UN: Population Brief: Fertility & Third World || What is Peak Food? || A Sustainable (Two Children Limit) Population is Required

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Fast population growth, fueled by high fertility, hinders the reduction of poverty and the achievement of other internationally agreed development goals. Lack of Government commitment is at the root of low contraceptive prevalence. Among the 17 least developed countries with very low recent levels of modern contraceptive use, just five considered fertility to be too high in 1985 and just 8 had policies to reduce fertility by 1995 -- UN Population Division Policy Brief

As a Patron of the Optimum Population Trust, I shall be keenly supporting their ‘Stick at Two’ campaign. And as an environmentalist with a bit of a track record, I shall continue to point out to many of my colleagues that their continuing silence on the links between population, climate change and social justice is actually a betrayal of everything that they stand for – however ‘politically correct’ they may imagine it to be.
~ UN: Population Brief: Fertility & Third World || What is Peak Food? || A Sustainable (Two Children Limit) Population is Required ~

Climate change, energy depletion, food shortages, resource wars, species extinction - these are not the problem, they are only the symptoms. The singular root problem that causes all these horrifying threats to mankind is overpopulation.

So - logically - the solution that will eliminate these threats is simply to reduce the population of humans on this planet to a sustainable number.

Yet, no one proposes this obvious solution. No one is even willing to discuss it. It is the Elephant in every room.
~ The Population Elephant: The Problems with “The Problem” || Ten Best Population Quotes, from The Population Elephant ~

Today, 6.5 billion humans depend entirely on oil for food, energy, plastics & chemicals. Population growth is on a collision course with the inevitable decline in oil production.
~ The Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror, by Free Will Production ~

What would it take to accelerate fertility decline in the least developed countries?

March 25, 2009 | Optimum Population Trust

Fast population growth, fueled by high fertility, hinders the reduction of poverty and the achievement of other internationally agreed development goals. Lack of Government commitment is at the root of low contraceptive prevalence. Among the 17 least developed countries with very low recent levels of modern contraceptive use, just five considered fertility to be too high in 1985 and just 8 had policies to reduce fertility by 1995
~ UN Population Division Policy Brief ~

The least developed countries as a group and in their majority are lagging behind in the transition to low fertility and have rapidly growing populations.

• Lack of access to family planning and, in particular, to modern methods of contraception is a major cause of the persistence of high fertility as indicated by the high levels of unmet need for family planning prevalent in most least developed countries having the requisite data.
  
  
• Expansion of access to family planning requires government commitment and effective action to disseminate information about contraceptive methods and the benefits of smaller families.
  
  
• Strengthening and expanding family planning services requires adequate funding and access to supplies. Increases in donor funding for family planning would make a major contribution in this regard given that, since the mid-1990s, most least developed countries have experienced a per capita decrease in donor funding for family planning.
  
  
• Investments in family planning are cost effective because of the strong synergistic effects of longer inter-birth intervals and lower fertility with other development goals. For every dollar spent in family planning, between 2 and 6 dollars can be saved in interventions aimed at achieving other development goals.

Full UNPD Policy Briefing

Source: Optimum Population Trust

What’s Peak Food?

Peak Food is the moment in time when per capita availability of food in the world reaches a maximum and then begins to decline. As world reserve food stocks have now fallen to dangerous levels, and increased prices have failed to push up food production, it seems that Peak Food is here. When reserve stocks disappear, panic and hoarding will clear the shelves, adding to the problem.

But worse is to come as food production goes into serious and sudden decline for the following reasons:

• climate change
  
• oil and gas shortages
  
• cropland losses
  
• crops used for ethanol and biodiesel
  
• competition for water
  
• falling fish stocks
  
• population increases with millions in Asia eating more meat so needing more land per person when there is less.

Two of these factors - climate change and oil and gas shortages - could independently cause catastrophic reductions in world food supplies. But if they were to happen at the same time there could be world-wide famine.

The West is especially vulnerable because we have now become dependent on unreliable countries such as Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Iran for our food, just as surely as if the food was grown there. This is because our food production system has become totally dependent on oil to power the machines and trucks and to make the pesticides. Natural gas provides the nitrogen fertiliser that is responsible for about 40% of our grain yield. If we have reduction in supplies that lasts for more then a few months, food supply would be bound to fall. No wonder that governments worry about oil security.

The U.S. already imports 60% of its oil, and a 2006 policy document from the European commission warned that reliance on imports is expected to increase from 82% to 93% by 2030 for oil and 57% to 84% for gas. This on its own would be alarming enough, but many oil experts are now saying that oil production will soon decline just at the time when demand from developing countries like China and India is rocketing. Thus, any shortage of oil that lasts for more than a few months would cause chaos and hunger in the West.

War in the Middle East, terrorist activity or the establishment of Islamic fundamentalist governments in important countries like Saudi Arabia are just some of the events that could trigger a crisis.

Fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel made from crops are seen by many politicians as one answer to oil insecurity, but to produce these crops is taking millions of acres of good land out of food production.

Climate change is already causing droughts, floods and other extreme weather events that are reducing yields in affected areas. Should there be large yield reductions in several parts of the world at the same time, or for more then one year running we all will be in grave danger because those world carry-over food stocks, that are supposed to cushion us from a bad harvest, are now dangerously low and would be quickly used up in a crisis.

