from the field of economic geography 2

1. Is the world overpopulated?
Yes—but it’s hard to prove.
However, expert opinions vary. The absolute limits to human population vary as well, depending on what is measured. Some physical estimates explore the limits of things such as carbon or heat, and yield rather high numbers—on the order of scientific notations of billions of people—but under preposterous assumptions such as total algae food production and sinking all earthly carbon in human flesh. General approaches have lower estimates, 100 billion and less, but consider factors in a more holistic way that better represents real-world scenarios. The meta-analysis by geographers Jeroen, Van Den Bergh and Rietveld, obtained a median of 7.7 billion.
There are three distinct camps on the issue, the pessimists, the optimists, and the Marxists, and at least two are readily understandable. Every fact has an ambiguous interpretation and so consensus on any viewpoint is difficult to gather. Broadly, there are three components to consider when making calculations about human population limits: space, resources, and quality of life.

SPACE____________
Even with six billion humans crawling around it, most of the Earth remains uninhabited. While it is true that our species has settled on every continent, the total area of human habitation is extremely low compared to the total area of Earth, some 57,500,000 square miles. The population density of the entire human population on Earth, then, is the number of people divided by the square miles of area: 6,430,794,815 / 57,500,000 = 111.8399, or about 112 people per square mile. However, most estimates drop Antarctica out of the equation, reducing the total area to 52.5 million square miles, raising the density to 122 per square mile. This seems like a low number, suggesting that there is still room for expansion, but the habitable area of Earth is much smaller, 25% of the total land area, according to economic geography author Timothy J. Fik. So now we have to divide by only 14,375,000 square miles, and the population density is roughly 447 people per square mile.
However, this estimate is considered crude, and rightly so. People are not evenly distributed across the Earth, and the population densities for the major concentrations of people vary widely, clustering around riparian areas. As Fik points out for example, the Nile Valley supports 3200 people per square mile, “30 times greater than the world average,” while cities like Hong Kong and Singapore have more than 10,000 people per square mile, and Manhattan exceeds 50,000.
That sounds like quite a large number, but 50,000 people per square mile is only about 1/1000 of a person per square foot in the Naked City, perhaps the strangest out of its eight million stories. Assuming the math is correct, it makes Manhattan seem more like a city in The Day After instead, but one hardly can wander through its streets screaming “Where is everybody?” Before the next line, “Where has everybody gone?” could be uttered, one would be swallowed up by the crowd on the sidewalk, though likely to go unnoticed. Fik makes the point that physical space is not the problem, dramatically noting that all six billion of us could stand at arm’s length from one another in Texas, but think how bad rush-hour traffic would be then.
Well, if space isn’t the problem, what is?

RESOURCES__________
More important than where to put everybody is the question of how to feed them. Currently, it is estimated that one billion people go hungry. As a rough measure, then, it could be said that there are one billion people too many already. But again, such a crude estimate does not paint the whole picture.
The frightening fun of population pressure theory began in a churchyard in 1798, with the English scholar Thomas Malthus, who postulated a mathematical limit to human population. He reasoned that because humans reproduce at a geometric rate while human food sources were replenished at the lower arithmetic rate, starvation would provide a natural check on overpopulation—when we get overpopulated a bunch of people will starve to death (a lot more will die at the hands of the other two horsemen of the Apocaplypse: pestilence and war). That hypothetical point has not yet been reached, but most concede it has to happen some time.
The idea is not all that new, really. Band societies have struggled with the issue since time immemorial, developing the harsh, but least-of-all-evil practices of infanticide, suicide, and sacrifice. As horrible as any one may seem, it was at least mitigated by usually being limited to a single individual, because the alternative of having too many people—who consequently exhaust the food supply—spreads the horror to all.
For today, however, scarcity is not the reason people go hungry. Lappe and Collins estimate enough food supplies to provide the entire world population with 3000 calories a day. While such a distribution system would be a boon to a fledgling global weight-loss industry, it seems unlikely to develop. Famine is a tool of geopolitics, of warfare and dominance. And those industries are firmly entrenched in human civilization.
Take, for example, the current crisis of the Sudanese refugees now encamped near Darfoor. The invading Arabs not only destroyed wells and crop fields, they timed their attacks so that the Sudanese exodus would occur during the brief planting season. With no one to plant, there would be no food for the entire year, a famine that would kill far more than the militiamen could with rifles alone. It is an ancient military strategy—disrupt supplies.
Assuming the distribution of food was entirely equitable, it still must be determined what number of people is sustainable, a much trickier calculation. While current levels of production may yield plenty for the current population, can that yield be maintained? Land degradation due to overproduction, erosion, or salinization is a growing problem.
