15. MALTHUSIANISM

(Or, how Nature Only Has to Win Once)

The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.

- Thomas Robert Malthus

Have you ever been so hungry you begged for food?

Or lied when a friend asked if you had food to spare?

I have.

While on escape and evasion training, a group of us clad in grey coveralls and boots without laces were starved and chased by police tactical teams across snow-covered eastern Ontario over several days in the late fall. Despite orders not to, most of us approached isolated farm houses in our area to ask for anything they could spare. The need to eat was as strong or stronger than the fear of getting caught because to keep running, we needed food and there was never enough. There wasn’t any food, in fact, and the lesson we learned was that in a survival situation, you do what you must. If that includes breaking rules, that’s reality.

What’s also reality is that by 2050, the world population is expected to be 9.7 billion¹. That might be a problem because in 2019, with a population of around 7.6 billion, the world was already unable to feed everyone². Sounds daunting, I know, but it’s not a new problem.

In the late 18^th Century, the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus claimed that human populations increased through geometric growth, that is, by a constant ratio. He also reasoned that food production increased through arithmetic growth, or by a constant amount³. In other words, human population grows exponentially, while food production grows linearly. The conclusion of Malthus’s argument is simple math: the human population will, at some point, outstrip food production, as illustrated below. When that happens, the population will inevitably crash.

Figure 1 – The Malthusian Catastrophe⁴

So far, Malthus’s predictions have never come true. Every time human society has seemed to reach the limits of food production, science and technology have come to the rescue and helped us produce more. In the 19^th Century, scientists discovered nitrogen could be used as a fertilizer, which boosted agricultural production. When it seemed that naturally occurring supplies of nitrogen would disappear in the early 20^th Century, chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch developed a method to create synthetic fertilizer⁵. In the 1940s and ‘50s, Norman Borlaug started a Green Revolution by breeding disease resistant wheat, and his work inspired the development of high-yield rice in Asia, again, increasing production.

Still, to feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050, we’ll need to pull another rabbit out of the hat. The 2019 World Resources Report, Creating a Sustainable Food Future, estimated that food production must increase by 50 percent from 2019 levels to feed 10 billion⁶. Is that possible? Can people continue to extract more production from Earth’s finite resources?

Maybe, who really knows? There’s data to suggest the world might already produce enough food to feed 10 billion, but that much is wasted, inefficiently distributed, or siphoned off to other industries, such as biofuels⁷. More likely, redistribution won’t be enough and increases in agricultural production will also be required.

Unfortunately, this might be a difficult task considering rising temperatures, extreme floods, and droughts are assessed to have already reduced global agricultural productivity approximately 21% since 1961⁸, and are expected to cause even lower yields for major staple crops like corn, rice, and wheat⁹. At the same time, demand for water and energy will also likely go up, causing a ripple effect across entire economies that may result in climate change-induced resource scarcity. In this scenario, the best case is that what food and resources are available cost more. In the worst case, there isn’t enough to go around, and it’s also more expensive, because that’s how a free-market handles scarcity. The result is that for the first time in decades, it’s very possible that subsequent generations may have less than their parents.

Still, people are already volunteering time and resources to solve some of these problems, like City Beet Farms, which started in 2013 in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant and Riley Park neighborhoods, operating on five different lawns to form a collective small-scale farm. Today, City Beet Farm has 13 different yards for a total of about half an acre, and produces enough food for about 250 people from June to October.

Community gardens in general are productive activities, with some estimates suggesting a return on investment of $6 for every $1 spent¹⁰, not to mention their effects on food security and sense of community. Then there’s Maria Rose Belding and Grant Nelson, co-founders of MEANS, a database to help those with excess food distribute it to those in need¹¹. All of these are great initiatives, however, more people who are willing to contribute to society’s food security will be required because ultimately, we don’t know if we can feed 10 billion.

What we do know is what people do when they’re hungry. They look for food. If they can’t find it nearby, they’ll go wherever it’s available. And if they’re truly desperate, they’ll break the rules to get it, damn the consequences.

1. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Population Prospects 2019: Ten Key Findings, June 2019, https://population.un.org/wpp/Publications/Files/WPP2019_10KeyFindings.pdf, accessed 4 Jun 2023.

2. Tim Searchinger, Richard Waite, Craig Hanson and Janet Ranganathan, Creating a Sustainable Food Future: A Menu of Solutions to Feed Nearly 10 Billion People by 2050, Washington, World Resources Institute: 2019, https://research.wri.org/sites/default/files/2019-07/WRR_Food_Full_Report_0.pdf, accessed 4 Jun 2023.

3. Mann, C., The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World, New York, Alfred A. Knopf: 2018.

4. By Malthus_PL.svg: Kravietzderivative work (translation): Jarry1250 - translated from Malthus_PL.svg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15063889, accessed 4 Jun 2023.

5. Mann, The Wizard and the Prophet, 2018.

6. Searchinger et al., Creating a Sustainable Food Future, 2019.

7. Eric Holt-Giménez, Annie Shattuck, Miguel Altieri, Hans Herren and Steve Gliessman, ‘We Already Grow Enough Food for 10 Billion People … and Still Can't End Hunger,’ in Journal of Sustainable Agriculture, 36:6, 595-598, 2012.

8. Ortiz-Bobea, A., Ault, T.R., Carrillo, C.M. et al. “Anthropogenic climate change has slowed global agricultural productivity growth,” in Nature Climate Change. 11, 306–312 (2021).

9. Searchinger et al., Creating a Sustainable Food Future, 2019.

10. Hynes, H Patricia, A Patch of Eden: America's Inner-City Gardeners. White River Junction, Chelsea Green Publishing Company: 1996.

11. MEANS, ‘About,’ meansdatabase.org, https://meansdatabase.org/about/, accessed Oct 21, 2021.