Thomas Malthus was right

A short version of this was published by The Vancouver Sun, Oct. 1, 2011.

Thomas Malthus said in his famous first “Essay on Population” in 1798, that the geometrically increasing human population must inevitably outstrip the ability of the Earth to provide subsistence to all, which “must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind” —so severely that the growth rate must fall [1]. Then and ever since, nay-sayers have decried the “doomsday” scenarios, insisting that human ingenuity would find a solution. Malthus was right. European countries did not collapse, but only because the Industrial Revolution was fuelled with resources taken from their colonies: Belgium’s congo; The Ottoman Empire’s (then France’s and England’s) Arabia, North Africa and Polynesia; Britain’s eastern and southern Africa, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and America, Germany’s Namibia, Cameroon and Tanganyika; Portugal’s Angola, Mozambique and Brazil; Italy’s Lybia and Sudan; Spain’s Latin American holdings, and so on. Today, some call it economic imperialism; others call it global trade, or more simply, globalism.
What global trade means is this: countries with resources to sell will be able to find those with cash to buy them until the last log is cut, the last bushel of wheat threshed, the last oil well drilled, the last tonne of fish netted, and the last lump of coal burned. Will we learn to ration these meagre resources and distribute them to mutual benefit? Or will we fight over them to the last drop of blood?
Meanwhile, the nay-sayers in last countries with cash will continue to malign modern Malthus’s like Paul Ehrlich [2, 3] and our own David Suzuki [4, 5], saying that for all their gloomy prognostications, we’re still doing fine economically. The question is, who is “we”? In Canada we are fine, for now, but what about the villagers in the aforementioned colonies? Are they all doing fine?
Our politicians and business leaders have not noticed two “state changes” in the global economy. First, depletion of resources has changed global trade from one of countries with resources competing for markets, to countries with money competing for resources. Economic growth was only possible when there were new frontiers to explore, countries to conquer and their resources to exploit. This is no longer the case, and it leaves poor countries no option but to get poorer. Hence, the number of failed states increased year by year, and these directly threaten Canada. I’ll return to this in a moment.
Second, something is bound to upset the world economy, turning countries with money into countries with no money. That “something” could have been anything, or a combination: mad cow disease of 1987–1989 that killed 4.4 million cattle in the U.K. and severely damaged Canada’s livestock industry when just one cow from Canada was caught with it in 2003(15 cases had been confirmed up to April 16, 2009: Canada Food Inspection Agency (http://www.inspection.gc.ca/, accessed May 2, 2009); the millennium computer bug in 2000 (it didn’t materialize), the 2003 SARS epidemic (it passed, but with considerable economic disruption), the 2004 Avian Flu pandemic that has forced the slaughter of hundreds of millions of commercial poultry and has so far killed 257 people (up to April 23, 2009; Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_spread_of_H5N1, accessed May 2, 2009). It could be another rise in prices as happened in 2007, causing people in 22 countries from Bangladesh to Yemen to riot in the streets because they can no longer afford bread [6], or another phase of the current financial crisis.
Or it could be a rapid escalation of armed conflict drawing in third parties, of which there are many candidates such as Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, etc. etc. The point here is that Canada can no longer be assured of future prosperity. The ability to sell our produce and products, or to buy the resources we think we need in perpetuity, is no longer a given. Too many things can happen and some already have.
The world passed the point where its resources could feed its population about 20 years ago and the population is still going up and the resources going down. The economy cannot grow forever. Nothing can. Millions of Americans who thought so and bought houses and consumer goods on that assumption are now out on the street, bankrupt. The financial institutions that led them into it invented imaginary ways to pretend that such growth would continue and, like many dreams it crumbled and took down Chrysler Canada and GM Canada with it. China and Europe found to their dismay that however strong their own economies, they cannot withstand the meltdown of one of their trading partners’.
Here is why the economy cannot grow in the future like it has in the past.
