Food Scarcity. Unavoidable by 2100? Impact of Demography & Climate Change.
by
Raoul Weiler and Kris Demuynck. Geneva: Globethics.net, 2017. Available at:
<http://www.globethics.net/gel/10848704> ISBN 978-1546442615 (PDF) £0.00
(GBP). 150pp.
Ugo
Bardi. Department of Chemistry, University of Florence
ugo.bardi@unifi.it
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DOI: 10.3197/jps.2017.2.1.73
Licensing: This article is Open Access (CC BY 4.0).
How to Cite:
Bardi, U. 2016. 'Food Scarcity. Unavoidable by 2100? Impact of Demography & Climate Change by Raoul Weiler and Kris Demuynck'. The Journal of Population and Sustainability 2(1): 73–76.
https://doi.org/10.3197/jps.2017.2.1.73
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Scientific
studies that examine the food supply and its correlation to human population
have a long tradition extending back to Thomas Malthus and his Essay on the Principle of Population of 1798. From then on, the field has
remained politically charged. Still today, Malthus is often dismissed as a
doomsday prophet whose apocalyptic predictions turned out to be wrong. But
Malthus lacked the modern concept of “overshoot and collapse” and he never
predicted the kind of population crashes that we associate with modern famines
(Kolb, 1972; Bardi, 2016). Another study often accused of having been overly
alarmist in terms of the future of the human population is the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth, first published in 1972.
This is also a misinterpretation, since none of the several scenarios reported
in 1972 foresaw a population decline before entering the second half of the
21st century (Bardi, 2011).
Of
course, there are also counter-examples showing that it is perfectly possible
to make wrong predictions about the future of the food supply. For instance, in
1968 Paul Ehrlich (1968) wrote that widespread famines would afflict humankind
in the 1970s and 1980s. On the contrary, the 1980s saw the start of a
historical phase in which no major famines were recorded for at least three
decades (Penuel and Statler, 2011), yet despite this hunger still persists in
the world.
These
considerations are meant to show how difficult the subject of food supply is
and how easy it is to let politically charged considerations bend the results
of a study to fit preconceived views of the world. So, it takes a certain
courage to venture in this field, but nevertheless it is an important subject
which needs to be faced. The authors of Food Scarcity,
Raul Weller and Kris Demuynck, have done exactly that with their book dedicated
to the central subject pursued by the Club of Rome: the future of humankind.
Weller is a member of the Club while the study is sponsored by the Club’s EU
chapter. Analogous to the first report to the Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth, of 1972, the book by Weiler
and Demuynck approaches an old problem with a new methodology. While The Limits to Growth was
one of the first studies to apply system dynamics to the study of the economy, Food Scarcity is among
the first study to apply modern network theory to the world’s food system – a
subject also approached earlier by Zimmerman et al. (2016), but not on such a
wide scale.
The
resulting book, Food Scarcity, is
an ambitious attempt to pack an enormous amount of material into just 150
pages. It starts with a review of the situation of the world’s food supply with
extensive data on the different climate systems, cultivation technologies,
geographical conditions, and more. It then proceeds to an analysis based on
modern network theory, where the authors describe the correlations between the
various ecosystemic, geographic, and climatic elements of the system. The
subsequent section considers various perspectives on current techniques of food
production. Finally, the book provides a set of recommendations for the future.
The
depth and the breadth of the analysis attempted by the authors is impressive
but, at the same time, the book gives the impression of not having been
completely successful in tackling the title subject of Food Scarcity. The book targets many important
elements of the world’s food production system, including climate change, soil
erosion, technological effects and others, but it does not include some which
are fundamental to the subject of food supply,
which is not the same thing as food production. In
particular, there is no mention of the importance of the financial system in
the issue of feeding the world’s population. In ignoring financial factors, Food Scarcity follows
the approach that was previously taken by the authors of The Limits to Growth –
which may be considered a necessity given the many unknowns generating the wide
fluctuations of the financial markets. Yet, in dealing with food supply at the
global level we cannot ignore how the fact that large famines disappeared for
the past 40 years rests only in part on the increased yield of agriculture.
Another major factor, perhaps the most important one, has been the capability
of the world’s commercial system to deliver food everywhere. However, food is
delivered because people are able to buy it, otherwise it would rot where it is
produced. A global financial crisis, such as the one that took place in 2008,
could cause major famines if it were to last more than a few years. So, it is
disappointing to read the nine “Recommendations” of the book, all based on
suggestions of how to increase food production, or at least avoid its decline
(e.g., avoid producing biofuels). These are all good suggestions, albeit
perhaps temporary ones, but none of them mention factors related to delivering
food where it is needed. One problem here is that we are still at an early
stage in understanding what makes complex networks resistant to external
perturbations, and we are unable to predict how and when a complex system will
crash, even though crashing is a typical property of these systems (Bardi,
2017).
This
book can be seen as an important first step in using network theory for
understanding a major sector of the world’s economy, that of food production
and supply. But it is only a first step, and much more work will be needed to
be able to manage the world’s food supply system in a way that will make
humankind truly safe from famines.
Bardi,
U., 2011. The limits to growth revisited. New
York: Springer.
Bardi,
U., 2016. Jay Wright Forrester (1918–2016): His contribution to the concept of
overshoot in socioeconomic systems. BioPhysical Economics and
Resource Quality, 1, 12
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Bardi,
U., 2017. The Seneca effect. Why growth
is slow but collapse is rapid.Berlin: Springer Verlag.
Ehrlich,
P. R., 1968. The population bomb. New York: Sierra Club/Ballantine Books.
Kolb,
F. R., 1972. The stationary state of ricardo and malthus: Neither pessimistic
nor prophetic. Intermountain Economic Review, 3,
17–30.
Malthus,
T., 1798. An essay on the principle of
population: or, a view of its past and present effects on human happiness.
London: J. Johnson.
Meadows,
D. H., Meadows, D. L., Randers, J. and Bherens, W., 1972. The limits to growth. New York: Universe Books.
Penuel
K.B. and Statler M., eds., 2011. Encyclopedia of disaster relief.
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Zimmerman,
R., Zhu, Q. and Dimitri, C., 2016. Promoting resilience for food, energy, and
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