According to Fik, 17% of the world’s vegetated land has been degraded, higher in some areas—a whopping 42% in Africa, with Asia at 36%. Considering the concentration of people in Asia—two thirds of all human population is there—the problem is alarming. A ghastly demonstration in Malthusian theory could take place in this region.
Here again, though, it is not the sheer force of numbers that is the problem, but the management of resources. Horticultural societies have long known that a single patch of land cannot be tilled perpetually. Plots in cultivation were rotated so that each could lie fallow for a time and recover its fertility. But as more of the world gets developed into an urban environment, which is permanent, impervious, and immobile, there is less land available to cultivation, much less to lie around unused at all. Fik cites the example of China, where only 10% of the total land area is cultivable, roughly 9.6 million hectares. In the 1990s, more than 400,000 hectares went from cultivation to urbanization.
David Pimentel of Cornell University and Mario Giampietro of the Istituto of Nazionale della Nutrizione, Rome, estimate that the U.S.—the largest food exporter in the world—loses one million acres a year to urbanization. Their study averaged the loss at one acre per person added to the U.S. population. The U.S. has almost 190 million hectares, and adds one person to the population every 10 seconds or so. Here’s another frightening statistic from the Negative Population Growth website: 10 million acres of U.S. forest have been suburbanized.
That’s important because of something far graver in consequence than running short of snacks: breathable air. Forests produce most of the oxygen humans need as well as remove carbon dioxide and some atmospheric pollutants. The Forest Products Association of Canada quotes a 1990 Report to Parliament: “one acre of healthy forest produces about 4 tonnes of O2 per year. On average, we estimate that one acre of mature forest contains 400 trees, therefore: 4 tonnes @ 2,200 lbs/tonne = 8,800 lbs. 8,800 lbs divided by 400 trees = 22 lbs/tree/year.”
The estimates used in managed forests on U.S. tribal indian lands are somewhat different. Developed in conjunction with NASA scientists, seemingly strange bedfellows, they estimate that an average tree can generate as much as 260 pounds of oxygen per year, and that the average person will use 400. To sustain the tribal population, each person needs two trees. For all of humanity to breathe, then, we need approximately 13 billion trees.
The two estimates give a range: 13 billion to 115 billion trees necessary for oxygen production alone. At an estimated 11.84 billion acres of forested land worldwide, with 400 trees per acre (the Department of Energy uses an estimate of 700 trees per acre) there are 4,400,000,000,000 trees on Earth.
That sure seems like a lot of trees, many more than we need just for oxygen, and even for the most incontinent of dogs. However, the rate of their loss is staggering: 50 acres per minute. At that rate, the remaining forests could be completely cleared in 450 years. Coincidently, it’s been about that long since the age of exploration until now. Knock a decade or two off the time limit because we have to maintain 287,500,000 acres of forest at 400 trees per acre just to sustain the number of people there are now, many more than that to sustain 10 billion, the projected world population in 2050.
We do not know how much acreage the forests need to sustain themselves. And of course, rates of oxygen production vary among the different species of trees. Other plants make oxygen, as well, but the forests are where most of the other plants live, too. Common sense would suggest that the forests are valuable resources that require conservation for our very survival; even if there seem to be plenty at the moment, it would be foolish to squander the only sources of fresh oxygen.
A good estimate of population would consider other factors, too, such as fresh water and energy. The real problem with resources, though, is not how much we need to sustain ourselves, but how much nature needs to sustain itself. Minus that, there still should be plenty for humanity. The question of overpopulation is not one of setting an absolute limit but an optimal one.

QUALITY OF LIFE___________
There are many ways to measure the quality of life, and such subjective observations sometimes are of little scientific value. Yet there is one basic truth that is uncontestable: the more people that share, the smaller a share there is for each. There are a finite number of resources on the planet, but a growing number of people to divide them, so we all will have to make do with less.
For example, Pimentel and Giampietro projected trends for the U.S. that suggest “only 0.6 acres of arable land per person will be available in 2050. Agronomists, however, stress that more than 1.2 acres per person are needed for a productive agriculture, one that produces a varied diet of plant and animal products.” Currently, the U.S. cultivates 1.8 acres per person. So, while people may not starve, they will not have as good a diet as they once had. The U.S., with around 5% of the world’s population, consumes roughly one quarter of the world’s resources at present. That kind of luxury cannot last.
With quality of life issues it is perhaps too easy to concentrate on concrete matters like the consumption of resources. There is another fact of nature I wish to consider, and that is humankind’s social evolution. We have not evolved to cope with so many people being around.
Humans live in extremely high population concentrations compared to other primate species. But this state is relatively new. Early humans evolved in low population concentrations. Band societies, considered to be the oldest form of political organization, typically comprise less than one hundred members, and commonly spend time in smaller groups of twenty or so. As the band is an extended kin group, all individuals within it are personally known to one another.
