In Korea, we use this expression : “You don’t joke/play around with food.”
Food is a sensitive issue worldwide due to constant rising health issues. However it looks like Kenya has confronted with some major aliment security problem. In this editorial, I could feel how helpless the food consumers in Kenya must be. Imagine your country trying to poison you, what could one possibly do? While food supply is one thing, food security seems to be another. Being aware of the fact that Korea also imports dry goods or cereals from other countries, it is apparent that a real tight and secure monitoring of the whole food supply process is necessary in between trading nations. It is quite disturbing to buy goods from which its agricultural source is poorly taken care of or concealed for some unknown reason. After all food IS everything: national duty to security, national healthcare, etc. Sadly, 50 years ago, in Korea, ‘food’ was scarce … but now ‘safe’ food is scarce.
● Here are some additional information on “Aflatoxin” before the article.(wikipedia)
Aflatoxins are naturally occurring mycotoxins that are produced by many species of Aspergillus, a fungus, most notably Aspergillus flavus and Aspergillus parasiticus. Aflatoxins are toxic and among the most carcinogenic substances known.[1] After entering the body, aflatoxins are metabolized by the liver to a reactive intermediate, aflatoxin M1, an epoxide. (to put it in easier words: it is a kind of toxic substance emitted by the fungus of grains that can cause people cancer … I also read it somewhere over the internet that this substance was in dog food 2 years ago, and killed 23 dogs… drove pet owners quite angry http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzmhmWEntsA.)
Furthermore, Aflatoxin-producing members of Aspergillus are common and widespread in nature. They can colonize and contaminate grain before harvest or during storage. Host crops are particularly susceptible to infection by Aspergillus following prolonged exposure to a high humidity environment or damage from stressful conditions such as drought, a condition which lowers the barrier to entry.
------------------------------------------------
[Editorial] The never-ending story of Africa’s hunger tragedy: where lies food safety?
African Journal of Food Agriculture Nutrition and Development Vol.9 No1 2009
By Ruth Oniang'o, Editor-in-Chief
A January 9,2009 story in the local press reports that Kenya shilling 83million (equivalent 8 million US dollars) worth of maize was ordered destroyed by a local court. The maize totalling about 32,000 90kg bags was tested and found positive for unacceptable levels of aflatoxin; the maize was unfit for human consumption. The destruction of the maize comes at a time when rains have failed and nearly 10 million Kenyans in a population of 36 million face starvation. There is a major shortage of maize, the main staple in the country. The story in the newspaper was small, mixed up with other corruption stories but the headline was big. The National Cereals and Produce Board of Kenya (NCPB), supposedly the gate keeper of Kenya’s food grain systems had to wait to be taken to court before they could decide what to do with grain which clearly was now poison to Kenyans.
The worry for many Kenyans should be: If it has to take one government agency to report another, what more is being hidden from Kenyans regarding the quality of their marketed food? After the court ruling that the maize should be burnt, NCPB pleaded to have the maize sold to a glue making company to get funds to cover storage and handling costs. This clearly is very worrying, that a government agency whose responsibility includes ensuring a safe maize supply for Kenyans is more concerned with the storage costs than with their own failure and inability to safeguard Kenyans’ health. The other question is: What guarantee is there that other stored maize is not contaminated? In the same province (Eastern) where Siakago is people have died before from aflatoxin poisoning after consuming contaminated maize. At the time, about a year ago, and more times before there was big publicity about the lethal contamination, and deaths being blamed on the quality of maize with some terming it as GM (genetically modified) maize. As it is now there is little information as to the type of maize and the strain of aflatoxin and the actual levels of contamination.
The Kenyan story surely cannot be unique. The food systems in Africa are in dire need of serious attention. Facilities and personnel to monitor and maintain a safe food supply are in short supply.
