Seven billion…and rising

The world’s population passed seven billion on October 31, but this was a milestone that few were in a mood to celebrate, except, of course, for the anti-family planning lobby.

Concerns about overpopulation were present when the world hit the six billion mark in 1999, but they were subdued in that era of growth and, at least in the North, optimism.  There was a sense then that while there were major hurdles along the way, the world’s future could only get brighter.

Globalization was inevitable, and it could only bring about a better life for all, according to its apostles, foremost of which was then US President Bill Clinton.  The Kyoto Protocol had just been adopted, and while it had its flaws, it seemed to be the first step in what would be an increasingly coordinated global effort among governments to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The Earth Policy Institute valiantly issued its “State of the World” warnings against overfishing, desertification, and an emerging crisis in water, but many were persuaded by corporate agribusiness’ propaganda that it had developed the technological capacity to more than feed the world and the remaining problem was the distribution of food, which was a logistical as well as political matter.

Malthus specter?

Today’s context and mood could not be more different.  And it has to do not only with unease over the speed with which we added another billion people since 1999.

Global capitalism is in a deep, deep funk, with the center economies caught in the iron grip of stagnation and high unemployment for an indefinite period.  Extreme weather events have become a fact of life, yet any move towards a successor to the Kyoto Protocol that would cut greenhouse gas emissions and come up with a viable adaption strategy continues to elude the world’s governments.

Agriculture seems to be at the limits of its productive capacity, prompting many to ask: Have we walked into the Malthusian trap?

Malthus, that enigmatic Victorian figure, predicted that population growth would outstrip the capacity of the soil to produce food, leading to a demographic cataclysm that would eventually result in a smaller population in equilibrium with the soil’s productive capacity.  While Malthus’ views were adopted—uneasily—by many ecologists and environmentalists, he became the bête noire of both progressive and neoclassical economists.  Progressives saw his theory as an elitist, conservative effort to blame the poor for their misfortunes, while some neoclassical economists, most notably Julian Simon, saw him and his followers as underestimating the human capacity to innovate to surmount limits to production and economic growth.

The food price crisis of 2008 was, to many, a wake-up call that agriculture might be reaching its productive limits,  that the problem in agriculture was no longer just distribution but production.  That crisis saw the food import bills of the least developed countries rise by 37 per cent in 2008, adding 75 million to the ranks of the hungry and driving an estimated 125 million into extreme poverty.

In accounting for the causes of rapid rise in the price of food, analysts pointed to the coming together of a number of developments to create the perfect storm:  among them, World Bank and IMF-imposed structural adjustment programs in developing countries, which severely cut government support for agriculture and reduced agricultural production; the diversion of vast amounts of corn land, especially in the US, to feedstock for biofuels rather than food production owing to huge subsidies; speculation in food commodities in financial markets; and growing resistance of insects to pesticides and refusal of soils to respond to more applications of fertilizer.

Food crisis redux

After registering lower increases for two years, prices began again to rise markedly over the last year, underlining that the 2006-2008 crisis was no fluke.   In July, the average price of wheat was 45 per cent higher than it was earlier while that of corn was 89 per cent higher.

This time around, though, extreme weather events caused by global warming were the central factor, reminding people how extremely fragile are the links between the soil and the atmosphere. In the last year, massive wildfires in Russia devastated hundreds of thousands of croplands, forcing the government to impose a ban on grain exports; a stubborn drought in China ravaged 14 million hectares and left 14 million people short of water; unremitting rains in Pakistan have devastated the country’s croplands for the second year in a row; at the beginning of 2011, practically the whole state of Queensland in Australia, including its capital, Brisbane, was submerged, with billions of dollars’ worth of  grain, vegetables, and livestock swept away; and in the last few months, the Horn of Africa has been paralyzed by a drought that has placed some 12.4 million people at risk of famine.

In the last few weeks, it has been the turn of the rice bowls of Southeast Asia to suffer from nature’s revenge for human beings’ inordinate carbon consumption.   Some 1.5 million hectares of rice land have been inundated in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand, with one million hectares in Thailand, the world’s No. 1 rice exporter, alone.  An estimated 1.3 metric tons of rice in Thailand have been lost, while in the Philippines, more than 103,000 metric tons of the standing rice crop were wiped out by the recent typhoons.  Already the price of Thai rice in the international market is 26 percent higher than in May and is expected to rise even more steeply.

Things can only get worse over the next few years, say climate experts.

Progressives and population

The crisis of agricultural production has led many to give a fresh look at the population issue.  Among them are people on the left.  In the past, progressives tended to be lumped together with the Catholic hierarchy and Christian fundamentalists as being population skeptics, though for different reasons.   Some of them saw family planning as a US plot to keep developing countries under its thumb while others argued that the main problem lay in the concentration of wealth and the means of production in the hands of a few.  Ending this stranglehold, they asserted, would open the way to egalitarian redistribution that would address the problems brought about by the rise in population.

At the global level, progressives argued that overconsumption by the 20 percent that lived in the North, not population pressure from the 80 percent that lived in the South constituted the main social and environmental challenge.

