8 ms·

This is interesting political analysis, but the fact remains that the global population is topping out at several billion with almost all arable land already be

This is interesting political analysis, but the fact remains that the global population is topping out at several billion with almost all arable land already being farmed and ecological impacts accumulating. All these related problems may have solutions, but reframing the situation doesn't really address potential for improvement.

jonnycomputer 6y ago
Yes. Problems like this one: https://phys.org/news/2021-01-arctic-microplastic-pollution.html https://phys.org/news/2021-01-arctic-microplastic-pollution.... are an unintended consequence of scale. I don't have good solutions, and the way our economies are set up discourage population degrowth (see the panic in Europe), and there are many bad, immoral ways to go about it, but so many of our problems are not a problem with technologies employed, but the scale at which they are employed.
saddlerustle 6y ago
If we were running low on resources for food production you'd expect to see food prices increasing. But broadly, food is cheaper than ever.
- slothtrop 6y ago
  Ecological damage and collapses occur well before we'd run out of resources. Just because we can encroach on more and more land, at the expense of the environment, doesn't mean there isn't a problem.
  - majani 6y ago
    Increasing agricultural productivity nowadays doesn't involve encroaching more land. And the developing nations, where the populations are booming, are still on the lower end of agricultural productivity. Combine that with the fact that populations appear to top off at a certain level of prosperity, and you'll realize that we'll be just fine.
    - slothtrop 6y ago
      > Increasing agricultural productivity nowadays doesn't involve encroaching more land. What are you talking about? 41% of US land is used for livestock production. It's not that efficient, and the perpetual increase in population will just push that higher. > Combine that with the fact that populations appear to top off at a certain level of prosperity, and you'll realize that we'll be just fine. We don't all share in that prosperity. Population is still set to grow in the (perpetually) developing world plagued by poverty. The population growth rate in the 1st world is a targeted rate, a matter of policy, which is met by increasing immigration. Fertility rates on the global scale won't drop so long as child mortality and quality of life isn't improve across the board, and consequently the growth rate in the 1st world is also here to stay.
- jaegerpicker 6y ago
  Food has two types of cost, market value and ecosystem cost. It always has been this case. It's the very reason that crop rotation was discovered. By improving the ecosystem that you farm in (in this case soil but Tree windbreaks also count etc...) you increase the productivity. The issue is that most ways to improve productivity are terribly short term. Think slash/burn. So yes food is cheaper than ever to buy but we are burning through environmental capital at dangerous and irresponsible rate IMO. The cost of food will stay cheap until it's too late and the land stops producing at the current level.
  - saddlerustle 6y ago
    What, exactly, will "run out" that affects most food production? The remaining soil lifespan in societies with developed agriculture is hundreds of years, and relatively cheap practices can extend that to thousands of years.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      Water https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/grace/study-third-of-big-groundwater-basins-in-distress https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/grace/study-third-of-big-groundwate...
      - saddlerustle 6y ago
        Managing groundwater is an economic co-ordination problem, not a limit to food production. We currently produce crops that are very, very inefficient in terms of water per calorie, because people like them and some jurisdictions like California don't have effective water markets.
        lotsofpulp 6y ago
        I predict nothing will change until nature forces it, at which point the damage will be irreversible. A small fraction of people live the high life, but a large fraction has tasted it, and almost everyone has seen it. Effectively no one is going to cut down on their consumption because they’re calculating (correctly, in my opinion) that even if they do, someone else will step in and consume their portion anyway.
- beckingz 6y ago
  The market can stay irrational longer than our biosphere can stay solvent.
- saalweachter 6y ago
  The thing everyone always forgets about food production in armchair analysis is that it is not constant. Some years we produce more, some years we produce less. We can smooth across space and time to keep short-term or regional shortfalls from becoming a famine, and we do so most of the time, most places. In any year, in any place where there is not a famine, we are, by definition, producing more food than anyone wants to consume, in aggregate at least if not for individuals. Whenever you are producing an excess of something, the price will fall. Famine, if it happens, won't happen as a slow decline of food production, until at a predictable time we cross from producing 100.0000001% of the food the world needs to producing 99.9999999%. It will happen as a slow decline reducing our safety margin until some sort of three-sigma weather event makes for a really bad year -- flooding in some regions kill production here, drought in other regions kills production there, a blight on crops in otherwise fair weather, and the production for the next N months falls below the level of the stockpiles to last. That is the point at which the market will react and food prices will go crazy. It won't do anything to help production -- some things take time, not money. It will just be the world playing musical chairs to see who gets left without enough food to eat.