Not much investment has been put in this area, unfortunately. As it is now, we need to preserve as much food as possible. It just does not make sense to call for increased food productivity, or for food aid when capacity to store what is given or harvested is not adequate. Who should be trusted with a country’s food safely? What systems need to be put in place to ensure what people eat is safe and protected from metal, bacterial and fungal poisoning? A country which knows what it is doing will invest in the training of personnel in the area of food safety and allied fields. The kind of report I have just alluded to in the case of Kenya gives the country a very bad image in interntional trade. Food is the most traded commodity internationally and can give producing countries good foreign exchange income, but only if the commodities do not get rejected out of safety concerns by recipient countries. Many developing countries lack the human resource capacity to be able to compete in international food trade. As such, whatever capacity exists gets focused on trying to meet recipient country standards requirements. The result is that internal food systems are highly threatened by exposure to contaminating forces and thus food associated morbidity and mortality rise rapidly.
Africa still has a chance to undertake effective agriculture: crop, livestock and aquaculture to enhance not only internal food security but to produce enough to trade internationally. This, however, will not happen if Africa’s food production systems are not safeguarded against contamination. Safeguard facilities require policy prioritization and budgetary investment. I am well known for the quote: Food is the first medicine. Likewise, Food can be poison.
2. More Difficulties with Malthusianism as a Theory about Environmental Degradation: Data on Population Delcine; the Demographic Transition/Urbanization (and Environmental Pollution)
3. As the past week had argued in class, raw population may be an indirect variable, though it is never experienced that way, only filtered through particular organizational forms of consumption; the direct variables of environmental problems and famine (what Malthus really was arguing about instead of environmental problems) are far more organizational and policy related than related to raw demographic scale. Malthus's originating ideas of permanent timeless historical cycles of population growth is not an historically valid thesis; the arguments about people "timelessly, innately" being unable to catch up with food have been critiqued for generations (see Boserup's article) via technological changes. Still, the idea of Malthus is mobilized by many Western elites as a kind of unexamined cultural idea in much media concerning environmentalist thought. The point of this past week was to examine its thesis and any data for or against in particular cases of famine or demographic expansion to provide some critiques of its simple timeless two variable model.
Anyway, here's a nice summary of some "deep slow movements" of statistics about population that call into question Malthus once more:
All told, some 59 countries, comprising roughly 44 percent of the world's total population, are currently not producing enough children to avoid population decline, and the phenomenon continues to spread. By 2050, according to the latest United Nations projections, 75 percent of all countries in even under-developed regions will be reproducing at below replacement levels.
-------------------
The Population Implosion How will global aging change our future?
By Phillip Longman, New America Foundation
New America Foundation | February 1, 2004
A NEW CHALLENGE FACES THE WORLD. It is not a problem that can be photographed, reduced to a sound bite, or rendered into the conventional formulations of Left and Right. It has everything to do with sex, death, money, and power, yet is rarely the subject of a headline. Rather, its reality dwells beneath the surface of everyday events, in the realm of what historian Arnold Toynbee once called the "deeper, slower movements that, in the end, make history." The trend, if properly managed, presents many positive opportunities for mankind, but also poses deep risks to the world's standard of living and geo-political order.
In 2003, the number of human beings on Earth increased by roughly 75 million. Thus it is hardly surprising that the prospect of over-population continues to cause widespread alarm around the globe. Yet a closer look at demographic trends shows world population growth has already slowed dramatically over the last generation and is headed on a course for absolute decline.
Indeed, forecasts by the United Nations and others show world population growth could well turn negative during the lifetime of people now in their forties and fifties, and is very likely to do so before today's children reach retirement age.
Long before then, many nations will shrink in absolute size, and the average age of the world's citizens will shoot up dramatically, as the elderly in many parts of the world become far more numerous than children.
These predictions come with considerable certainty. The primary reason is the unprecedented fall in fertility rates over the last generation that is now spreading to every corner of the globe.
[Some of it related to environmental pollution as well: drastic drops in human sperm counts in many countries over the past 20 years, assumed due to body burden of chemicals.]
In both hemispheres, in nations rich and poor, in Christian, Taoist, Confucian, Hindu, and especially Islamic countries, one broad social trend holds constant at the beginning of the twenty-first century: As more and more of the world's population moves to crowded urban areas [there is what is called the 'demographic transition' toward choosing small families and education, etc.], and as the economy demands more and more education from men and women alike, people are producing fewer and fewer children.
Today, global fertility rates are half what they were in 1972.
