Overpopulation is less dangerous than you think
Insights and opinions on how we have grown chronically allergic to the overused and abused term “overpopulation”
Cover image credit: Leslie Taylor from Gaijin Camera.
When the screening schedule for Aarhus Film Festival was released, one movie title caught my attention — “Population Boom” directed by Werner Boote, a director hailing from Austria who shot to fame after the release of his call-to-action documentary titled “Plastic Planet” (IMDB link). The documentary asks a simple yet important question:
Is overpopulation as dangerous as people make it sound like?
A brief history of human population
Population growth is defined by two simple parameters — the rate of which new human beings are birthed, and the rate of which members of humanity perish. Changes in world population is therefore, controlled by rate of birth and death of its constituent members.
In nature, various factors keep both parameters in check. Birth complications, family planning decisions, or even down to just the sheer population of sexually-mature humans of reproductive age and capacity, are one of the many events determining birth rates across the world. Conversely, disease, catastrophes (natural or otherwise), medical advances and a myraid of other elements determines the rate of which members of our very own species disappears from the face of the Earth.
Of course, what you see above is an oversimplified view of the dynamics of global human population, influenced by a wide spectrum of factors that are hard to grasp, not well-understood and at times, poorly appreciated.
Earth has witnessed the meteoric growth of human population from a modest 1 billion to a staggering 7 billion in the span of time slightly more than two centuries, running from 1800 to 2011. That’s a 700% inflation in just 200 years, a timespan that comfortably commodates half a dozen generations, so to speak.
Birth rate peaked at ~2.3% in the 1960s, followed by a slow but steady decline to today’s rate of ~1.1%, translating to 2.5 new members added to the surface of our planet every second. Since you have started reading this piece of writing, around 230 new mouths that have to be fed; 230 new humans that need to have clothed, accommodated and attended to; have been added to our collective existence.
The falling birth rate did not hamper the momentum of population growth, however — we are expected to pack 10 billion by the turn of this century, based on the assumption that birth rate will eventually converge to the replacement level of around 2.1 births per women.
Is sheer size that we have to be afraid of?
The main concern voiced by many people, from scientists to the journalists, is that we are too populous for the little blue planet to handle. The depletion of natural biodiversity, global warming, widening income disparity, catastrophic outbreaks, unchecked hunger and a range of other global issues have been blamed on this single word — overpopulation.
But is our sheer number the (only) thing to blame?
That is the question “Population Boom” left me as I left the screening room and headed into the cold and unforgivingly humid Danish winter night.
We are not equal
Homogeneity is the assumption and fallacy that we tend to make all the time. If this is happening to me, it must be happening to everyone else. Or, in other words, we tend to assume that people around us, on a local or even a global scale, behave the same way we do — that we have the same consumption patterns, lifestyles, priorities, demands, provisions and more.
Perhaps, it is the very mirror neurons themsleves, that powered and supercharged our evolutionary success, making us falling prey to the simple homogeneity fallacy. By equipping us with the ability to emphatize and feel, it might have led us to assume that we are all equal, in one way or another. Ah, I forget to mention that I’m a molecular biologist myself — which explains this digression.
Unfortunately, the statistician within me politely disagrees. Isn’t it a bit spurious to assume that the 7+ billion other people on the surface of the planet have exactly the same demands as ourselves? We might be homogenous in a local level (say, in your neighbourhood), but expanding that assumption further out would be myopic, naive and overgeneralizing.
And there is plenty of evidence to back this up. Peter Menzel, a photographer who travelled around the world to document what households in different regions eat in a week, did an remarkable work portraying just how different our consumption patterns are — although care should be taken that the households portrayed may not be representative of the population investigated.
On one end of the spectrum, the Aboubakar family from Chad, and the Namgay family from Nepal (see top), spend $1.23 and $5.03 on food on a weekly basis. Meanwhile,the Glad Ostensen family from Norway, and the Fernandez family from Texas, United States of America (see bottom), spends $731.71 and $242.48 respectively on food over the same period of time.
Another poignant graph that I find intriguing will be plotting the population size in each country against their energy consumption, measured in kilograms of oil equivalent. The question I am posing is “do countries that we consider overpopulated consume a lot of energy?”
It seems that population size itself is a poor determinant of energy consumption. In fact, you would fail to see much of a trend, linear or otherwise, there. However, if you plot a country’s per capita GDP (after purchasing power parity conversion), you will see something more interesting:
The double log chart plotted above is fitted with a generalized linear function with a correlation coefficient of 0.7405.In layman terms, the linear relationship between log-transformed GDP and log-transformed energy consumption is rather solid (scoring 74%).