  - saddlerustle 6y ago
    Developed countries produce, not a little bit, but multiples of calories than is consumed because people choose to pay extra for tastier but less efficient calories through livestock, and tolerate food waste for convenient packaging and higher quality selection. I don't see any sign of a downwards trend in this ratio.
    - saalweachter 6y ago
      Oh yes; you can slaughter millions of extra cows and pigs in the US to realize a huge number of available calories, while redirecting the grain back to humans, all with no more ethical worries than you've already accepted in producing & consuming meat. A number of other inefficiencies can also go away under emergency conditions -- people will get less picky about their fruits and vegetables in a hurry, and it won't spend as long on supermarket shelves anyway. From purely a US standpoint, yeah, I suspect our agricultural buffers are good enough for anything but a "volcano blotting out the sun" level deviation from the norm. Call it, four sigmas of food security. You'd need an event that only happens once every ten thousand years or so to really bring the US to its knees, agriculturally. My point is -- I don't think food prices will shift much as long as the buffer is positive. If our margin narrows -- less livestock, more of it grass fed on marginal lands, grain spending less time in silos before being processed into food -- to two or three sigmas of food security, I don't think that you'll see food prices rise significantly, from market pressure. I think if things go badly (and there's no guarantee of it at this point), it happens slowly at first, and then quickly, and you can't just point at food prices being low to say it's not about to turn from slow to quick.
riffraff 6y ago
Isn't a lot of land in the developing world still producing far less then it could?
- hnmullany 6y ago
  African agricultural productivity is at about 1/10 US rates. So lots of headroom for improvement there.
Supermancho 6y ago
> with almost all arable land already being farmed Source? I don't think this is a matter of fact.
- corty 6y ago
  Well, we are currently removing the last big forests like Amazonas for agriculture. Have the population double again, then it's gone for certain.
  - saddlerustle 6y ago
    Agricultural land use only went up ~10% as the world went from from ~4 billion to ~8 billion people. It has been almost entirely offset by increased agricultural productivity.
    - corty 6y ago
      And how much can we increase agri productivity? Will it grow exponentially along with the population? Otherwise, we will need that land.
      - saddlerustle 6y ago
        Assuming increasing wealth and technology development, infinitely, because there's crops we can grow with no land assuming very cheap energy
      - throwaway316943 6y ago
        Population growth hasn’t been exponential for half a century. Get your facts straight.
        corty 6y ago
        It has, the only obscuring factor is China's one-child-policy and Europe's and North America's decline. The rest is still very much in exponential growth. Only the last 20 years at best saw some possible downward trend, but there have been similar variations before. So that's like reading the climate from small changes in weather, a fool's errand. Until there is a firm trend for a shrinking or stagnating population, all the small variations just lead to wishful thinking like yours. You cannot just ignore math and biology, populations will grow exponentially until they hit a limit.
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
The article is not arguing that the Earth should support 1 trillion people or some equally unsustainable numbers. This is not the point. The point is the racist and genocidal undertones expressed by malthus and repeated even nowadays: "wealthy countries can thrive and use a lot of resources while people in the global south can starve and die of disease to reduce population" EDIT: why all the downvotes, huh?
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  I downvoted you because you used racism and genocide as a thought-stopping cliché. There is no reason to ignore that countries like Niger will inevitably run into even more problems if they continue reproducing according to contemporary UN models. The projections go to 70 million people for Niger in 2050, and they have actually slightly underestimated African population growth in the past. Feeding 70 million people in a mostly desert country with no industry to speak of is a real issue and it should not be ignored just because America has developed an allergy on anything that might be construed as racism.
mpweiher 6y ago
Fortunately land use has been pretty much steady since 1990[1], despite world population increasing by around 45%[2]. This is due to land use for agriculture per person dropping rapidly[3]. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-agricultural-area-over-the-long-term https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-agricultural-area-o... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population?time=1985..latest&country=IND~CHN~NGA~BRA~IDN~USA~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population?time=1985..lat... [3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-agricultural-land-use-per-person?time=1900..2016 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-agricultural-land-u...