No industrialized nation still produces enough children to sustain its population over time, or to prevent rapid population aging. Germany could easily lose the equivalent of the current population of East Germany over the next half-century. Russia's population is already contracting by three-quarters of a million a year. Japan's population meanwhile is expected to fall by as much as one-third -- a decline equivalent, the demographer Hideo Ibe once noted, to that experienced in medieval Europe during the scourges of the plague.
Yet the steepest drops in fertility, and the most rapid rates of population aging, are now occurring in the developing world [and its demographic transition], where many nations are now growing old before they reach economic prosperity. Today, when Americans think of Mexico, for example, they think of televised images of desperate, unemployed youths swimming the Rio Grande or slipping through border fences. Yet because Mexican fertility rates have dropped so dramatically, Mexico will not only be a less youthful country than the United States by mid-century, its population will be older than Japan's is today.
The same is true for much of the rest of Latin America, according to UN projections.
Similarly, those televised images of desperate, unemployed youth broadcast from the Middle East create a misleading impression. Fertility rates are falling faster in the Middle East than anywhere else on earth, and as a result, the region's population is aging at an unprecedented rate.
It took the United States 50 years to go from a median age of 30 to today's 35. By contrast, during the first fifty years of the twenty-first century, Algeria will increase its median age from 21.7 to 40, according to UN projections.
China's low fertility, brought on in part by its one-family/one-child policy, has put the country on a course in which by 2020 its labor supply will be shrinking and its median age will be far older than that of the United States.
By mid-century, China could easily be losing 20 to 30 percent of its population per generation.
[Korea is already far below replacement at 1.19 ratio of childbirth to adults.]
India's fertility rate has dropped by roughly a fifth since the first half of the 1990s.
Already, residents of the [more industrial/developed] major southern provinces Kerala and Tamil Nadu produce too few children to replace themselves, as will be true for Indians as a whole by the end of the next decade if current trends continue.
Meanwhile, the country's sudden drop in fertility means that its population will be aging three times faster than will the U.S. population over the next half century.
By 2050, the median age in India is expected to be 37.9, making its population older than that of the United States today.
All told, some 59 countries, comprising roughly 44 percent of the world's total population, are currently not producing enough children to avoid population decline, and the phenomenon continues to spread. By 2050, according to the latest United Nations projections, 75 percent of all countries in even under-developed regions will be reproducing at below replacement levels.
How will the global economy and balance of power evolve, given current trends in fertility and population aging? Let us begin with the positive possibilities.
SLOWER WORLD POPULATION GROWTH offers many benefits, some of which have already been realized. Many economists believe, for example, that falling birthrates made possible the great economic boom that occurred first in Japan, and then in many other Asian nations beginning in the 1960s. As the relative number of children declined, so did the burden of their dependency, thereby freeing up more resources for investment and adult consumption. In East Asia, the working-aged population grew nearly four times faster than its dependent population between 1965 and 1990, freeing up a huge reserve of female labor and other social resources that would otherwise have been committed to raising up children. Today, China's rapid industrialization is aided by a dramatic decline in the share of dependent children in the population.
Over the next decade the Middle East could benefit from a similar "demographic dividend." In every single country of the Middle East, birth rates fell during the 1990s, often dramatically. The resulting "middle aging" of the Middle East will ease the overall dependency ratio over the next 10 to 20 years, thereby freeing up more resources for infrastructure and industrial development. As young adults account for a declining share of the population, the appeal of radicalism may also diminish, as Middle Eastern societies become increasingly dominated by middle-aged people concerned with such practical issues as health care and retirement savings. Because of population momentum from the past, there will still be considerable strains on water and other natural resources in the region, but much less than if the rate of population growth was not declining.
Yet even if declining fertility rates can bring a "demographic dividend," that dividend eventually has to be repaid. At first there are fewer children to feed, clothe, and educate, leaving more for adults to enjoy. But soon enough, if fertility continues to remain below replacement levels, there are fewer productive workers as well, while there are also more and more dependent elderly, who each consume far more resources than children do. Even after considering the cost of education, a typical child in the United States consumes 28 percent less than the typical working age adult, while elders consume 27 percent more, mostly in health-related expenses. Persons 65 and over receive 11 times more in federal spending per person than do children under age 18.
