Planet could be 'unrecognizable' by 2050, experts say

Only something like 2% of Africa's arable land is even irrigated, there is so much room for growth. I don't think the Africans are going to have too much trouble with food, as their population grows, so will their production capacity.

Brazil agricultural revolution has been staggering for a tropical country, Brazil has now joined the top 5 largest food exporters of the world, and it's the only (and first, and hopefully first of many) tropical country to do so. If anybody wants to read the Economist special report I can repost it here.

Food shortages will not be a problem if the correct political decisions are made regarding agricultural policy.

The naysayers, bah, shoo...back in the woodworks you go!

This sounds to me more like "the darks are taking over" fear mongering. Fear not.

And fifty years ago, Canadians were probably absolutely apalled that there would come a time when there would be double as many people living in Canada, and that Toronto would not only surpass Montreal in size but grow to five times it's original size! How would we be able to feed such a growing population? Housing is already ridiculous, transit is struggling to keep up, how are we ever going to fit so many people into such limited space since we can't use up this farmland?

Does this sound similar andyt? Malthus is still wrong. 200 years running. Toronto is a fine example.

Things aren't going to stay static. If housing becomes too expensive, who would move to Vancouver? What business-man would make a start up there, what company would form a subsidy there? People aren't stupid, and they respond to incentives. If there's no place for them to live, then they will move somewhere else, simple as. If the housing is too expensive, either some form of cheaper housing must be made or else people will not move there, simple as.

This assumption that people will always move to Vancouver is silly, andyt. At some point, people began moving to Toronto more than Montreal. At some point, more people began moving to the West in the last few decades. Somehow, these cities are managing. Maybe it's because these people have a brain and can respond to the fact that there are more jobs and cheaper housing elsewhere. Maybe they are moving because things are not static. Cities will change and have changes -- at some point, Edmonton stopped using street cars and began using buses. The horribly struggling street cars of the future is no more. How can this not happen in Vancouver?

Because all else save for population must remain static?

Instead, alarmists fall back to the same rhetoric. Malthus has been wrong for 200 years, but this time he'll definitely be right! The world will fall under blight! Estimates that the population won't stop at 9 billion at the top have to be a lie! Let's revise our horrific calculations and say that the world will now end a whole 2 billion less than we were claiming a few years ago! We must increase population controls and condom use!

Other experts, including the guy in The Seveth Billion video, are saying something very different from these experts. However, because doom and apocalypse are over the horizon, minor news stories develop around what a select few experts are spouting because it fits more in line with sensationalist news, and some people pick up on it because it already picks up on their already formed points of view.

Somehow, the world has not gone through a mass famine since Malthus first formed these ideals hundreds of years ago. Somehow, Canada has ably managed to take on double it's original population in the last 50 years. At our current rate of expansion, by 2061, we'll not even have broken 50,000,000 yet. To double our population in fifty years, we'd have to seriously ramp up our immigration rate. Yet I don't see wide spread support for that either.

Tying in "pro-immigration" to 100,000,000 people in Canada, neo-Malthusian stuff and so on makes no sense to me. Fringe positions do not represent the mainstream, and I'd appreciate it if you would stop trying to shove all of us into our group and misrepresent our positions while you are doing so.

We utilize less than half of our arable land in the world. That makes up a small proportion of the overall landmass on Earth. This is a lot of air being blown up out of proportion. The world is not going to be covered by farmland in a few decades.

Khar beat me too it. Why are Malthusian disaster predictions still so popular when practically every single one of them has been proven completely wrong ever since the panic-mongering old jerk first published them? Most famines, for example, are the result of severe drought or war-crippled local infrastructure or active ethnic combat going on, not because of over-population or changing climate conditions.

To me this sort of stuff is no different than what the Nostradamus followers or the conspiracy assholes barf up on a regular basis. It's almost always wrong but despite that it still manages to hold sway over millions and millions of terrified minds that should know better by now. Totally baffling to say the least.

I find it silly how people in the developed world go crazy over organic foods and try to avoid the technological advances that make it possible to feed much of the rest of the world. Genetically engineered crops, irradiated fruit, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers; we still have quite a ways to go before global overpopulation worries me.

Will Malthus Be Right?

Malthus was right. So read a car bumper sticker on a busy New Jersey highway the other day, and it got me thinking about the Rev. Thomas Malthus, the English political economist who gave the "dismal science" its nickname. His "Essay on the Principle of Population," published in 1798, predicted a gloomy future for humanity: our population would grow until it reached the limits of our food supply, ensuring that poverty and famine would persistently rear their ugly faces to the world.
The most casual cruise on the Internet shows how much debate Malthus still stirs today. Basically, the Pollyannas of this world say that Malthus was wrong; the population has continued to grow, economies remain robust--and famines in Biafra and Ethiopia are more aberrations than signs of the future. Cassandras reply that Malthus was right, but techno-fixes have postponed the day of reckoning. There are now 6 billion people on Earth. The Pollyannas say the more the merrier; the Cassandras say that is already twice as many as can be supported in middle-class comfort, and the world is running out of arable land and fresh water. Despite a recent slowdown in the growth rate, the U.N. Population Division expects the world population to reach 9.5 billion by the year 2100.
What's missing from the debate is an understanding of the changing relationship between humanity and nature. For it is how humans fit into the natural world that will settle whether Malthus was right or wrong. He was wrong in 1798. But if he had been writing 10,000 years earlier, before agriculture, he would have been right. And were his book being published today, on the brink of the third millennium, he would be more right than wrong. Let me explain.
Malthus cared about only one species: ours. And, ecologically speaking, ours is an unusual species. With the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago, we became the first species in the 3.7 billion-year history of life not to be living as small populations off the natural fat of the land. Taking food production into our own hands, we stepped outside the local ecosystem. All but a few cultivated plants became weeds, and all but a few domesticated herds, pets and game animals became pests and vermin.
In short, we declared open war on the very local ecosystems that had until then been our home. As preagricultural hunter-gatherers, we humans held niches in ecosystems, and those niches, resource-limited as they always were, had indeed kept our numbers down. Estimates vary, but a figure of roughly 6 million people on Earth at the beginning of agriculture is reasonable. By 1798 the population reached 900 million. Agriculture altered how we related to the natural world and, in liberating us from the confines of the local ecosystem, removed the Malthusian lid in one fell swoop.
So, when he wrote 200 years ago, Malthus was wrong. He did not see that nations are not like ecosystems, that people could expand into new regions and, with the burgeoning technology of the Industrial Revolution, become vastly more efficient at producing food and wresting raw materials from Earth

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... z1EYrDhgNh

In fairness today's world would be largely unrecognisable to people back in 1910.