https://phys.org/news/2021-01-arctic-microplastic-pollution....
are an unintended consequence of scale.
I don't have good solutions, and the way our economies are set up discourage population degrowth (see the panic in Europe), and there are many bad, immoral ways to go about it, but so many of our problems are not a problem with technologies employed, but the scale at which they are employed.
Combine that with the fact that populations appear to top off at a certain level of prosperity, and you'll realize that we'll be just fine.
What are you talking about? 41% of US land is used for livestock production. It's not that efficient, and the perpetual increase in population will just push that higher.
> Combine that with the fact that populations appear to top off at a certain level of prosperity, and you'll realize that we'll be just fine.
We don't all share in that prosperity. Population is still set to grow in the (perpetually) developing world plagued by poverty. The population growth rate in the 1st world is a targeted rate, a matter of policy, which is met by increasing immigration. Fertility rates on the global scale won't drop so long as child mortality and quality of life isn't improve across the board, and consequently the growth rate in the 1st world is also here to stay.
So yes food is cheaper than ever to buy but we are burning through environmental capital at dangerous and irresponsible rate IMO. The cost of food will stay cheap until it's too late and the land stops producing at the current level.
A small fraction of people live the high life, but a large fraction has tasted it, and almost everyone has seen it. Effectively no one is going to cut down on their consumption because they’re calculating (correctly, in my opinion) that even if they do, someone else will step in and consume their portion anyway.
https://tradingeconomics.com/world/arable-land-hectares-per-...
As for not having any scientific process to fall back on, that's far from true in most of the world, even the developed world. Sadly the EU has been blocking the use of GM crops for years, supposedly on 'safety' grounds but in reality as a form of trade barrier designed to protect local farmers from having to become more efficient (mostly French farmers). So the EU isn't even using genetic engineering to increase yields, a by now very mature technology! Large parts of Europe don't even use advanced technology because the CAP subsidy scheme pays them to not grow food!
When you look around the world there's plenty of low hanging techno-fruit almost everywhere, except maybe the USA where new tech is embraced and farming is quite efficient already. But even then, there's plenty of tech on the horizon should we want it. Genetic engineering is still at the start of what it can do - it's capable of so much more than just pesticide resistance.
In any year, in any place where there is not a famine, we are, by definition, producing more food than anyone wants to consume, in aggregate at least if not for individuals. Whenever you are producing an excess of something, the price will fall.
Famine, if it happens, won't happen as a slow decline of food production, until at a predictable time we cross from producing 100.0000001% of the food the world needs to producing 99.9999999%. It will happen as a slow decline reducing our safety margin until some sort of three-sigma weather event makes for a really bad year -- flooding in some regions kill production here, drought in other regions kills production there, a blight on crops in otherwise fair weather, and the production for the next N months falls below the level of the stockpiles to last.
That is the point at which the market will react and food prices will go crazy. It won't do anything to help production -- some things take time, not money. It will just be the world playing musical chairs to see who gets left without enough food to eat.
From purely a US standpoint, yeah, I suspect our agricultural buffers are good enough for anything but a "volcano blotting out the sun" level deviation from the norm. Call it, four sigmas of food security. You'd need an event that only happens once every ten thousand years or so to really bring the US to its knees, agriculturally.
My point is -- I don't think food prices will shift much as long as the buffer is positive. If our margin narrows -- less livestock, more of it grass fed on marginal lands, grain spending less time in silos before being processed into food -- to two or three sigmas of food security, I don't think that you'll see food prices rise significantly, from market pressure.
I think if things go badly (and there's no guarantee of it at this point), it happens slowly at first, and then quickly, and you can't just point at food prices being low to say it's not about to turn from slow to quick.
The US is a strange beast when it comes to Agri. It's worth noting that there are conditions under which we are -destroying- surplus crops due to price controls rather than flooding the market.
Which to me is a bigger concern; this 'buffer' may cause price shifts to come with less warnings, and perhaps the first 'shock' will be a bit more than we would expect.
Source? I don't think this is a matter of fact.
On the other hand, there's plenty of land that is nearly suitable for growing sustenance crops but just needs a little preparation. We don't always favour converting that land to agricultural use, e.g. in the Amazon rain forest.
However, the claim misses the point for a different reason. Even if all arable land is being farmed, it's very far from being exploited to its maximum capacity. In terms of calories per hectare per year, much of that land could be improved tenfold or more with a switch of crops or farming methods, if the economics demanded it and potatoes became as expensive as steak.
This is due to land use for agriculture per person dropping rapidly[3].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-agricultural-area-o...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population?time=1985..lat...
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-agricultural-land-u...
This is not the point.
The point is the racist and genocidal undertones expressed by malthus and repeated even nowadays: "wealthy countries can thrive and use a lot of resources while people in the global south can starve and die of disease to reduce population"
EDIT: why all the downvotes, huh?
There is no reason to ignore that countries like Niger will inevitably run into even more problems if they continue reproducing according to contemporary UN models. The projections go to 70 million people for Niger in 2050, and they have actually slightly underestimated African population growth in the past.
Feeding 70 million people in a mostly desert country with no industry to speak of is a real issue and it should not be ignored just because America has developed an allergy on anything that might be construed as racism.