jonnycomputer 6y ago

Yes. Problems like this one: https://phys.org/news/2021-01-arctic-microplastic-pollution.html https://phys.org/news/2021-01-arctic-microplastic-pollution.... are an unintended consequence of scale. I don't have good solutions, and the way our economies are set up discourage population degrowth (see the panic in Europe), and there are many bad, immoral ways to go about it, but so many of our problems are not a problem with technologies employed, but the scale at which they are employed.

saddlerustle 6y ago

If we were running low on resources for food production you'd expect to see food prices increasing. But broadly, food is cheaper than ever.

slothtrop 6y ago
Ecological damage and collapses occur well before we'd run out of resources. Just because we can encroach on more and more land, at the expense of the environment, doesn't mean there isn't a problem.
- majani 6y ago
  Increasing agricultural productivity nowadays doesn't involve encroaching more land. And the developing nations, where the populations are booming, are still on the lower end of agricultural productivity. Combine that with the fact that populations appear to top off at a certain level of prosperity, and you'll realize that we'll be just fine.
  - slothtrop 6y ago
    > Increasing agricultural productivity nowadays doesn't involve encroaching more land. What are you talking about? 41% of US land is used for livestock production. It's not that efficient, and the perpetual increase in population will just push that higher. > Combine that with the fact that populations appear to top off at a certain level of prosperity, and you'll realize that we'll be just fine. We don't all share in that prosperity. Population is still set to grow in the (perpetually) developing world plagued by poverty. The population growth rate in the 1st world is a targeted rate, a matter of policy, which is met by increasing immigration. Fertility rates on the global scale won't drop so long as child mortality and quality of life isn't improve across the board, and consequently the growth rate in the 1st world is also here to stay.
jaegerpicker 6y ago
Food has two types of cost, market value and ecosystem cost. It always has been this case. It's the very reason that crop rotation was discovered. By improving the ecosystem that you farm in (in this case soil but Tree windbreaks also count etc...) you increase the productivity. The issue is that most ways to improve productivity are terribly short term. Think slash/burn. So yes food is cheaper than ever to buy but we are burning through environmental capital at dangerous and irresponsible rate IMO. The cost of food will stay cheap until it's too late and the land stops producing at the current level.
- saddlerustle 6y ago
  What, exactly, will "run out" that affects most food production? The remaining soil lifespan in societies with developed agriculture is hundreds of years, and relatively cheap practices can extend that to thousands of years.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Water https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/grace/study-third-of-big-groundwater-basins-in-distress https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/grace/study-third-of-big-groundwate...
    - saddlerustle 6y ago
      Managing groundwater is an economic co-ordination problem, not a limit to food production. We currently produce crops that are very, very inefficient in terms of water per calorie, because people like them and some jurisdictions like California don't have effective water markets.
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        I predict nothing will change until nature forces it, at which point the damage will be irreversible. A small fraction of people live the high life, but a large fraction has tasted it, and almost everyone has seen it. Effectively no one is going to cut down on their consumption because they’re calculating (correctly, in my opinion) that even if they do, someone else will step in and consume their portion anyway.
beckingz 6y ago
The market can stay irrational longer than our biosphere can stay solvent.
saalweachter 6y ago
The thing everyone always forgets about food production in armchair analysis is that it is not constant. Some years we produce more, some years we produce less. We can smooth across space and time to keep short-term or regional shortfalls from becoming a famine, and we do so most of the time, most places. In any year, in any place where there is not a famine, we are, by definition, producing more food than anyone wants to consume, in aggregate at least if not for individuals. Whenever you are producing an excess of something, the price will fall. Famine, if it happens, won't happen as a slow decline of food production, until at a predictable time we cross from producing 100.0000001% of the food the world needs to producing 99.9999999%. It will happen as a slow decline reducing our safety margin until some sort of three-sigma weather event makes for a really bad year -- flooding in some regions kill production here, drought in other regions kills production there, a blight on crops in otherwise fair weather, and the production for the next N months falls below the level of the stockpiles to last. That is the point at which the market will react and food prices will go crazy. It won't do anything to help production -- some things take time, not money. It will just be the world playing musical chairs to see who gets left without enough food to eat.
- saddlerustle 6y ago
  Developed countries produce, not a little bit, but multiples of calories than is consumed because people choose to pay extra for tastier but less efficient calories through livestock, and tolerate food waste for convenient packaging and higher quality selection. I don't see any sign of a downwards trend in this ratio.
  - saalweachter 6y ago
    Oh yes; you can slaughter millions of extra cows and pigs in the US to realize a huge number of available calories, while redirecting the grain back to humans, all with no more ethical worries than you've already accepted in producing & consuming meat. A number of other inefficiencies can also go away under emergency conditions -- people will get less picky about their fruits and vegetables in a hurry, and it won't spend as long on supermarket shelves anyway. From purely a US standpoint, yeah, I suspect our agricultural buffers are good enough for anything but a "volcano blotting out the sun" level deviation from the norm. Call it, four sigmas of food security. You'd need an event that only happens once every ten thousand years or so to really bring the US to its knees, agriculturally. My point is -- I don't think food prices will shift much as long as the buffer is positive. If our margin narrows -- less livestock, more of it grass fed on marginal lands, grain spending less time in silos before being processed into food -- to two or three sigmas of food security, I don't think that you'll see food prices rise significantly, from market pressure. I think if things go badly (and there's no guarantee of it at this point), it happens slowly at first, and then quickly, and you can't just point at food prices being low to say it's not about to turn from slow to quick.