Largely because of this imbalance, population aging puts severe strains on government budgets. In Germany, for example, public spending on pensions, even after accounting for a reduction in future benefits written into current law, is expected to swell from an already staggering 10.3 percent of GDP to 15.4 by 2040 -- even as the number of workers available to support each retiree shrinks from 2.6 to 1.4. Meanwhile, the cost of government health-care benefits for the elderly is expected to rise from today's 3.8 percent of GDP to 8.4 percent by 2040.
Theoretically, raising the retirement age could help to ease the burden of unfunded old age benefits, but declining fitness among the general population places severe obstacles to more productive aging. The dramatic increases in obesity and sedentary lifestyles so evident in the United States today, for example, are now spreading to many other nations, and are likely to overwhelm any public health benefits achieved through medical technology. According to the International Association for the Study of Obesity, an "alarming rise in obesity presents a pan-European epidemic." A full 35 percent of Italian children are overweight. In the case of European men, the percentage who are overweight or obese ranges from over 40 percent in France to 70 percent in Germany. Meanwhile, as Western lifestyles spread throughout the developing world so do Western ways of dying. According to the World Health Organization, half of all deaths in places such as Mexico, China, and the Middle East are now caused by non-communicable diseases related to Western lifestyle, such as cancers and heart attacks induced by smoking and obesity.
POPULATION AGING AND DECLINE also present severe challenges to the global economy. One reason is that population growth is a major source of economic growth. More people create more demand for the products capitalists sell, and more supply of the labor capitalists buy. Economists may be able to construct models of how economies could grow amidst a shrinking population, but in the real world it has never happened.
New businesses flock to areas where the population is increasing, such as the Sun Belt, and avoid or leave areas where population is falling. Across the Great Plains of the United States, for example, where fewer people now live than in the 1920s, thousands of small towns are caught in a vicious cycle of depopulation, as younger workers and local business flee in search of economic opportunity, leaving behind shuttered storefronts, empty schools, and understaffed nursing homes. Drought and falling commodity prices may in this instance have set the cycle in motion, but once depopulation begins, new investment soon vanishes. Indeed, capitalism has never flourished except when accompanied by population growth, and is now languishing in those parts of the world (Japan, Europe, the Great Plains of the United States), where population has become stagnant.
A nation's gross domestic product (GDP) is literally the sum of its labor force times average output per worker. Thus, a decline in the number of workers implies a decline in an economy's growth potential. When the size of the workforce is falling, economic growth occurs, if at all, only through compensating increases in productivity. The European Commission, for example, projects that Europe's potential economic growth rate over the next 50 years will fall by 40 percent due to the shrinking size of the European work force. Italy expects its working-age populations to plunge by 41 percent by 2050, meaning that output per worker will have to increase by at least that amount just to keep Italy's rate of economic growth from falling below zero. With a shrinking labor supply, Europe's future economic growth will depend entirely on getting more out of each remaining worker (many of them unskilled, recently arrived immigrants) even as it has to tax workers at higher and higher rates to pay for old age pensions and health care.
Meanwhile, abundant evidence also suggests that these very population trends work to depress the rate of technological and organizational innovation. Cross-country comparisons imply, for example, that after the proportion of elders increases in a society beyond a certain point, the level of entrepreneurship and inventiveness decreases. In 2002, Babson College and the London School of Business released their latest index of entrepreneurial activity by country. It shows that there is a distinct correlation between countries with a high ratio of workers-to-retirees and countries with a high degree of entrepreneurship, and that conversely, in countries in which a large share of the population is retired, the amount of new business formation is low. So, for example, among the most entrepreneurial countries on earth are India and China, where (at least for now) there are roughly five people of working age for every person of retirement age. Meanwhile, Japan and France are among the least entrepreneurial countries on earth and have among the lowest ratio of workers-to-retirees.
There are many possible reasons for this correlation. One, of course, may be that aging workers and investors tend to be less flexible and more risk averse. Both common sense and a vast literature in finance and psychology support the claim that as we approach retirement age, we become more reluctant to take risks with our careers and nest eggs. It is not surprising, therefore, that aging countries such as Japan, Italy, and France are marked by exceptionally low rates of job turnover, and by exceptionally conservative use of capital.