Once in power, however, progressives acknowledged that even without class inequalities, unrestrained population growth would foreclose the possibility of economic growth and development.  Thus, concern over population growth outstripping food production and economic growth led China in the 1980s to institute its one-child policy, which, for all the abuses connected with it, appeared to be largely positive on balance, resulting in as many as 300 million less births and providing the breathing space to channel significant resources from consumption to investment.

Vietnam followed suit, promoting a two-child policy that, unlike in China, was implemented non-coercively.  The results have been equally positive.  The country’s population growth rate is down to 1.2 per cent per annum.  The total fertility rate (TFR), or the average number of children per woman of reproductive age, has dropped from over 6 in 1961, when the program first began, to 2.1, a figure that demographers tag as “replacement level fertility.”  Vietnam has 88.2 million people; had there been no family planning program, it would now have 104 million people.

18.6 million less births meant that Vietnam could devote more resources to upgrading the quality of education, alleviating poverty, and raising investment.  The country registered a growth rate of 7.2 percent per annum in the period 2000-2010.  By 2010, average per capita income had tripled in one decade, reflecting economic growth outpacing the population growth rate.

Population management and the East Asian “miracle”

In adopting family planning, the post-revolutionary societies of China and Vietnam most likely saw their East Asian capitalist neighbors that developed earlier as models.  Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan had found it necessary to implement strong preemptive family planning programs to create the space for economic takeoff.  And while effective family planning was not the only factor in explaining their rapid growth, it was a major one.

By providing access to contraceptives, state-supported family planning programs in these countries enabled women to have greater control over reproduction.   The proportion of women using contraceptives in East Asia was four times the rate in Africa; surveys showed that the difference was largely explained by the state provision of contraceptives in East Asia.  And when access to contraceptives was joined to greater access by women to education, the trend was for women to limit their births in order to accumulate resources to improve their families’ living standards.  Such were the dynamics of the demographic revolution in East Asia.

The end of growth?

Yet the success of these societies in achieving high growth by managing their populations may be wiped out if the era of growth is over, as some analysts contend.

Most of the East Asian economies and some other developing economies in Latin America and Africa followed export-oriented development strategies that were dependent on continuing growth in the North.  Yet the Northern economies, bludgeoned by the current crisis of capitalism, now face a future of stagnation or low growth.  For the advanced developing economies to now shift and follow an alternative strategy of achieving growth by relying on domestic consumption seems logical, but this is easier said than done.  The social classes and enterprises that formed around a 30-year-old strategy can stymie an effective transition, as has been the case of China.  This is not surprising since a shift of development strategy is not simply a change in policy but involves a redistribution of income and economic power if the rural and urban lower classes are to be equipped with purchasing power to be the new sources of demand.

But the bigger question faced by all developing economies is, whether “export-market” or “domestic-market” led, it is still possible to follow the traditional growth strategy.  To analysts like Richard Heinberg, the intersection of the financial collapse, economic stagnation, global warming, the steady depletion of fossil fuel reserves, and agriculture reaching its limits is a fatal one.  It represents a far more profound crisis than a temporary setback on the road to growth.  It portends not simply the end of a paradigm of global growth driven by the demand of the center economies.  It means the “end of growth” as we know it.  It is, in short, the Malthusian trap, though Heinberg understandably avoids using the term

Paradoxically, the so-called least developed countries in Africa and South Asia may have an easier time making the transition to a post-growth global economy.  They were less integrated into the global economy and many maintain agricultural sectors that have not been totally damaged by structural adjustment and liberalization.  They have also been far behind in the institutionalization of the high-growth dependent western consumption model owing to widespread poverty.  If they can combine effective family planning programs with successful redistribution initiatives and economic strategies emphasizing improvement in the quality of life, they may well pioneer in the forging of a post-growth, post-globalization development strategy.

It will not be easy though.

Dilemmas

The current dilemmas of our planet of seven billion are well summed up by Richard Heinberg in his latest book, The End of Growth:

“Perhaps the meteoric rise of the finance economy in the past couple of decades resulted from semi-conscious strategy on the part of society’s managerial elites to leverage the last possible increments of growth from a physical, resourced-based economy that was nearing its capacity.  In any case, the implications of the current economic crisis cannot be captured by unemployment statistics and real estate prices.  Attempts to restart growth will inevitably collide with natural limits that simply don’t respond to stimulus packages or bailouts…Burgeoning environmental problems require rapidly increasing amounts of efforts to fix them.  In addition to facing limits on the amount of debt that can be accumulated in order to keep those problems at bay, we also face limits to the amounts of energy and materials we can devote to these purposes.  Until now the dynamism of growth has enabled us to stay ahead of accumulating environmental costs.  As growth ends, the environmental bills for the last two centuries of manic expansion may come due just as our bank account empties.”

FPIF columnist Walden Bello represents the political party Akbayan (Citizens’ Action Party) in the House of Representatives of the Philippines and is a senior analyst in the Bangkok-based institute Focus on the Global South.  He is the author of Food Wars (London: Verso, 2009) and 14 other books.