Although this is before my time, I do recall seeing clips of hippies from the 1960s concerned about overpopulation and mass food shortages. Recently, I was speaking to an economics major who said “yeah, that was our [economists’] doomsday prediction, but people persevere. They always persevere.” So, what happened to solve this? And, where did all the extra food come from?"
Fertilizers and improved agricultural methods.
See The Population Bomb for what those hippies were all concerned about.
This wiki on the Green Revolution is a good start. Green Revolution - Wikipedia
Interestingly, the technology had been largely developed by the 1960s but the resulting crop yield increases hadn’t yet been fully realized. People didn’t know in the '60s that the problem has already largely been solved for a few more generations at least.
Take a look atworld wheat production. The yield per acre (in this chart, it’s per hectare) more than doubled, and the area planted increased by around 10%. Overall, total production has tripled from 1960-2015.
You’ll find similar increases for other crops, as well. While the world’s population has more than doubled, food production has mostly kept up, or even outpaced it.
The other improvement has been distribution - transportation, storage, preservation, etc.
This is why as a farmer the price I get for my crops rarely goes up and if there was a food shortage, you would think high commodity prices (based on scarcity) would be an obvious sign.
Another factor in defusing the population bomb is the Demographic Transition; most countries in the world have moved towards a low birth rate and a low death rate, making population growth low in most locations
—except Africa.
Currently the population of the world can be very roughly divided up as follows -1 billion people in Europe, one billion in the Americas, one billion in Africa, and four billion in Asia. Hans Rosling calls this the ‘pin number of the world’. 1114.
Reduced population growth will mean that in 2100, there will be 1 billion people in Europe, one billion in the Americas, four billion in Africa, and five billion in Asia. The new pin number will be 1145.
As you can see, the reduction of population growth does not seem to be happening in Africa.
Note that the green revolution and increased crop yields are largely due to petro-chemical based fertilizers, increased use of herbicides, and mechanized farming. So when and if the oil runs out, people are going to get hungry very fast and all at once.
Whether we have pulled new rabbits out of our hats by then is anyone’s guess. So it’s not clear that they were * wrong* in the 60’s, but they may have gotten the time frame off by a few decades.
And the use of large amounts of fossil water from underground, which is rapidly running out.
There are also new methods of producing food coming on such as hydroponics and more use of greenhouses. So basically food can be grown year around regardless of climate.
Even with cattle there is a move to fodder feeding as opposed to pasture so more meat can be produced with less land.
Around 1900 roughly 40% of the U.S. workforce worked in agriculture or related industries. IOW it took nearly 1/2 the workforce to feed a population (then) of 76 million people.
Today there are 318 million people in the U.S. and only a tiny fraction – less than 2% – work in agriculture. Scientific and technical advances enabled this tiny fraction to feed a much larger population.
One example of this is the Lexion 780 combine harvester: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/7Fbtzu4DUbM/maxresdefault.jpg
These machines use GPS guidance and laser scanning to track down a row of field crops within a few inches, hands off: CLAAS of America | Precision Agricultural Equipment and Technologies | CLAAS
Completely unmanned robotic versions have already been tested.
In 2010 the smaller Lexion 760 harvested over 51,000 bushels of corn (about 213 acres) in under 10 hours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHdNiQIY5_Q
Neither has the Green Revolution.
The trouble then becomes how to transport all that grain to market either domestic or overseas.
Right now we have times where all the grain elevators are full waiting for say river barges or trucks to haul it away and quite alot of it just gets dumped onto the open ground in giant mounds.
Plus most farmers do not just harvest and sell that day because prices are lower then. They will often put their grain into storage to sell at a later date.
Yes. Oil is a similar analogy. A few years ago, “peak oil” was all the rage. We were sure to soon run out of it. The price reached $140 per barrel. The industry responded to the market with new sources and improved methods, the price collapsed to $35, and now we’re swimming in oil. Problem solved.
Capitalism always finds a way. It’s a wonder that so many are against it.
It’s definitely an issue of when not if. Take the most blindly optimistic peak oil denier and force the question; he’ll eventually admit oil is a finite resource and we aren’t producing any new oil.
So there’s two policies on the future of oil: “We’re going to run low on oil someday and we should be making plans for that” and “We’re going to run low on oil someday but there’s no need to think about that”.
The second policy in action.
Also IIRC during the 1960s there was a prominent crop failure and mass starvation in an area of India (sort of like what happened in Somalia a generation ago). Unlike Somalia, or Biafra, or China in the 1950
s, or South Sudan - these areas were more the victims of bad government and/or internal conflict. The onset of mass starvation due to crop failure in the 1960’s in India seemed to reinforce the issue.
The question is whether/when the demographic shift will hit areas of Asia and Africa. As people get richer, children become less of a working asset and more of a cost during their childhood. People adjust their child-producing ways accordingly. China appears to be well on the way, including government policiies. India in some cases seems to be approaching this point. Africa (as you see, going from 1 to 4) appears to be the big question. Of course, the collateral question is - where will the food come from to feed four times as many people? Africa is too chaotic to make any increase in food production for now, and the resulting chaos if they don’t means that the wilds of big game Africa may be gone in 2 generations.
I also recommend 60’s contemporary - Harry Harrison’s “Make Room, Make Room”, which was turned into the bizarre movie “Soylent Green”. However, the 60’s apocalyptic vision of overpopulation in North America simply did not and will not happen.
So you are saying that a policy of “We’re going to run low on oil but there’s no need to think about it” worked? Hm.
Regards,
Shodan
At least 40% (I’ve heard estimates nearer 50%) of all edible human food produced in the world goes uneaten. Al that is necessary to feed nearly double the present population is to reduce waste to near zero, which can be readily done with sensible application of existing technology.
Last week, I was in a city of nearly a million in Somalia, and the people looked pretty well fed. There was plenty of food and other consumer goods in the marketplace, prices were affordable, there was no visible poverty approaching starvation. Somaliland is a net exporter of livestock, with wheat and rice the principle staples. If a region like that can be anywhere near self-feeding., it suggests to me that all that is needed is a civilized resolve that transcends globalized economics and politics, which is exactly what Somaliland is doing, absent any diplomatic recognition from any nation and no national currency.