It seems that richer countries, measured by per capita GDP, seems to be a more avid guzzler of energy. Poorer countries, meanwhile, consume less. It is very likely that lifestyle, which is distinct across the GDP spectrum, has a significant contribution towards energy usage — not absolute population size as we initially thought.
I have decided to use the household expenditure, normalized against population size, to be a rough approximate of spending based on lifestyle choices, socio-economic conditions and the likes. Here, again, we see that population is somewhat a poor determinant of household spending (0.03549, or 3.5% score, left) compared to per capita GDP (0.9044, or 90%, right):
In the final chart I have presented, energy consumption, again, correlated positively and moderately (0.6034, or 60% score) with household expenditure in USD normalized against population size of each country. This brings me to the following conclusion:
Lifestyle and wealth, not population size, are main determinants of energy consumption patterns in countries.
Data set: per capita energy use, population,per capita GDP (PPP), and household expenditure are all from year 2007 (selected for greatest coverage). Incomplete datasets were eliminated.
In the same breath, it is fair to say that environmental degradation and climate change are not due to overpopulation alone. Our consumption patterns, unnecessary wants created by rentless commercializationg and ruthless advertising, abuse of mass-production technologies are one of the many candidate suspects of overconsumption of resources. This brings us to the next point, about food consumption pattern across the world.
We have enough to feed the world
The Green Revolution, taking place between 1940s and 1960s and spearheaded by founding father Norman Borlaug, resulted in greater food production and allowed the same amount of arable land support a greater number of people. The dire, bleak future of global social and political turmoil stemming from underfed populace and food shortage, known as the Malthusian disaster, failed to materialize.
Why, then, you ask, that 36 million people perish unnecessarily annually because of hunger? It simply boils down to uneven distribution of resources — 80% of stunted children live in just 20 countries — and unnecessary food wastage. Other factors are just as responsible, such as crop losses due to diseases, improper storage, but let’s focus on the prickly topic of food wastage first.
In 2008, 43 billion pounds, or almost 20 billion kilograms,
of food is thrown away in USA at the retail level alone.
The Natural Resource Defence Council published a study in 2012 detailing the gruesome amount of wastage that is happening in the background. While losses inevitably occur in all stages of food production, the most significant loss occurred at the consumer level:
A more sobering fact is that the world today already has the potential to feed everyone. Not only that one third of the food produced today for human consumption ends up, well, not being consumed (source, PDF), the amount of food wasted in industrialized nation is roughly equivalent to the annual output of more than half of the African continent.
Annually, industrialized economies waste 222 million tonnes of food. The annual food production capacity of sub-Saharan Africa is estimated to be at 230 million tonnes.
Unchecked priorities, as well as low consumer income and lack of purchasing power thereof, are perhaps just as, or even more, responsible for food security issues and global hunger and malnutrition. Year 2002, India — when a sizeable portion of the population (350 million out of 1.046 billion) went to bed hungry, the government is sitting on a stockpile of 53 million tonnes of wheat that either the general populace lacks purchasing power to acquire, or was destined for export. Meanwhile, USA is the largest food producer in the world, yet hunger remains a reality that is too close to home for 1 out of 6 Americans. More gravely, 1 out of 5 American children are suffering from inadequate food and nutrition.
To compound the situation of food shortage, pricing of consumable food seems to be a two-headed snake. While expensive food, such as wheat in India, has kept the poorest starving, mass-produced cheap food that are found awashed on the counters of shops in industrialized economies actually encouraged wastage due to the low perceived private cost — a study by the University of Arizona revealed.
As economists have always proposed, our individual decision in a simplified market structure boils down to how we perceive and compute personal, or private, costs and gains. We often fail to see the great social costs or gains our collective decisions, which necessitates government intervention in various forms. Various textbook examples are definitely at our disposal for argument’s sake — vaccination against transmissible diseases carry a huge social benefit although individuals tend to shy away from them due to unfounded fear of side effects and high costs of vaccination; pollution taxes levied on heavy industries forces factory operators and business owners to internalize the social costs of dirtying the environment.
Food wastage carries a low private cost in modernized, industrialized societies, but burdens the world with an invisible but enormous social cost.
Similarly, food wastage continues to go unchecked because we simply cannot see past the greater impact of our choices.
We are blaming the wrong people
I am appalled by the extremely skewed income distribution in the US — even more so after watching this sobering video documenting the gross wealth inequality in the country:
Top 1% of Americans own 40% of the country’s wealth.
The very same, yet small, subset of Americans also owns 50% of all stocks and equities, and earns the equivalent of an average monthly salary in 15 minutes.
