughts, floods, and infestations.

• Technological innovations, upon which so many people are pinning their hopes, often exacerbate the problems in unforeseen ways. Bioengineering, geoengineering, nuclear engineering, nanotechnology and materials science in general, the internet, robotics, cybernetics, virtual reality, and AI, to name just a few, present us with the Faustian bargain of limitless power and potential self-annihilation.

• Corporate and financial capitalism, a wealth-production system without equal, holds unparalleled influence over every aspect of our lives, profits by the clever manipulation of short-term thinking, and stands as the main obstacle to the fundamental changes needed for humanity’s long-term viability.

• The life of each and every person is now shaped not by just local circumstances, but also by powerful, often invisible forces from numerous actors around the world, collectively referred to as economic globalism. Transnational and supranational in structure, decision-making and operation, organizations as varied as ExxonMobil and the WTO circumvent the democratic process, thwarting personal and national sovereignty.

• Innovations in technology and economy evolve far faster than can cultural and biological adaptations. Religious mores, psychosocial development, and cultural values, beliefs, and traditions are not changing fast enough to keep up with the human-created challenges.

Most of us in the First World can appreciate the unprecedented conditions of our present lifestyles. The mistake we make is believing that these times are a continuum of inevitable progress, of evolution in some presumed direction of material betterment for all people. More likely, however, our inflated numbers and expanded lifestyles are the exception not only to history but to the future, as well.

Even if we change the operating rules of the Civilization system to more equitably share resources among the 9.7 billion people projected to be living in 2050, the challenges to that global system will be formidable, albeit more evenly spread. Working against that ideal, Civilization has evolved a deeply entrenched inequity that perpetuates itself. Those with wealth and power do not voluntarily relinquish their privileges. This is no less true of union workers making $50,000 a year than CEOs with three homes and a yacht. Naturally, therefore, as the conditions of climate and food security worsen, the poorest billions will suffer most. Should Civilization continue to prove incapable of distributing food to everyone, famines will be far worse than sheer production numbers would suggest. Refugees will surely flee these distressed regions in mass migrations, overwhelming cities and border countries, kindling violent conflict, and challenging the viability of unstable governments.[xxiii]  First World countries, too, will be rocked by these events, as their wealth and border walls cannot protect them from heat waves and other severe weather events, water scarcity, and the flood of climate refugees expected this century.[xxiv]

FOOTNOTES

[1] Hunger includes both undernutrition—due to an insufficient supply of calories—and malnutrition, which results from inappropriate nutrient intake. There are numerous working definitions for famine (see those, for example, compiled by Ravallion,1997; Howe and Devereux, 2004) as well as the United Nations recent IPC scale (http://www.ipcinfo.org/). Here, I am using the general description used by Cormac Ó Gráda (2007) where “famine entails a widespread lack of food leading directly to excess mortality from starvation or hunger-induced illnesses”.

Ravallion, M. (1997.) “Famines and Economics.” Journal of Economic Literature, 35(3): 1205–42.

Howe, P., and Devereux, S. (2004) “Famine Intensity and Magnitude Scales: A Proposal for an Instrumental Definition of Famine.” Disasters, 28(4): 353–72.

Ó Gráda, C. (2007) Making Famine History, Journal of Economic Literature, v. 45, pp. 3-36.

[2] We are approaching the human biological potential in most well-fed countries (Fogel, R.W. (2004) The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World. Cambridge University Press, NY.)

ENDNOTES

[i] Catton, W.R. (1982) Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, Univ. Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago.

[ii] Malthus, T. (1798/1970: Chapter 1) An Essay of the Principle of Population. Pelican Classics, Harmondsworth, England. 

[iii] Malthus, T.R. (1826, Book 2, Chapter 13)) An Essay on the Principle of Population, 6th ed.

[iv] Ehrlich, P. (1968) The Population Bomb. Buccaneer Books, Cutchogue, New York.

[v] Livi-Bacci, M. (2001:18) A Concise History of World Population. Blackwell, Massachusetts.

[vi] Fogel, R.W. (2004) The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World. Cambridge University Press, NY.

[vii] Ponting (1991) A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations. Penguin Books, New York.

Livi-Bacci (2001), Fogel (2004).

 [viii] Fertility-Sax (1955), Livi-Bacci (2001), Fogel (2004).  Migrations—Sax (1955), Ponting (1991).

Sax, K. (1955) Standing Room Only: The World’s Exploding Population. Beacon Press, Boston, MA.

[ix] U.S. Census Bureau (1960), Ponting (1991:244).

U.S. Census Bureau (1960) Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1957.

[x] Erisman, J.W., Sutton, M.A., Galloway, J., Klimont, Z., and Winiwarter, W. (2008) How a century of ammonia synthesis changed the world. Nature Geoscience, v. 1, pp. 636-639. 

[xi] Ponting (1991).

[xii] U.S. Census Bureau (1960), Borlaug (1970), Nielsen (2017).

Borlaug, N.E. (1970) Nobel Lecture: The Green Revolution, Peace, and Humanity, pp. 59-78, in Norman Borlaug on World Hunger, A. Dil (Editor), 1997, Bookservice International, San Diego, CA.

