Malthusian Dilemma

reading about Neo-Malthusian thought tonight- pretty prescient stuff. From Wikipedia:

At the time Malthus wrote, and for 150 years thereafter, most societies had populations at or beyond their agricultural limits. After World War II, the growth rate of the world's population accelerated rapidly, resulting in predictions by Paul Ehrlich and many others of an imminent Malthusian catastrophe. However, the so-called Green Revolution produced a contemporaneous exponential increase in the world's food supply, and the date of the predicted Malthusian collapse had been temporarily forestalled, until the peaking of agricultural production began to occur in the 1990s in several world regions.

Pimentel and Nielsen, working independently, found that the human population has passed the numerical point where all can live in comfort, and that we have entered a stage where many of the world's citizens and future generations are trapped in misery [2]. There is evidence that a catastrophe is underway as of at least the 1990s; for example, by the year 2000, children in developing countries were dying at the rate of approximately 11,000,000 per annum from strictly preventable diseases. ^{[1] [2]} This data suggests that by the standard of misery, the catastrophe is underway. The term 'misery' can generally be construed as: high infant mortality, low standards of sanitation, malnutrition, inadequate drinking water, new and widespread diseases (e.g. HIV), war, political unrest.

Regarding famines, data demonstrates the world's food production has peaked in some of the very regions where food is needed the most. For example in South Asia, approximately half of the land has been degraded such that it no longer has the capacity for food production. ^[2] In China there has been a 27% irreversible loss of land for agriculture, and continues to lose arable land at the rate of 2,500 square kilometres per year. ^[3] In Madagascar, at least 30% of the land previously regarded as arable is irreversibly barren. On the other hand, recent data shows the number of overweight people in the world now outnumbers the number of malnourished, and the rising tide of obesity continues to expand in both rich and poor countries.^[4]

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