riffraff 6y ago

Isn't a lot of land in the developing world still producing far less then it could?

hnmullany 6y ago
African agricultural productivity is at about 1/10 US rates. So lots of headroom for improvement there.

Supermancho 6y ago

> with almost all arable land already being farmed Source? I don't think this is a matter of fact.

corty 6y ago
Well, we are currently removing the last big forests like Amazonas for agriculture. Have the population double again, then it's gone for certain.
- saddlerustle 6y ago
  Agricultural land use only went up ~10% as the world went from from ~4 billion to ~8 billion people. It has been almost entirely offset by increased agricultural productivity.
  - corty 6y ago
    And how much can we increase agri productivity? Will it grow exponentially along with the population? Otherwise, we will need that land.
    - saddlerustle 6y ago
      Assuming increasing wealth and technology development, infinitely, because there's crops we can grow with no land assuming very cheap energy
    - throwaway316943 6y ago
      Population growth hasn’t been exponential for half a century. Get your facts straight.
      - corty 6y ago
        It has, the only obscuring factor is China's one-child-policy and Europe's and North America's decline. The rest is still very much in exponential growth. Only the last 20 years at best saw some possible downward trend, but there have been similar variations before. So that's like reading the climate from small changes in weather, a fool's errand. Until there is a firm trend for a shrinking or stagnating population, all the small variations just lead to wishful thinking like yours. You cannot just ignore math and biology, populations will grow exponentially until they hit a limit.

eeZah7Ux 6y ago

The article is not arguing that the Earth should support 1 trillion people or some equally unsustainable numbers. This is not the point. The point is the racist and genocidal undertones expressed by malthus and repeated even nowadays: "wealthy countries can thrive and use a lot of resources while people in the global south can starve and die of disease to reduce population" EDIT: why all the downvotes, huh?

inglor_cz 6y ago
I downvoted you because you used racism and genocide as a thought-stopping cliché. There is no reason to ignore that countries like Niger will inevitably run into even more problems if they continue reproducing according to contemporary UN models. The projections go to 70 million people for Niger in 2050, and they have actually slightly underestimated African population growth in the past. Feeding 70 million people in a mostly desert country with no industry to speak of is a real issue and it should not be ignored just because America has developed an allergy on anything that might be construed as racism.

mpweiher 6y ago

Fortunately land use has been pretty much steady since 1990[1], despite world population increasing by around 45%[2]. This is due to land use for agriculture per person dropping rapidly[3]. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-agricultural-area-over-the-long-term https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-agricultural-area-o... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population?time=1985..latest&country=IND~CHN~NGA~BRA~IDN~USA~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population?time=1985..lat... [3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-agricultural-land-use-per-person?time=1900..2016 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-agricultural-land-u...