Globally Rational

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I don’t think I have to tell anybody about the obvious ramifications of the recent cyclone in Myanmar.  All obvious points aside, I think the bigger issue might be that the tragedy happened in a fertile area at a time when the world is approaching a hunger crisis and, possibly, a Malthusian catastrophe.

Now we’re finding out that the cyclone also damaged about 200,000 tons of rice right before the rainy season.  This will also wash away some of the soil’s salinity and prevent future rice growth.  Luckily, Myanmar’s government has finally allowed some foreign aid… but it’s too late to save the crop.  This is one more step in the direction of Malthus’s prediction; if we can’t increase the global food supply in the near future, the world will reach its carrying capacity.  When a bigger population has to share a smaller amount of food, nobody is properly nourished and everybody starves (except, of course, people like you and me who will probably never have to worry about starvation).  If we can’t find a way to solve the problem soon, every dent in the global food supply will become a poison for the human race.

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About a week ago, I wrote about how humanity seems to be disturbingly close to the mass die-off that Thomas Malthus predicted 200 years ago. In that last week, I’ve come across a huge amount of additional evidence suggesting that this theoretical catastrophe might soon become a reality:

• Food riots have been taking place around the world; the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is suggesting that this may lead to social instability.
• The use of corn ethanol as an energy source is causing a rise in the price of corn, which means that many people can no longer afford it.
• People in Haiti have resorted to eating mud.
• A US envoy is visiting North Korea, of all places, to provide food aid.

And that’s just a short list of stories I’ve happened to encounter. I’ll keep following this issue in the future; stay tuned to see what else is going on. The striking thing about this problem is the fact that in Western countries like the US, we’re facing an “obesity epidemic” at the same time as this “starvation epidemic.”

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About 200 years ago, the mathematician Thomas Robert Malthus famously wrote an equation predicting that the human population would soon reach the planet’s ecological carrying capacity, causing many of us to die off because of the lack of food and resources (just like what we have often seen with other species). He expected it to have already happened well before 2008 (especially because of the rapid population growth of the last 200 years), but we’ve managed to stave it off thanks to the effects of the Industrial Revolution. Recently, however, I’ve been seeing more and more articles suggesting that the hunger crisis is on its way to reaching epidemic proportions.

The UN is expecting that this lack of food will kill about 100 million of the world’s current residents, suggesting that we’re on the brink of a cap in our population. When everybody tries to share an inadequate amount of food, nobody gets enough… so this could lead to bigger problems in the future. As growth continues in some parts of the world, the increased number of mouths to feed will eventually mean that we’ll see the mass die-off that Malthus predicted. It seems like we’re following either the orange or the green trend on the graph (see right), since such a huge negative shift couldn’t possibly be on the same order as the red line.

The Malthusian catastrophe is not unexpected; we’ve expected it for a long time, but we managed to delay it with new technology. The biggest question has just been the timing of the effect, an it seems like we’re on our way there now. Odds are that it won’t directly affect you, since you’re obviously well-off enough to be reading this in your spare time, so we probably won’t bother to do anything about it. Recently, for example, Sam’s Club and Costco set a purchasing limit of 4 bags of rice per customer per visit… which is 3 more bags than I’ve ever bought.

We need to ask ourselves if we care enough to really do something about this.

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