There is no more farm land. Well, hardly any, and what there is would take a huge effort and expense to develop. The annual expansion rate of world irrigated land has fallen from an average of over 2 percent from 1961 to 1992 to around 1 percent from 1993 to 2002 and began declining after that. But because of population growth, the irrigated area per person has been declining for three decades and in 2003 was 7 percent below the 1978 peak[7]. The reasons for the decline are mainly salinization and falling levels of irrigation water; rising costs of irrigation and urban expansion also contribute. There is no sign that these four capital debits can reverse, and climate change will exacerbate the first two. Even with biotechnology, there are no more large gains to be made in agricultural productivity. From 1961 to 1986, the global grain harvest has nearly tripled, while world population merely doubled. Since then, as the growth in grain production has matched population growth, per capita production has stagnated. Experts agree that the kind of innovations that drove the post-World War II grain production—like irrigation, pesticides and massive production and distribution of fertilizers, are behind us now [8].
There is no more fresh water. Seventy percent of the Earth’s freshwater is used for irrigation. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (www.agr.gc.ca, accessed May 3, 2009) notes that important food producers China, India, Mexico, Australia, Africa, the U.S., and others are now on the brink of serious water shortages. Global water requirements are expected to increase by 40 percent over the next 20 years. If trends continue, by 2025 competition between urban, industrial, and agricultural water uses will curb both economic growth and agri-food production, causing yearly global shortfalls of 350 million tonnes of food. Climate change has already exacerbated shortages in many regions and will get worse.
There are no more fish. The global, wild-caught fish catch has remained relatively stable over the last 15 years, peaked in 2000 and has been declining since then. There is little room for expansion: about 50 percent are being fished at full capacity, 25 percent are underfished, and the remainder are overex-ploited, depleted, or recovering [9]. As a result, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization predicts that maximum wild fish capture has already been reached. Moreover, the quality is declining: most of the stocks of the top 10 fished species are being fully fished or are overexploited, and studies have indicated that, even in the most stable fisheries, there have been declines in the most valuable species, such as tuna and salmon. Harvesting the top predators has not only depleted but changed the structure of many of the world’s marine ecosystems, which now produce more biomass of species such as jellyfish that are of little use to humans [10, 11].
In contrast to wild fish, fish farming, or aquaculture, has continued to increase over the last 10 years by more than 3 million tons per year (of a total wild catch plus aquaculture of 160 million tons in 2006) [9]. These gains are not without damage to coastal ecosystems here in North America [12-14], but in tropical regions, the effluent from on-land fish farms and the wholesale destruction of mangrove swamps for shrimp aquaculture [15] wreaks massive damage to coastal fisheries productivity. They also displace farmers and fishers, respectively, who have been working the land and sea sustainably for centuries (more on displaced persons below).
There is no more oil. Experts debate when oil production will peak and begin to decline, but no one doubts that it will. If you think the 2008–2009 rise in oil prices was scary, wait until supplies really start to drop. Agriculture, fishing and global trade depend on oil, to say nothing of our luxurious lifestyles.
All of the above might be okay if the human population would stop growing. Then, countries with the wherewithal like Canada could put our energies into working with poor countries to improve their governance, fix failed states, and get them on a path to self-sufficient food production within the constraints of the Earth’s productivity. But it is not stopping and the crux of the matter is that, since Earth’s population continues to rise while food and other resources remain stable or fall, that means that the per capita availability of resources will fall as long as the human population rises. How much wheat have we sold lately to Zimbabwe? Mozambique? Afghanistan? Democratic Republic of Congo?
If the world population were to rise at any constant rate, it would increase exponentially, as it did from time immemorial until about 1995. Since then, the annual population growth rate has been decreasing, partly because of lowered fertility rates in Europe and North America, but more especially because the death rates have been increasing: Despite vastly increased longevity in developed countries, many more people are dying everywhere else. Why?
