Fighting The Scarcity Lie: Agricultural Innovation Can Feed A Growing, Global Population
By Owen Yingling
Be Not Afraid, Agricultural Abundance Is Before Us— Always
By Patricia Patnode
Environmental anxiety is plaguing young people in the West. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) described eco-anxiety as “a chronic fear of environmental doom.” In a survey of 10 countries, including the United States, 59% of youth and young adults said they were very or extremely worried about climate change, and more than 45% said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily life and functioning.
Although Meghan Markle and Prince Harry consciously limited their family size to two children for environmental reasons, it’s unclear how much that environmental consciousness is impacting population growth in different countries. Still, our global population is plateauing, and de-growthers rejoice.
Looking to the future, we must affirm that the world is not overpopulated, we are not running out of food, and there is enough fresh water to sustain humanity for another one million years– especially if we allow for desalination plants to operate.
Conditions will only improve because humans are limitlessly innovative.
Things are not so bad, have another baby.
Owen’s essay gives a brief overview of modern ag-innovations that should inspire hope and optimism for our future. Check it out below!
Highlights:
“Putting the enormity of the Green Revolution in perspective: from 1960 to 1999 the global population doubled from three billion to over six billion. Yet during that time, the average number of calories available for people across all regions of the world actually increased.”
“Today, we see all kinds of disastrous ideological ambitions that could send us back to the time of famines and poverty, particularly the aptly named “degrowth movement” that has caught on among certain parts of the modern environmental movement. If there is one concrete thing that the Green Revolution can teach us, it is that growth is the way, the only way, forward.”
Why is Agricultural Innovation so Important?
By Owen Yingling
In 1789, Thomas Malthus infamously claimed in his Essay on the Principle of Population that, “the power of population is so superior to the power of the Earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death in some shape or another must visit the human race.” Malthus’s argument was elegantly simple: human population growth is exponential, but the growth of our food supply is linear, so without limiting population growth humanity will always be forced to live — mostly miserable and always at risk of starvation — at the limit of our carrying capacity. Yet, this nightmarish world is not the one we live in today.
Thanks to the improvements in labor efficiency and crop yields, the industrial world was able to endure massive population growth while also managing to tremendously decrease the risk of starvation and greatly increase quality of life across the board.
But, Malthus’s specter would not be vanquished so easily: his ideas found fertile ground in the early environmental movement, most notably in Paul Ehlrich’s 1968 work The Population Bomb. Ehlrich, then and still a Stanford professor, predicted imminent and inevitable world-wide famines in developing countries, claiming that “in the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” He suggested that countries like India, which he saw as “so far behind in the population food game that there is no hope that our food aid will see them through to self sufficiency” should have their food aid eliminated, their people left to starve to death for the greater benefit of humanity. And his ideas were taken seriously: The Population Bomb sold over two million copies and similar neo-Malthusian principles tragically led to the unnecessary, and sometimes forced, sterilization of millions of Indian men and women.
Once again, there were no massive famines. Food insecurity decreased significantly since Ehlrich’s dire predictions. Nevertheless, he stated in 2009 that the most serious flaw in The Population Bomb was that “it was much too optimistic about the future.” He also appeared on 60 Minutes this year and cheerily regurgitated his apparently temporally unshakeable opinion that “the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to.”
While it is certainly good fun to laugh at a doomsayer and what was, in the words of journalist Jonathan Last, “one of the most spectacularly foolish books ever published,” the way that we’ve managed to escape these Malthusian trap is far more important and receives far less coverage than enviro-apocalypse rhetoric that surrounds us.
There is nothing inevitable about the world we live in —for much of human history Malthus’s predictions were a fairly accurate description of society: from the agricultural revolution until the 17th century, there was no significant trend upwards in wages and recurring famines occurred across all human civilizations.
The abundance of food we have now: a global average of almost 3,000 calories per person per day is almost solely due to agricultural innovation and the market based framework that exists to spur its progress. The commercialization of crops and innovations such as crop rotations and the enclosure of farms in the 17th and 18th centuries paved the way for the broader industrial revolution and prevented early modern Europe from falling into a Malthusian trap. Then the industrial scale production of synthetic fertilizers in the early 1900s along with the earliest pesticides further increased crop yields and improvement on these innovations continued through the rest of the 20th century. But it is worth looking in particular at the agricultural innovations made in the mid-1900s, sometimes referred to as the “Green Revolution,” to see what agricultural innovations look like on a non-abstract level, and their vital importance to the entire world.
Pictured above: Norman Borlaug, who was the originator of a wheat variety in Mexico, is considered the godfather of the Green Revolution.
Predictions about future hunger and global famines were prevalent during the 1950s and 1960s as the global population began to grow exponentially with remarkable growth in developing countries, especially in China and India. At the time, concern that these countries, both of whom had dealt with famine historically and did not appear to be close to self sufficient in food production, could fall into a Maltusian scenario did not seem unwarranted.
