Food Insecurity and Malthusian Catastrophes

In a world with a population exceeding 7 billion and on the course for 9 billion within the next century, we desperately need new ways of producing enough food to keep everyone fed. We already have food shortages around the world, though these are often to do with localised droughts or infrastructure deficiencies making transportation difficult. The FAO estimates that around 795 million people around the world were undernourished in 2014-2016 (FAO, 2015).

 Thomas Malthus believed in a future in which the hungry mass of humanity would outstrip the planet’s ability to feed it, leading to societal collapse and an eventual return to subsistence-level living (Den Herder et al, 2010). This was not an unreasonable thought in the 1800s, a time when the UK population was increasing but their capacity to produce food was not. His gloomy predictions were proved wrong, at the time, by the Industrial Revolution. With the advent of farming machines such as the combine harvester, food production in the west could keep up with its expanding populations. But was the Industrial Revolution merely a delay in Malthus’s predicted agrapocalypse? Machines continued to develop; but the global population is still growing, and there are areas of the world where food shortages and famines are a fact of life. Are we heading for a Malthusian dilemma of food unavailability?

Thomas Malthus, rocking the mutton chops.
Source: Wikimedia Commons, Thomas Robert Malthus.

 Defined by the FAO as “A situation that exists when people lack secure access to sufficient amounts of safe and nutritious food for normal growth and development and an active and healthy life,” food insecurity is an issue which plagues people in all parts of the world. There are many reasons for people to be suffering from food insecurity; even in the more developed parts of the world, not everyone has the income to keep themselves on the ‘secure’ side of that line. Sometimes the problem is caused by supply and demand; like when the increasing popularity of quinoa (keen-wah, say it with me) in the USA and the UK lead to the price of the crop tripling, leaving the people of Bolivia and Peru who depended on it as a main source of food unable to afford it. Yeah, your super-duper-vegan-friendly-protein-packed quinoa and pesto dinner doesn’t look so appetising anymore, does it? But supply and demand is the reality that we live with, and it’s the reason we’re using so much of our land to produce food that much of the world can’t even afford.

 That’s not the only reason, of course. As the wise Bob Geldof has taught us, drought and famine are enemies that are not so easily fought off; and they often crop up in the parts of the world that are least equipped to deal with them. The global population is still rising, though not in the more economically developed world, so there are still more mouths to feed. As I’ve mentioned previously, we produce a lot more food than we consume; unfortunately, we just don’t get it to all of the people who need it.

 Technological advances kept us clear of Malthus’s agrapocalypse, but unsustainable farming coupled with unequal economic situations, and famines and droughts caused by climate change, could be leading to a different kind. The technology needed to feed the global population is there, but the infrastructure to distribute the food and the wealth to distribute the machines are not. And therein lies the problem.

 No one really needs to go hungry, but they do because those of us with money drive the price up beyond the reach of those without. We literally steal food from the hands of communities that cannot afford to lose it. Technological advancement is, in some ways, exponential; we can build bigger and better greenhouses, raise our crops on nothing but water and sunlight, and take chickens from birth to butcher in under a month, but all this intensifying of the agricultural process costs money. So the better we get at it, the further behind we leave others. The Industrial Revolution saved us from Malthus’s predictions, but in a cruel irony it could become the reason for their eventual occurrence.