Because prudence required that older investors take less risks with their investments, we can also expect that as populations age, investor preference will shift toward safe bonds and bank deposits and away from speculative stocks and venture funds. As populations age further, we can expect an ever-higher share of citizens to be cashing out their investments and spending down their savings. Neither of these trends is consistent with a future marked by high levels of high-risk investment in new technology. Instead, many observers believe that population aging will eventually cause steep and destabilizing drops in stock and real estate prices.
Also to be considered are the huge public deficits projected to be run by major industrialized countries over the next several decades. Because of the mounting costs of pensions and health care, government-financed research and development expenditures as well as educational spending will likely be under increasing budgetary pressure. Moreover, massive government borrowing could easily crowd out financial capital that would otherwise be available to the private sector for investment in new technology. Even after assuming a rebound in fertility rate levels, a massive increase in the percentage of women in the labor force, and large cuts in future pension benefits, the European Commission recently calculated that population aging in Europe will lead to an increase in public spending of between 3 and 7 percentage points of GDP in most member states by 2050. To finance the cost of aging, Germany would have to increase its public indebtedness by as much as 384 percent while the French national debt would rise to more than three times the country's entire annual economic output. Population aging gives Japan an even gloomier long-term financial outlook.
Theoretically, a highly efficient, global financial market could lend financial resources from rich, old countries that are short on labor, to young, poor countries that are short on capital, and make the whole world better off. But for this to happen, old countries would have to contain their deficits, while also investing their savings in places that are themselves either on the threshold of hyper-aging (China, India, Mexico) or highly destabilized by religious fanaticism, disease, and war (most of the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia), or both.
Moreover, who exactly, under this scenario would buy the products produced by these investments? Japan, Korea, and the other recently industrialized countries relied on massive exports to the United States and Europe to develop. But if the population of Europe and Japan is falling away, while the only population growth in the United States comes from old people, where will the demand come from to support development in places like the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa?
Population aging is also likely to depress economic activity by creating huge legacy costs for employers. This is particularly true in the United States, where health and pension benefits are largely provided by the private sector. General Motors (GM) now has 2.5 retirees on its pension rolls for every active worker, and an unfunded pension debt of $19.2 billion. Honoring its legacy costs to retirees now adds $1,800 to the cost of every vehicle GM makes, according to a 2003 estimate by Morgan Stanley. Just between 2001 and 2002, the U.S. government's projected short-term liability for bailing out failing private pension plans increased from $11 billion to $35 billion, with huge defaults expected from the steel industry.
An aging workforce may also be less able or inclined to take advantage of new technology. This seems to be part of what is behind Japan's declining rates of productivity growth in the 1990s. Before that decade, the aging of Japan's highly educated work force was a weak, but positive force in increasing the nation's productivity, according to studies. Older workers "learned by doing," developed specialized knowledge and craft skills, as well as the famous company spirit that made Japan an unrivaled manufacturing power. But by the 1990s, the continued aging of Japan's workforce contributed to Japan's declining competitiveness.
No longer did the Japanese firms with the oldest workforces show the strongest rates of productivity growth; instead they showed the weakest. Japan was able to use information technology to compensate for its vanishing supply of low-skilled, younger workers, but did not succeed in using information technology to boost the productivity of its highly skilled older workers. Yoshiaki Nakamura of the University of Tokyo and other economists have found that during the 1990s, Japanese firms reached the limits of what productivity increases could be achieved by deepening the skills and experience of Japan's manufacturing workers, who were essentially hardworking, but aging craftsmen. Aging went from having a mildly positive to a negative effect on productivity growth that technology could not overcome.
Population aging works against innovation in another way as well. As growth in population dwindles, so does the need to increase the supply of just about everything, save health care. That means there is less incentive to find ways to making a gallon of gas go farther, or of increasing the capacity of existing infrastructure. Population growth is the mother of necessity. Without it, why bother to innovate when you could be contentedly enjoying an ample supply of affordable houses, open roads, and comparatively abundant natural resources? An aging society may have an urgent need to gain more output from each remaining worker, but without growing markets, individual firms have little incentive to learn how to do more with less -- and with a dwindling supply of human capital, they have fewer ideas to draw on.