Unbelievably, the world is losing over 20 million acres of productive land each year due to desertification, salination and paving over for urban sprawl, industry and roads etc.

The various threats to our food supplies are discussed in more detail in regular posts and news items under various categories.

My book, Famine in the West, shows not only how serious things could get, but also how we could use innovation and the abundant energy we receive each day from the sun to feed the 8 billion people of 2025.

Source: Peak Food

A sustainable population

Jonathan Porrit

I’ve always felt that logic and sound evidence provide a pretty solid foundation for good policy-making. But some issues are more amenable to logic than others, and population is clearly the least amenable of all.

I’m in the population doghouse yet again. On 1st February the Sunday Times carried a front page story based on comments I had made that as we are heading off into some very troubled times, it would come to be seen as “irresponsible” for families to have more than two children.

You’d have thought I’d advocated compulsory sterilisation, emasculation, euthanasia, and baby-slaughtering all in one fell swoop. Melanie Philips likened me to Pol Pot and Hitler (who was “green” after all!), and when Fox News in the US got hold of the story, every religious nutcase with nothing better to do crawled out from under their stones to suggest the best thing I could do to help address population pressure would be to top myself. Instantly. Logic and sound evidence were not much in evidence.

So let’s just start all over again – here’s the logic, in 12 easy steps.

1. The more human beings there are on the planet, the bigger our collective impact. There were about 3 billion of us in 1950, and there will be about 9 billion by 2050 – if we just carry on as usual. That’s an extra 6 billion in 100 years!

2. Our impact is felt in many different ways – in terms of soil erosion, over-fishing, deforestation, water shortages, loss of species and habitats, and so on. Most particularly, it’s felt in terms of the rising emissions of C02 and other greenhouse gases that we’re putting into the atmosphere, with the prospect of horrendous consequences by the end of the century if we can’t turn this around.

3. Each individual is responsible for their own carbon footprint. Here in the UK, it’s about 12 tonnes per person per annum. In China, it’s about 4 tonnes per person per annum. It soon mounts up. Were it not for China’s ‘one child family’ policy (which is certainly very controversial), there would be as many as 400 million additional Chinese alive today – with a combined annual carbon footprint of around 1.6 billion tonnes of C02!

4. Population and environmental impact are therefore inextricably intertwined. New technology (around energy efficiency and renewables) can do a lot to help reduce that impact. But at the moment, the efficiency gains it gives us are not even keeping up with the combined increase in human numbers and economic growth.

5. Here in the UK, we have adopted some extremely ambitious targets to reduce emissions of C02 and other greenhouse gases by 80% by 2050. On a per capita basis, that means going from around 12 tonnes per person per annum today to around 2.5 tonnes per person per annum by 2050 – if our population remains the same in 2050.

6. But it’s not going to! Current projections indicate that our population is going to grow from 61 million today to 77 million by 2050. Logically, that means there’s a lot less C02 to go round (in terms of our per capita allocation), making it all the harder to achieve that 80% target. (A target, incidentally, which many scientists now see as the absolute minimum which will be required in rich countries like ours).

7. It also means a lot more overcrowding, a lot more pressure on housing, on water supplies, on our trains, on our already congested roads and so on.

8. If you accept that this is a not very attractive proposition, and that it would be better to aim for a lower, rather than a higher population, there are two things that have to happen here in the UK.

9. The first is to allow into our country no more people than leave it on an annual basis. That’s called “net zero immigration”. This is not xenophobic, let alone racist. It’s just common sense.

10. The second is to see if we might persuade (please note, persuade, not coerce!) the 26% of women in the UK who are currently expected to have more than two children to ‘stop at two’. (The other 74% already do stop at two, or have one child or none.) If we did this, we would be able to cut our forecast population by around 7 million people.

11. Combine both policies (neither of which, I think you’ll agree, are that extreme, let alone threatening, let alone totalitarian!), and the consequences are enormous: instead of a population of 77 million, we’d have a population of around 55 million – 6 million fewer than we have today.

12. Amazingly, if we then applied ourselves to doing more or less the same for women the world over, during the course of the next 20 years or so, by the tried and tested means of improving education for all (but particularly for girls), including healthcare for all (but particularly for women), and ensuring a choice of contraception for all women so that they are free to manage their own fertility, without fear of oppressive religious and male-dominated constraints, then we might just be able to stabilise world population to something closer to 7.8 billion instead of 9.2 billion. And just work out what that means for climate change, the planet and all future generations.

So that’s the logic. Of course, it isn’t as easy as that. The barriers are still huge.

Many religious people still think the use of any contraception other than abstinence or the ‘natural method’ runs counter to the will of God. Many economists still think that a declining population will create an increasingly problematic imbalance between those at the end of their working lives and those whose taxes will be needed to support them.

But there seems to be little reason, on either count, to declare that population must remain for ever a taboo subject, beyond rational discourse, worthy only of the rantings of Daily Mail columnists and religious extremists.

So I shall stick to my guns on this one! As a Patron of the Optimum Population Trust, I shall be keenly supporting their ‘Stick at Two’ campaign. And as an environmentalist with a bit of a track record, I shall continue to point out to many of my colleagues that their continuing silence on the links between population, climate change and social justice is actually a betrayal of everything that they stand for – however ‘politically correct’ they may imagine it to be.

Source: Jonathan Porrit