Myopic, narrow focus on human numbers instead of pre-existing political processes and social conditions detracts us from the real cause of poverty and inequality. It is easy to apportion blame to the less privileged, wealthy and also the silenced ones. Moreover, misleading imagary attempting to depict overpopulation have been overused — the annual pilgrimage to Mecca; visitors to the Chhath Puja festival in India; travellers to and from Ed Al-Adha in Dhakar, Bangladesh; or even the image of the busy Shibuya crossing in Japan (seen in the cover photo of this writing) — has been weaponized by population control advocates about the horror, danger, inevitability of overpopulation.
Photos from Mecca, Chhath Puja festival and Ed Al-Adha depict crowds that congregate only at specific days of the year — no more than a dozen in total. Pilgrims, tourists and visitors of these events converge on a central location, and typically hail from far away places — therefore, the locations where these events occurred are not as crowded as usual.
Undeniably, these photos carry the shock value that media corporations and journalists crave. They are visually stunning, beautifully made — but what bothers me is that are these photos, and allow me to reuse the keyword mentioned before, representative of the opinion they are trying in vain to shout across the room?
The truth is that these images are not representative images of overpopulation, but unfortunately recruited for the very same purpose. Moreover, these photos serve a subtle but sinister function of shifting the blame of issues we have today on poorer and more populous nations.
Have I mentioned that Mexico has achieved birth rate that is of replacement level? However, does the photo I have used previous, of the sprawling suburb outside of Mexico City, portray that?
…or that as of 2013, the per person energy consumption in Bangladesh, standing at 208.8 kilogram of oil equvalent (kgoe/a) is 35 times less than their American counterparts, standing at 7164.5 kgoe/a?
In fact, use of such imagery borderlines stereotyping and discrimination. Immigrants and the poor are frequently depicted in media to be responsible for overpopulation because of their higher birth rates — but have we also given fair and due consideration that these people probably consume less resources per capita due to the economic condition they are in? These imageries inadverently create a strong, but unsubstantiated and unwarranted, link that third world countries are responsible for overpopulation, and are the ones to be blamed for a a host of issues, from global warming to food shortages, around the world.
Population control as a tool of oppression
The truth is, population control does not only serve its obvious purpose of keeping human population in check. In fact, population control is often applied subjectively — like how richer parents in China can afford paying for the privilege of having an additional child; how birth control dehumanizes the female gender for being the sole cause of uncontrolled population growth; how immigrants and third world countries are being fingered when it comes to blaming the party responsible for population boom.
Women are often the victim of population control, or as known by its gentler but equal name, family planning. Cases of expecting mothers being abducted and forced to undergo abortion are not unheard of in China, where the infamous one child policy is strictly and also selectively enforced. In many countries, post-abortive care is negligently carried out or even absent, posing a great deal of health and future reproductive risk to women.
I tread this topic with caution — as much as I champion, respect and honour a woman’s right to undergo abortion, I am definitely not a supporter of forced, blunt-ended population control measures.
Population boom is a fact. Overpopulation is a myth.
Yes, we are experiencing a population boom in the sense that our absolute numbers are increasing. However, the use of the term overpopulation for the purpose of fear-mongering and as a scapegoat for all problems, big or small, that mankind is currently facing, is uncalled for.
Overpopulation is simply a constructed excuse used by some people for self-serving purposes. We are not suffering from overpopulation — the world is suffering from poverty, income and wealth inequality, hunger, climate issues due to underlying flaws in our political and economic systems. Population growth is simply an easy scapegoat.
In other words, family planning and population control is not an all-encompassing panacea. In fact, policies that are formulated to control population growth not only demean women rights by portraying them as the party responsible for excessive birth, but also to suppress the less privileged majority.
What can we do? Where do we go from here?
I find this section the hardest to write of all. What can I do, as a droplet in the magnitude of an ocean, a single individual in a sea of 7+ billion, to help?
Exercise the power of your vote. Voting is a right bestowed upn you by the constitution. Instead of spending time to be opiniated, try rerouting that effort towards educating yourself of the political landscape in the society around you. Encourage others to do the same, and let political apathy be an issue of the past.
Consume responsibly. Being environmentally conscious does not stop of shopping from farmer’s markets and supporting local stores, who source materials and consumables from geographically closer locations, therefore reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Reduce your waste. Think twice about bowing to the buy-one-get-one-free offers. Ask yourself — what do you want, and what do you need?
Acknowledgements
Werner Boote, for directing the film Population Boom, and raising awareness on the (non-existent) issue of overpopulation.
R core development team and the authors behind ggplot2 that made the two graphs possible, as well as data from World Bank.