Nielsen, R.L. (2017) Historical Corn Grain Yields for the U.S.

[xiii] Marx (1997), FAO (1997, 2017), Ames (1999, 2001), Black, M. (2003), Black, R. (2003), Pimentel (2003), Underwood (2003), Sanchez and Swaminathan (2005), Barrett (2010), Ziegler (2013), Gernand et al. (2016).

Marx, J. (1997) Iron deficiency in developed countries: prevalence, influence of lifestyle factors and hazards of prevention, European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, v. 51, pp. 491-494.

FAO (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization) (1997) Preventing Micronutrient: A Guide to Food-Based Approaches: Why Policy Makers Should Give Priority to Food-Based Strategies.

FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO (2017) The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2017: Building resilience for peace and food security. Rome, FAO.

Ames, B.N. (1999) Micronutrient Deficiencies: A Major Cause of DNA Damage, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, v. 889, p. 87-106.

Ames, B.M. (2001) DNA Damage from Micronutrient Deficiencies is Likely to be a Major Cause of Cancer. Mutation Research/Fundamental and Molecular Mechanisms of Mutagenesis, v. 475, p. 7-20.

Black, M. (2003) Micronutrient Deficiencies and Cognitive Functioning, Journal of Nutrition, v. 133, 3927S-3931S.

Black, R. (2003) Micronutrient Deficiency-An Underlying Cause of Morbidity and Mortality. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, v. 81, no. 2.

Pimentel, D. (2003) Malnutrition, Disease, and the Developing World. Science, v. 300, p. 251.

Underwood (2003) Scientific Research: Essential, but is it Enough to Combat World Food Insecurities? Journal of Nutrition, v. 133, pp. 1434s-1437s.

Sanchez, P.A. and Swaminathan, M.S. (2005) Cutting World Hunger in Half. Science, v. 307, p. 357-359.

Barrett, C.B. (2010) Measuring Food Insecurity. Science, v. 327, pp. 825-828.

Ziegler, J. (2013) Betting on Famine: Why the World Still Goes Hungry. The New Press, New York.

Gernand, A., D., Schulze, K.J., Stewart, C.P., West Jr., K.P., and Christian, P. (2016) Micronutrient Deficiencies in Pregnancy Worldwide: Health Effects and Prevention. Nature Reviews Endocrinology, v. 12, pp. 274-289.

[xiv] Historical population estimates come from studies compiled by the United States Census Bureau, but no longer available at the USCB website.

[xv] FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO (2017) The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2017: Building resilience for peace and food security. Rome, FAO.

[xvi] Sen (1982, 2002), Lappé, Collins, and Rosset (1998), Smil (2000b), Ó Gráda (2007).  

 Sen, A. (1982) Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Sen, A. (2002, June 16) Why Half the Planet is Hungry, Observer of London.

Lappé, F.M., Collins, J., and Rosset, P. (1998) World Hunger: Twelve Myths. Grove Press, New York.

Smil, V. (2000b) Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century, The MIT Press, Cambridge Mass.

Ó Gráda, C. (2007) Making Famine History, Journal of Economic Literature, v. 45, pp. 3-36.

[xvii] Dreze and Sen (1989), Ó Gráda (2007).

Dreze, J. and Sen, A. (1989) Hunger and Public Action. Oxford University Press, New York.

 [xviii] Cohen, J. E. (1995b) Population Growth and Earth’s Human Carrying Capacity, Science, v. 269, pp. 341-346. Cohen referred specifically to energy increase from 1860-1991.

[xix] IMF (International Monetary Fund) (2000) World Economic Outlook: Asset Prices and the Business Cycle.

[xx] Campbell and Laherrere (1998), Aleklett and Campbell (2003), Heinberg (2003, 2007), Smil (2005), Shafiee and Topal (2009), McGlade and Ektins (2015).

Campbell, C.J., and Laherrere, J.H. (1998) The End of Cheap Oil, Scientific American, March, pp. 78-83.

Aleklett, K., and Campbell, C. (2003) The Peak and Decline of World Oil And Gas Production, Minerals and Energy, v. 18, P. 5-20. 

Heinberg, R. (2003) The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, Canada.

Heinberg, R. (2007) Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, Canada.

Smil, V. (2005) Energy at the Crossroads: Global Perspectives and Uncertainties, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Shafiee, S., and Topal, E. (2009) When will fossil fuel reserves be diminished? Energy Policy, v. 37(1), pp. 181-189.

[xxi] Smil, V. (2006) 21st Century Energy: Some Sobering Thoughts, OECD Observer, No. 258/259, pp. 22-23.

[xxii] Heinberg (2007).

[xxiii] McKibben (2010:83), Black et al. (2011), Adler, (2014), Porter and Russell (2018).

 McKibben, B. (2010) eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York.

Black, R., Bennett, S.R.G., Thomas, S.M., and Beddington, J.R. (2011) Migration as Adaptation. Nature, v. 478, pp. 447-448.

Adler, J. (2014, May) The Reality of a Hotter World is Already Here. Smithsonian Magazine.

Porter, E., and Russell, K. (2018, June 20) Migrants Are on the Rise Around the World, and Myths are Shaping Attitudes. New York Times.

[xxiv] See for example, Porter and Russell (2018).