More importantly, they all must work to get along with one another. The band’s decision-making process has “the participation of all its adult members, with an emphasis on achieving consensus,” as William A. Haviland puts it in the standard anthropology text. Contrast such a notion with a presidential election or even a city council meeting.
The amusing zoologist of the human animal, Desmond Morris, said of band society
it is easy enough for the . . . hierarchy to work itself out and become stabilized, with only gradual changes as members become older and die. In a massive city community the situation is much more stressful. Every day exposes the urbanite to sudden contacts with countless strangers, a situation unheard-of in any other primate species.
Morris further explains that because it is impossible to enter into social relationships with all of them “although this would be the natural tendency,” the city dweller instead develops avoidance behaviors. “By carefully avoiding staring at one another, gesturing in one another’s direction, signalling in any way, or making physical bodily contact, we manage to survive in an otherwise impossibly overstimulating social situation.”
What can be the outcome for a social animal of evolving behaviors that avoid social contact? It hardly seems good. And it begs a subsequent question:
Of what quality is a life in the lonely crowd?
The behavior qualities resulting from population stress include aggression, depression, and homosexuality. Skimming the daily news reports of wars, murder-suicides, and television prime-time viewing schedules leads to the inevitable conclusion that the world must be overpopulated.


2. Critically evaluate Lappe and Collins’ arguments regarding the reasons for hunger in the world.
Fik summarizes the arguments in Lappe and Collins’s World Hunger: Twelve Myths extensively. Though each myth has a particular genesis, all fall into one of two larger reasons for existence: the way we do things and the way we think about things—distribution practices and cultural beliefs. Ultimately, they reason that all hunger is due to human activities, not nature’s. People go hungry because we let them—we have not decided to do otherwise, not because we can’t feed them.
Myths 1-3, 6, 8, 10, and 12 all have to do with the way food is distributed. The remaining deal with how the mentality of core economies has dominated and ultimately misguided efforts to reduce hunger. The mistakes are rooted in the core’s blind faith in the tenets of its own distribution system, free-market capitalism. Both forces combine in ways deliberate and unintended to exacerbate and perpetuate a problem that is solvable from a practical point.
Myths 1-3: Not enough food to go around; Natural hazards are the leading cause; Too many people
These go together naturally, and can be considered as different aspects of the same problem. The world is still undergoing a transition from purely subsistence orientation to a commercial one. As transportation systems improve, food can be moved from greater distances. Economies that once were isolated are now part of the global market, and must choose between growing food crops and cash crops.
Even so, as Fik points out from work by Grigg, the global output of agriculture was more than the increased consumption due to growth. Quite simply, the food existed but it did not go to the people who needed it. There can be no other reason than the distribution system.
From time to time, a story appears in the media about how food aid is hijacked by warlords to be sold on the black market. But the real answers lie in the structural reform of the food market. Fik quotes at length from Bradley and Carter, noting the commodification of food and how it blinds social institutions to actual needs. With food treated as a saleable item “the forces that govern its production are . . . buying and selling at a profit. . . . production and distribution will fail to adjust” to the needs of the poor.
Many of the periphery economies suffer the throes of this change, mixtures of subsistence farming, cash crops, and foreign aid. Their delicate balance is easily upset when natural disasters like flood or drought do come along. Coupled with the effects of other human foolishness like war or “misguided government policy” and a region’s ability to sustain itself may become crippled. But to recognize that productive capacity is insufficient is not the same as to say there are too few resources to go around.
Myths 6 and 8: Subsistence farming lowers food output; and Free trade is the answer to ending world hunger
Western style agriculture reaps enormous bounties. Yields are large, business is predictable. The why-doesn’t-the-rest-of-the-world-work-this-way view so permeates thinking that obvious local solutions to the problem of hunger are dismissed in deference to the Western model being introduced. And so large tracts of cultivable land are switched to commercial applications when they could provide a local food source instead. Commercial uses tend to be spatially inefficient compared to intensive subsistence agriculture because they focus on a single crop. The intensive subsistence practices tend to plant multiple crops in combinations and rotations that both nurture soils and maximize yields per unit of land.
Moreover, Fik warns against Arthur Daniel Midland Corporation’s dream: the world as one giant greenhouse. Unrestricted free trade would encourage the local production of exports to the neglect of local subsistence crops. “Global free trade would bias . . . the SOUTH toward the production of cash crops for export. . . . this has only made matter worse in the periphery.”
Myth 10: More U.S. aid is needed
That cure may be worse than the disease. Because the problem is one of distribution and not supply, throwing more food at it hardly makes sense. Historically, the U.S. has done more harm than good, the aid it provides is “a tool of foreign policy and manipulation.” Fik lists seven generalizations about U.S. aid that suggest hope of it solving world hunger is misplaced.