It seems that Malthus and Eherlich and other “doomsday prophets” were right. The Earth’s carrying capacity has been reached or surpassed and the areas where Malthus’ “…difficulty of subsistence… must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind” has been occurring for a long time and is expanding. Currently, around 56 million people die per year, a rate that is expected to increase to 90 million by the year 2050 [16]. That is a lot of angry families.
The number of refugees and internally displaced persons may be as high as 184 million, or one out of every 36 persons on Earth [17]. Among them are 16 million refugees (including 4.6 million Palestinians) and 26 million internally dis¬placed people (IDPs-those who, unlike refugees, did not cross an international border). Another 12 million people are stateless— vulnerable because they lack the protection of citizenship, although they are not necessarily displaced. Some 25 million people have been uprooted by natural disasters. And Christian Aid, a London-based advocacy group, estimates that as many as 105 million people (an estimate that should be taken with caution as it may overlap with other categories) are made homeless by development projects, including dams, mines, roads, factories, plantations, and wild¬life reserves [17]. A refugee camp here, a shantytown there, and maybe it wouldn’t affect us here in Canada; but displacement and the resulting social economic upheaval on such a scale directly threatens global economic stability. The is why we need a climate change agreement. It is why we need a more effective convention on biological diversity, better national environmental protection laws, and stronger ocean fish protection agreements. It is why we need to slow down.
End Notes
1. Malthus, Thomas Robert, [First] Essay on Population. 1798, London: Murray.
2. Ehrlich, Paul R., The population bomb. 1968, New York, N.Y.: Ballantine Books. 201.
3. Ehrlich, Paul R. and A.H. Ehrlich, The population explosion. 1990, New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster. 320.
4. Gordon, Anita and David T. Suzuki, It's a matter of survival. 1991: Harvard University Press.
5. Suzuki, David T., Amanda Connell, and Amanda McConnell, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature. 1999: Mountaineers Books. 259.
6. Moroccan Unrest Over Bread Price, in The Arabist, September 27, 2007. 2007: Cairo.
7. Li, Ling, Irrigated Area Stays Stable, November 8, 2007. 2007, Worldwatch Institute, Vital Signs Online, http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5645, accesed May 2, 2009.
8. Brown, Lester R., Who will feed China? wake-up call for a small planet. 1995, New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
9. McKeown, Alice, Fish Farming Continues to Grow as World Fisheries Stagnate, December 17, 2008. 2008, Worldwatch Institute, Vital Signs Online, http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5645, accesed May 2, 2009.
10. Hay, Steve, Marine Ecology: Gelatinous Bells May Ring Change in Marine Ecosystems. Current Biology, 2006. 16(17): p. R679-R682.
11. Lynam, C., et al., Jellyfish overtake fish in a heavily fished ecosystem. Current Biology, 2006. 16(13): p. R492-R493.
12. Bjorn, P.A., B. Finstad, and R. Kristoffersen, Salmon lice infection of wild sea trout and Arctic char in marine and freshwaters: the effects of salmon farms. Aquaculture Research, 2001. 32: p. 947-962.
13. Harding, L. E., Levels of organotin in water, sediments, and oysters (Crassostrea gigas) at aquaculture sites in British Columbia. Presented at the 6th Annual Meeting of the North Pacific Science Organization, Pusan, Korea, October 22-26, 1997. 1997.
14. Volpe, John P., et al., Evidence of Natural Reproduction of Aquaculture-Escaped Atlantic Salmon in a Coastal British Columbia River. Conservation Biology, 2000. 14(3): p. 899-903.
15. Naylor, Rosamond L., et al., Effect of aquaculture on world fish supplies. Nature, 2000. 405: p. 1017-1024.
16. U.S. Census Bureau, World Population Information, http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpopinfo.html, accessed 2 June 2009. 2009, International Data Base (IDB).
17. Renner, Michael, Environment a Growing Driver in Displacement of People, September 17, 2008. 2008, Worldwatch Institute, Vital Signs Online, http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5645, accesed May 2, 2009.