Geography 2412 Lecture Notes 11/6

Human Population Growth and Food (pp 197-210)

Enough production, uneven distribution (poverty causes malnutrition, not enviro limits) results in 20% malnourished (900 m)

This is a reduction in last few decades!

But how close to “limits” or “carrying capacity” are we?

Cassandra’s: per capita production declining, humans appropriating 40% of global net primary productivity (NPP)

Pollyannas: sill enough to feed the world; still opportunity for expansion

Population and Food (pp 197-207) What’s needed to feed 10 billion people?

The main options for feeding somewhere between 7 and 10 billion people by the middle of this century are:

Expand current agriculture as presently practiced: More land, more technical inputs (all the same impacts). I rate this the most likely scenario.

Bio-technology—expand production through bio-engineering: uncertain, but promising with some concerns over unintended ecological consequences (e.g., “superweeds”) and social concerns (e.g., GMOs)

Sustainable/low-input agriculture: “Agroecology”: farming using ecological principles of diversity, interdependence, and synergy. Some of this requires a return to:

Traditional methods: inter-cropping, multi-copping, rotations, crop-animal integration, closed-system.

Is this Possible? Economically viable? It requires knowledge (much of which is being lost as industrial agriculture replaces traditional systems) and labor (less energy and chemicals, more attention and care by the farmer); not mass production; NAS says it works (p. 206). Is it Likely?