Population and resources -
Malthus and Boserup Over and under population Malthus Boserup The Club of Rome |
Malthus and Boserup Population and resources Think about it! |
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A 2009 estimate from the
Office of National Statistics (ONS) suggested that the UK’s population
could rise as high as
71 million people by 2033.
This caused an outcry and heated debate between
politicians and people who either see nothing wrong with that and people
who on the contrary want to see strict controls put into place on the
UK’s population (and in most cases on the migration element).
But why was this the case?
The answer lies in how people view the delicate
balance between population and resource provision in different ways.
Changing populations can
be viewed in relation to how many resources are available to support
that population.
Indeed, overpopulation is a condition where
there are too many people living in a nation or area relative to the
natural resources (food, water, fuel, building materials etc) that exist
in that place (the UK could be considered overpopulated in terms of food
supply as we only produce 60percent of the food we consume).
In contrast, under population is where there are
too few people living in an area to efficiently exploit and use the
natural resources within that area (e.g. Northern Canada has huge
mineral wealth but too few people to exploit those minerals because of
climatic constraints).
The ideal situation or any government is OPTIMUM
POPULATION, where there is a balance between the population size and the
amounts of resources available.
The reality of achieving
OPTIMUM population is difficult in practice because of 2 main reasons:
Population sizes are not
static but DYNAMIC and grow or shrink over time.
Technology changes,
allowing the exploitation of natural resources that might not have
previously been available (e.g. technology has allowed us to farm
increasing amounts of land in the UK that 200 years ago would have been
inadequate for farming).
A good example of a
country that has tried to manage OVER and UNDER population within its
borders is Indonesia.
Here, the government launched a massive
transmigration program.
There have been 2 major
contributors to the idea of the balance between population and
resources, pessimistic (doom and gloom) of Thomas Malthus and the
optimism (the glass is half full!) attitudes of Esther Boserup.
Malthus lived in the 18th
century and wrote an essay on the principles of population.
In this essay he stated that population growth
would be checked or stopped by various factors.
His argument was essentially that population
grew geometrically (1,2,4,8,16,32) whereas food production and resource
provision grew at a slower arithmetic rate(1,2,3,4,5,6).
He concluded that because of this more and more
peasants and subsistence farmers would live poorer and poorer lives
until some checks came into place.
He proposed that there would be
positive
checks, which raise the death rate; and preventative
ones, which lower the birth rate. The positive checks include hunger,
disease and war; the preventative checks, abortion, birth control,
prostitution, postponement of marriage and celibacy.
The alternative viewpoint came from Esther Boserup, who suggested that
human innovation and technological advances would allow food production
to keep up with population growth. Boserup was a Danish economist and
published The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The
Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure.
She argued that when population density is
low enough to allow it, land tends to be used intermittently (not
frequently – with gaps in time to allow land to recover), with heavy
reliance on fire to clear fields and fallowing to restore fertility. It
is only when rising population density reduces the use of fallowing (and
therefore the use of fire) that fields are moved towards annual
cultivation. This reduces fertility, and to deal with this people
expanded efforts at fertilizing, field preparation, weed control, and
irrigation. This process of raising production at the cost of more work
at lower efficiency is what Boserup describes as "agricultural
intensification".
So
who is right?
Malthus’ theory on
population growth has proved to be correct and has grown to a staggering
6.8Billion in 2010.
There have also been many local famines within
regions, natural disasters, water shortages to check local population
growth.
However, the number of famine deaths has decreased over
time, and population growth in some parts of the world such as Europe
has stabilised
or stopped. So
who is right? It seems that many of the problems of having a finite land
area and possible food shortages have been overcome by technology.
The
industrialisation
of farming, the green revolution, GM crops, improved farming methods,
land reform have all massively increased food production.
Indeed, some of the poorest countries in the
world can still export food to raise foreign earnings and gain
investment from TNCs.
However, some people still hold the Malthusian
view that catastrophe is imminent.
This is because population continues to rise
rapidly and many of our farming practices are heavily dependent on
unsustainable substances such as crude oil. In addition, there may be
less famine deaths but hundreds of millions of people survive on very
basic diets leading them to be malnourished rather than undernourished.
So population size and density does have a
negative impact upon their lives.
More current views
come from the deceased Julian Simon, and the Club of Rome. Julian Simon
supported Boserup’s view that humanity would innovate its way out of
disaster.
"We now have in our hands—really, in our libraries—the
technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing
population for the next seven billion years." (Simon along
The State of Humanity: Steadily Improving 1995).
The Club of Rome
are a group of industrialists, scientists, economists and
statesmen from 10 countries. They published ‘The Limits to Growth’ in
1972 which reached the basic conclusion that if present growth trends in
world population continue and if associated industrialisation,
pollution, food production and resource depletion continue unchanged,
the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime in the next
100 years.
Five variables were examined in the original model, on the
assumptions that exponential growth accurately described their patterns
of increase, and that the ability of technology to increase the
availability of resources grows only linearly. These variables are:
world population, industrialization, pollution, food production and
resource depletion. The authors intended to explore the possibility of a
sustainable feedback pattern that would be achieved by altering growth
trends among the five variables.
The most probably result will be sudden and uncontrollable
decline in both population and industrial capacity.
The Club of Rome really bring the idea of
SUSTAINABILITY to the population and resources argument. The question
now becomes who do you believe? |
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