Yet the technological innovation that would drastically increase the global food supply in the mid 20th century had been underway long before these neo-Malthusian fears had been raised. The story begins in Mexico where US scientists in the 1940s worked to find practices and technologies that could raise Mexican crop yields because agricultural productivity had fallen significantly. The scientists discovered that using newly bred crop strains and taking a scientific approach to the inputs of pesticides, water, and fertilizers could significantly boost yields and the disease resistivity of crops while also being economically favorable for farmers. In this early stage of Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution, the results were not achieved by any particular novel technology, but by the work of scientists to discover the best way to utilize existing technologies together, in communities that did not previously have knowledge or access to them. The results of their new techniques impacted the entire farming sector: from 1940-1965, Mexican agricultural production increased fourfold and produced far more than enough food to meet domestic demand.
The Green Revolution continued in the Philippines, where scientists working with the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, both of whom had supported the research in Mexico, bred the IR8 semi-dwarf rice in 1966, perhaps the most important agricultural breakthrough of the era. IR8 was a hybrid rice created by breeding a dwarf rice variety from China and a tall high yielding one from Indonesia. Scientists quickly discovered that IR8 was short, grew faster, and had a much higher per plant yield than traditional rice, all of which combined to make it a “miracle rice” in the fight against the impending global famines.
When IR8 was developed, India seemed to be close to the brink that Ehlrich and his fellow neo-Malthusians had warned of: it faced back to back droughts in 1965 and 1966 and was dependent on US food aid, over 10 million tons in 1966, to avoid disaster. But what the neo-Malthusians did not realize was that this was the peak of food instability in India — not the beginning of a global cataclysm.
Early findings suggested that IR8 could have a yield of five times more than traditional rice without fertilizer and India moved quickly to adopt it. The impact was clear: in the 1960s India had a rice yield of two tons per hectare but by the 1990s it had risen threefold to six tons per hectare.
Similar leveraging of agricultural technology took place in other developing countries: IR8 was planted in the Philippines and the use of specially developed hybrid crops quickly spread throughout the rest of Asia. In China, ideological conflict made the genetic theories of Mendel politically unpopular but some scientists managed to get access to outside scientific research on crop hybridization and created a number of their own high yield rice varieties. From 1960 to 2000, crop yields across the board increased tremendously in the developing world. Rice increased 109%, wheat 208%, maize 157%, and potatoes 78%.
Putting the enormity of the Green Revolution in perspective: from 1960 to 1999 the global population doubled from three billion to over six billion. Yet during that time, the average number of calories available for people across all regions of the world actually increased. The global average of 2,100 calories per person per day in 1961 rose to over 2,600 by the year 2000. Asia in particular was an enormous benefactor — caloric supply went from 1,800 calories per person per day — 200 calories shy of the US minimum caloric recommendation of 2,000 — to above 2,500 at the millennium.
The lesson here is obvious: incentivized human ingenuity is enough to escape the warnings of Malthus. But looking at the future we must heed the fact that almost all of human history has occurred under such a Malthusian framework — as was emphasized earlier, there is nothing natural or inevitable about our current escape and there is no reason we could not return there if we take measures to stifle the agricultural innovation that carries on the work done in the Green Revolution. Today, we see all kinds of disastrous ideological ambitions that could send us back to the time of famines and poverty, particularly the aptly named “degrowth movement” that has caught on among certain parts of the modern environmental movement.
If there is one concrete thing that the Green Revolution can teach us, it is that growth is the way, the only way, forward if we want to make the world a better place for everyone. The vision of the future we should work towards is one of abundance: an abundance of people, an abundance of food, and an abundance of happiness. That our escape from the Malthusian trap was not inevitable cuts both ways: we have freed ourselves from its chains and now there is nothing, no law of nature nor fundamental equation, that says we will have to ever go back. It is insane to suggest that we must put the shackles back on voluntarily and forgo the existence of countless potential people just to return to the horrid but deceptively familiar lives that humans once lived. We should feel grateful rather than guilty about the abundance in our world: the people who came before us did not live lives of poverty and malnutrition because they were “degrowthers” or were worried about the human impact on the environment. They lived that way because they had no choice. We do.
Our future should not be a race against Malthus but instead one where we fundamentally obliterate the very idea of scarcity through technological innovation. This is not some kind of utopian ideal: today we have access to technology, nuclear energy and genetically modified food, that could one day free all of humanity from want of energy or food. How much more could the future give us if, in spite of fears so oft-proven unwarranted, we pressed on towards infinite abundance?
Owen Yingling is a Mercatus intern and University of Chicago student (Class of 2027)
Further Reading:
SNAP can improve nutrition, help farmers, and support the environment By Angela Rachidi for Farming Abundance
Phony Demand and Underpopulation: Problems Plaguing American Farmers By Matthew Yglesias for Farming Abundance
Toward True Farming Abundance By Baylen J. Linnekin for Farming Abundance
Food Regulations: Myths and Games by Richard Williams for Farming Abundance
Achieve Agricultural Abundance by Challenging the Status Quo By Agnes Gambill West for Farming Abundance