Open Forum
New Delhi, 26 June 2019
Population Growth
CAN RESOURCES MEET CHALLENGES?
By Dhurjati Mukherjee
Population growth continues
to be a cause of concern globally with different predictions. On the one hand,
the UN estimates that population is expected to peak to 11 billion by 2100 and only
then will stabilise, and on the other many demographers are of the opinion that
it will peak much earlier, may be by 2050 at about 9 billion and start
shrinking after that. In such a scenario, the problem will accentuate in third
world countries, including India.
In these countries
the high density of population and increasing growth has come as a burden and
resulted in failure to assure the lower segments of the population a dignified
standard of living. Obviously, this is due to the fact that their resources are
inadequate to match the necessities.
Let us refer here to
famous scientist Robert Malthus prediction, way back in 1798 (in his book ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’)
where he stated that population may grow exponentially while resources would
grow arithmetically. As more people entered the workforce, wages would fall and
goods would become scare. Then there are experts of the last century who had
talked of a crisis situation emerging due to high levels of population growth and
it cannot be denied that during the middle part of that century there were
innumerable starvation deaths in many countries of Asia and Africa.
A follower of
Malthus, Paul Ehrich in his famous book ‘The
Population Bomb’ in 1968 warned that “in the 1970s hundreds of millions of
people will starve to death in spite of any crash programme embarked upon now”.
Ehrich was a big supporter of India’s family planning programme as he considered
it would become impossible for this planet to feed the ever-increasing
population. Though a section of economists, mostly from the Western world, feel
that population growth has no relation to poverty, it is a fact that in the
backward countries of Asia and Africa, where population growth and its density
are high poverty, under nutrition and squalor has been on the rise.
At the same time, while
it is acknowledged that human beings are the best and finest resource, the
pressure of population growth on natural resource has been rising. An example
could be countries such as India, which is primarily agro-based. Apart from the
fact that productivity is quite low, land holdings have become smaller due to
divisions with an increase in family members over passage of time, further
aggravating the situation. This has resulted in migration from rural to urban
areas, where infrastructure is poor and people have been forced to take shelter
in unauthorised slums, squatter settlements, railway tracks etc. where living
conditions are undoubtedly degraded and inhuman.
On the question of
food, while innovative methods have been successful in improving yields of
essential commodities and negating the Malthusian warning, there are certain concerns
which need to be addressed. Though food production has increased and the
conspicuous consumption of the rich is a reality, there are still starvation
deaths, even in India as also deaths due to under-nutrition, both of adults and
children. This is clear indication that availability of food in Third World
countries like India is not quite sufficient. Can anyone say when the whole
population of the developing economies will get a nutritious diet and whether
this at all is achievable in the next two decades or so?
Regarding
technological innovations in increasing food productivity, it has to be
admitted that pollution has emerged as a big challenge, whether it is the case
of water pollution, soil pollution etc. Degrading of land due to excessive use
of chemicals and fertilizers is well known as also the over use of groundwater
resources. While soil pollution is destroying large tracts of soil, arsenic,
fluoride and iron contamination of water has become manifest, specially in
various parts of India as water levels become lower.
The point that is
sometimes missed is that water contamination has little or no effect on the
upper and middle income sections; it mostly affects the poorer sections of
society. Thus it would not be judicious to say that science and technology has
worked wonders in feeding the population without the resultant effects, which
are indeed quite disastrous for the economically weaker sections.
Adding to all this is
the contamination of whatever we eat and the air we breathe. Scholars, who
mostly come from the upper echelons of society, are not much exposed to
problems suffered by the poor, specially those living in backward areas of the
country or living by the side of railway tracks. They simply cannot imagine
that the toxicity the common man on the street has been exposed to has resulted
in a virtual jump of diseases like cancer, which were a rare occurrence some 40
years ago. There is little possibility of the disease burden on the poor
receding in spite of best scientific interventions. Is not the high population
growth responsible for it?
Another interesting
finding is that most of the rich and the upper middle classes have small
families, whereas the number of members in poor families is much higher.
However, in recent times, with the spread of massive awareness campaign, birth
control has been brought down though population growth still remains a problem.
And this problem primarily affects the poorer sections of society due to lack
of education and exposure to socio-economic problems.
One may mention here
the observation of Ted Nordhaus, co-founder of Breakthrough Institute, a
California-based energy and environment think tank, who aptly pointed out: “For
decades, each increment of economic growth in developed economies has brought
lower resource and energy use than the last.” This trend of severing the tie
between GDP and energy/materials throughput is called ‘decoupling’.”
Many economists make
big claims for past decoupling and promise much more of it in the future. But a
careful analysis of decoupling to date shows that most is attributable to
accounting error. And to get the developing world up to the level of an average
American’s energy usage would require nearly quadrupling global energy
consumption, even assuming advances in efficiency, which, however, appears
unrealistic. Thus, unless we find ways to make decoupling actually happen in
the future more reliably and at higher rates, growing the global economy will
require us to use more of the Earth’s depleted resources.
The Global Footprint
Network calculated that humanity is currently exceeding Earth’s sustainable
productivity by 60 per cent. We do this by drawing down resources that future
generations and other species would otherwise use. As a result of our actions,
Earth’s long-term carrying capacity for humans is actually declining.
Environmentalists like Nordhaus are right that it’s not a fixed quantity; the
problem is that we are reducing it rather than adding to it in a way that can
be maintained.
Thus, it has been rightly
identified that nine planetary boundaries that have been transgressed at our
peril are: climate change, ocean acidification, biosphere integrity,
biochemical flows, land-system change, freshwater use, stratospheric ozone
depletion, atmospheric aerosol loading and the introduction of novel entities
into environments.
In sum, the
population growth will put severe pressure on resources and the common people and
though many would hope for some positive effect, these face the risk of being
negated unless countries are successful in doing a balancing act.---INFA
(Copyright, India
News & Feature Alliance)
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