Among these are the facts that aid is usually provided to allies rather than the needy, that their governments are often “fundamentally opposed to economic reforms on behalf of the poor,” and that it often goes “to those who need it least—wealthy businessmen and landowners.” Aid tends to perpetuate the status quo rather than drive regional economic growth. It may actually be a disincentive to production when it allows governments “to rely on cheap and plentiful external food sources.”
Myth 12: There is a “food-versus-freedom tradeoff”
Some people believe that their right to dominate the game is greater than someone else’s right to eat. Any belief that poverty and deprivation is a natural and consequential flip side of ability and drive in a free market system is just Social Darwinism revisited. “Redistribution schemes go against the right to secure wealth,” as Fik summarizes the argument. There is a certain truth to the statement that gives it considerable weight. What responsibility is it for productive members of society to support non-productive ones?
None really, but such a concern fails to question the basic assumption that the needy are inferior and that no one has an initial advantage over the rest. Like so many things, the question more rightly is of what is practical than what is idealistic. “Providing the means to basic survival will eventually allow the needy to provide for themselves.”
The deepest held belief of the West is that its way is always best. Only in light of the growing devastation from its unsustainable practices has there been any progress toward sustainable development. Fortunately, we believe change is good—efforts to change the track of development toward conservation are taking root.
Myths 4 and 5: To produce increasing amounts of food destroys the systems that produce the food; the green revolution caused harm to regional production systems
Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, so already efforts are underway to preserve capacity and ecological diversity, to limit ecological destruction and protect from invasive species. Pesticide use can be lightened by the introduction of predator species, or crop rotation. Seed banks set back stores to hedge against the loss of native cultivars and wild species as land is cleared. While this only mitigates the damage done by habitat loss, it provides a means to correct it later.
But growing more food crops has not been the problem. Often, food crops were abandoned in favor of cash crops or livestock as LDCs integrated with core economies. Worse, land might be cleared for resource extraction, like timber. However, if supported by higher yields of bio-engineered crops, there is less need to clear virgin land for crops, cash or otherwise. At the global level, it is pointed out, the green revolution “helped preserve land and important genetic resources.” Though these gains from the green revolution were great, they may have run their course, as population pressures continue to mount.
Myth 7: Market forces alone can end world hunger
Preposterous. To quote Fik again, many “regions produce for use value and not exchange value.” It is well known that you can’t eat money, and where infrastructure focuses on feeding people instead of on trading between people, the invisible hand of the market is unseen for a different reason—it does not work.
Again, the unbridled belief in something does not make something so. Market forces work best in market economies, not subsistence ones. It is difficult to see how a lower tariff on coffee would directly translate into a bowl of beans for a plantation worker.
But the idea is not entirely without merit. Market forces in conjunction with a realistic evaluation could stimulate economic growth. If money from exports went to build schools or local manufacturing instead of ready-made goods as imports, the benefits from producing the original export would stay local instead of flowing back outside.
Myth 9: The poor and hungry are too weak to revolt
And the wild animal is backed too far into the corner to bite back.
Marx said it all—they have nothing to lose but their chains. With no investment in the current system, and no expectation of benefit from it, the rational choice is to revolt, if there is a chance to benefit from a new system.
Fik is good to point out that the poor are disadvantaged, not incapable; indeed their hardships perhaps make them stronger. Ultimately, the might of sheer numbers makes them “a formidable force,” and it seems naïve to expect people to meekly accept the yoke forever.
Myth 11: Core economies in the NORTH benefit from hunger in the SOUTH
Prices are cheap because hungry people around the world are willing to work for less. To keep leather jackets cheap at the store, people need to be starving in Pakistan, so they’ll work for the lowest wage. It can hardly be denied that people favor high wages over low, but do people have to go hungry?
Wages compete against wages. If wages are lower in one place, and employers move there to take advantage of it, the original locale loses jobs, or at least income as wages fall to remain competitive. That results in them spending less money consuming the goods produced by others. There is a negative feedback loop—the area becomes more and more depressed as money flows out. It might also be argued that core economies lure immigrant workers to the jobs its own members will not do. But it is likely that these jobs would get filled if wages were higher.
Debunking myths is a thankless job. All the more reason to appreciate Lappe and Collins. Disparities will always exist among people. But there is no reason to let people go unfed. Dispelling the myths that let us believe there is nothing to be done about it is only the first step toward ending hunger—Lappe and Collins have taken it and there can be no excuse for lagging behind. Humanity must soon commit to ensuring the basic necessities for all, or resign itself to hypocrisy, now that it has been demonstrated that hunger is avoidable.
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