Since the 1960's Prof Paul Ehrlich has been cautioning us that sustainable population for Earth is in the range of 1.5-2.0 billion. That was the world population way back in the 1930's. Whether Prof.Ehrlich's assumption is justifiable or not, not even in our wildest dreams a reset to that number is possible. United Nations' Worldometer shows that as of Sept. 2021 we stand at 7.9 billion. The UN study group on population furthermore forecasts that population will peak at 11 billion by 2100 before a downward trend sets in. There are other schools who predict that the peak will be at 9.7 million in 2060's and thereafter it will begin to decline. Developing nations will be registering maximum growth, sub-Saharan Africa topping the list with +114% and East/Southeast Asia tailing at 13%. Whichever way one looks at it, the challenge indeed will be to feed the additional billions.
No poverty and Zero Hunger by 2030 are the top two priorities of United Nations' Sustainable Development agenda initiated in 2015. Recent COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the deep and wide flaws in the global food distribution system. Approximately 2.37 billion people did not have access to adequate food in 2020. Geopolitical and socio-economic factors aggravated the situation.
It is not that we don't produce enough. According to 2020 Statistical Yearbook published by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), we produce 1.5 times more food than we require: plentiful supplies of sugar cane, corn and soybeans come from the Americas, rice, wheat and potatoes from Asia. However approximately one third of the food produced is annually wasted, for want of storage, transport, logistics and marketing facilities, inflicting a whooping $1 trillion loss per year to the global economy.
If stringent steps are not taken, millions will continue to remain hungry forever. The UN Food Systems Summit was held last week in New York. With the tagline of GoodFood4All, the summit's vision is "a world where good food is affordable and accessible – where governments and businesses work together to provide it – and where farmers in every country grow food in a way that protects the planet." The basic question is not about optimum world population but sustainable population that specific geographic regions can support. This calculation needs to done taking into consideration the natural resources and anthropogenic activities that lead to irreversible drain on the ecosystem. For example it is estimated that human civilisation began with a forest cover of roughly 60million square kilometres, which has shrunk to less than 40 million square kilometres as of now.
REFERENCES:
1.Paul Ehrlich: Collapse of civilisation is near certainty within decades
2 The Population Bomb : Paul Ehrlich ,Macmillan (Revised 1971) ISBN:978-0345021397
3. Deforestation and world population sustainability: a quantitative analysis
