[p2p-research] Scientific American on the coming Malthusian Crisis

[Ryan Lanham]

Features<http://www.scientificamerican.com/department.cfm?id=feature-articles>
-
October 2, 2009
Another Inconvenient Truth: The World's Growing Population Poses a
Malthusian Dilemma Solving climate change, the Sixth Great Extinction and
population growth... at the same time

By David Biello

By 2050, the world will host nine billion
people<http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=is-birth-control-the-answer-to-envi-2009-09-23>—and
that's if population growth slows in much of the developing world. Today, at
least one billion people are chronically malnourished or starving. Simply to
maintain that sad state of affairs would require the clearing (read:
deforestation) of 900 million additional hectares of land, according to
Pedro Sanchez, director of the Tropical Agriculture and Rural Environment
Program at The Earth Institute at Columbia University.

The bad news beyond the impacts on people, plants and animals of that kind
of deforestation<http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=can-trees-save-us-from-climate-chan-09-04-24>:
There isn't that much land available. At most, we might be able to add 100
million hectares to the 4.3 billion already under cultivation worldwide.

"Agriculture is the main driver of most ecological
problems<http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=scientists-identify-safe-limits-for-human-impacts>on
the planet," said economist Jeffrey Sachs,
*Scientific American*
columnist<http://www.scientificamerican.com/author.cfm?id=978>and
Earth Institute director. "We are literally eating away the other
species on the planet."

Sachs made his remarks yesterday at a symposium hosted by the institute on
how to improve agriculture to address the mounting challenge of feeding the
world while combating climate change and stopping the wholesale loss of
biodiversity<http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=sixth-extinction-wipes-out-animals-08-10-09>,
among other interrelated issues.

Agriculture—thanks to deforestation, nitrous oxide from fields, methane from
cattle and rice paddies—is responsible for one third of global greenhouse
gas emissions from human activity, making emissions from transporting food,
known as "food miles," a "rounding error," said ecologist Jonathan Foley,
director of the Institute on the Environment (IonE) at the University of
Minnesota. Pasture has become the dominant ecosystem on the planet, he
added, and humans directly employ some 40 percent of the surface of the
planet. "Very little of that is urban."

In addition, agriculture accounts for at least 85 percent of human water
consumption—a growing concern as aquifers diminish and hydrology
changes<http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-india-running-out-of-water>in
the face of climate change. And, by Sanchez's rough calculation,
humans
now use some 171 million tons of nitrogen as fertilizer every year, much of
which ends up polluting lakes, rivers, streams and even the ocean.
"Fifty-four percent of that is fertilizer—the Haber-Bosch process; 11
percent is atmospheric deposition—the plus side of pollution; 18 percent is
in situ fixation," or nitrogen-fixing cover crops, like legumes, Sanchez
said.

And it's not like so-called organic agriculture is helping with that:
Nitrate leaching into waterways can come from manure, as in the Netherlands
or overuse of fertilizer, as in Iowa. The result is the same: dead
zones<http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=oceanic-dead-zones-spread>
.

So how can agriculture be intensified to feed a growing population while
addressing environmental concerns? Simply put, yields on existing lands must
increase<http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=agricultures-sustainable-future>
.

That's what Norman
Borlaug<http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=norman-borlaug-wheat-breeder-who-av-2009-09-14>and
his colleagues achieved in the 1960s and 1970s with the Green
Revolution
that staved off famine for millions. Yet, "there can be no permanent
progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for
increased food production and those that fight for population control unite
in a common effort," Borlaug said in his acceptance speech for the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1970<http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1970/borlaug-acceptance.html>.
"[Man] is using his powers for increasing the rate and amount of food
production. But he is not yet using adequately his potential for decreasing
the rate of human reproduction. The result is that the rate of population
increase exceeds the rate of increase in food production in some areas."

That demographic contradiction is nowhere more true than in many countries
of sub-Saharan Africa, where a population of 800 million must subsist on
local yields of one ton per hectare—one third of yields in the rest of the
developing world and one ninth those of the U.S., Europe, Australia and
other parts of the developed world. Yet, "we already grow enough food to
feed the world, we've been doing that for decades," noted ecologist
Catherine Badgley of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (U.M.), who led
a study assessing whether organic agriculture practices alone might
adequately meet global nutritional
requirements<http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=6&fid=1195048&jid=RAF&volumeId=22&issueId=02&aid=1091304&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S1742170507001640>.
"We need to address accessibility."

Global markets for food, however, spectacularly failed in 2008 as countries
shut down exports in the face of rising grain prices. "International food
markets are deeply wounded and faith in them has collapsed. Global
institutions failed to keep food moving," Sachs said. Add to that the
looming specter of growing crops for
biofuel<http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=biofuels-bad-for-people-and-climate>,
which reduce available land for food, feed and fiber production, he said:
"Biofuel is going to be an unmitigated disaster, that's as true in an
African village as it is in Iowa." Norman
Borlaug<http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=norman-borlaug-wheat-breeder-who-av-2009-09-14>agreed
in a warning he had issued in the 1980s to agricultural economist
Mark E. Downing of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Genetically modified varieties—currently illegal in most of Africa,
according to political scientist Robert Paarlberg of Wellesley College—might
boost yields. Such biotechnology is "critical for achieving the ecological
intensification required to meet human food demand on a global scale,"
argues agronomist Ken
Cassman<http://www.agronomy.unl.edu/welcome/directory/cassman.html>of
the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. At the same time, genetic
modification is not a panacea, despite claims for drought tolerance and the
like from companies such as Monsanto. "Anything you do to reduce the water
that plants transpire will reduce yield," he added.

Perhaps, fortunately, there is still a lot of room for improvement by more
conventional means: the targeted application of fertilizer and the like. The
Earth Institute's Millennium Village of Sauri in Kenya has tripled yields
even in the face of a crippling drought gripping the region, and Malawi
doubled yields<http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-green-revolution-finally-blooming-in-africa>through
fertilizer subsidies in just four years. "If we want to increase
production, it's better to have small to medium-size farms," argued U.M.
ecologist Ivette Perfecto. "Precision agriculture is already done by [such]
farmers."

At the same time, the collapse of agriculture in the "bread basket" of
eastern Europe, such as Ukraine, leaves room to "triple food production in
that region pretty easily," IonE's Foley said.

And, ultimately, a little change in diet might do a world of good. Global
demand for beef is an inefficient way to get protein, possibly
unhealthy<http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=that-burger-youre-eating-is-mostly-corn>,
and a major driver of deforestation and greenhouse gas
emissions<http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-greenhouse-hamburger>.
"Beef is costly per kilogram ingested of both mass and protein but also
probably unhealthy," Sachs said. "We should not take dietary choices as a
given but rather as something that needs to be evaluated," at least if we
want a fighting chance to avoid the grim fate Thomas Malthus predicted.

"Sustainability is still an unsolved problem, it is the same problem Malthus
identified about 200 years ago," Sachs added. "How we feed the planet, slow
population growth<http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=is-birth-control-the-answer-to-envi-2009-09-23>,
and thereby raise living standards is still an open question."

*Editor's Note: We used Twitter to cover the conference live. Follow me @
dbiello <http://twitter.com/dbiello> or us @ sciam<http://twitter.com/sciam>.
And thanks to Jon Foley, whose presentation headline, "Another Inconvenient
Truth," I have borrowed.*


-- 
Ryan
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