IMMIGRATION IS AT BEST only a partial solution. To be sure, the United States and other developed nations derive many benefits from their imported human capital. Yet immigration does less than one might think to ease the challenges of population aging. One reason is that most immigrants arrive not as babies, but with a third or so of their lives already behind them, and then go on to become elderly themselves. In the short term, immigrants can help to increase the ratio of workers to retirees, but in the long term they add much less youth to the population than would newborn children.
Indeed, according to a study by the United Nations Population Division, in order to maintain the current ratio of workers to retirees in the United States over time, it would be necessary to absorb an average of 10.8 million immigrants annually through 2050. At that point, the U.S. population would be 1.1 billion, 73 percent of whom would be immigrants who had arrived in this country since 1995 or their descendents. Just housing such a flow would require the equivalent of building another New York City every 10 months.
Meanwhile, it is unclear how long the United States and other developed nations can sustain even current rates of immigration. One reason, of course, is the heightened security concerns about terrorism. Another is the prospect of a cultural backlash against immigrants, the chances of which increase as native birthrates decline. In the 1920s, when widespread apprehension about declining native fertility found voice in books like Lothrop Stoddard's, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, the American political system responded by shutting off immigration. Germany, Sweden, and France did the same in the 1970s as the reality of population decline among the native born started to set in.
Another constraint on immigration to the United States involves supply. Birth rates, having already fallen well below replacement levels in Europe and Asia, are now plummeting throughout Latin America as well, creating the prospect that America's last major source of imported manpower will offer a declining pool of applicants. The fall in Mexican fertility rates has been so dramatic that the country is now aging at a far more rapid pace than the United States, and is destined to do so for at least the next two generations. According to UN projections, the median age of Americans will increase by four and a half years during the first half of the twenty-first century, reaching 39.7 years by 2050. By contrast, during the same period Mexico's median age will increase 20 years, leaving half the population over age 42. Put another way, during the course of a year, the U.S. population as a whole ages by little more than one month, while the Mexican population ages by nearly five months. Notes Enrique Quintana, co-author of a book on Mexico's aging population, "Picture a scenario in which almost 23 million people are over the age of 60, most of them have few descendents and many of them scant savings, no job, no retirement coverage scheme. The results can hardly be described as anything but catastrophic."
Long before Mexico reaches this point, the supply of Mexicans available to work in the United States could easily evaporate, as the example of Puerto Rico shows. When most Americans think of Puerto Rico, they think of a sunny, over-crowded island that sends millions of immigrants to the West Side of New York or to Florida. Yet with a fertility rate well below replacement level and a median age of 31.8 years, Puerto Rico no longer provides a net flow of immigrants to the mainland, despite an open border and a lower standard of living.
Sub-Saharan Africa still produces many potential immigrants to the United States, as does the Middle East and parts of South Asia. But to attract immigrants from these regions, the U.S. must compete with Europe, which is closer geographically and has a more acute need for imported labor. Europe also offers higher wages for unskilled work, more generous social benefits, as well as large, already established populations of immigrants from these areas.
Moreover, it is by no means clear how many potential immigrants these regions will produce in the future. Birthrates are falling in sub-Saharan Africa as well, even as war and disease leave mortality rates extraordinarily high. UN projections for the continent as a whole show fertility declining to 2.4 children per woman by mid-century, which may well be below replacement levels if mortality does not dramatically improve. Although the course of the HIV/AIDS epidemic through Sub-Saharan Africa remains uncertain, the Central Intelligence Agency projects that AIDS and related diseases could kill as many as a quarter of the region's inhabitants by 2010.
GLOBAL AGING IS A SLOW moving phenomenon. The long-term deficits and unfunded liabilities it creates are more akin to termites in the basement than to a wolf at the door. Yet it is also true that any solutions to the challenges presented by global aging will take decades to achieve, and must therefore be initiated in short order.
For example, the single greatest requirement of an aging society is sustained improvement in productivity. Yet the productive potential of workers 30 or 40 years from now depends critically on the health and education of today's children. We cannot expect, for example, that today's 10-year-olds will grow up to be far more productive workers than today's 50-year-olds ever were, or that they will be able to work for a far greater share of their lives, unless we quickly address problems like the rising incidence of childhood obesity and childhood poverty.
Sustaining future productivity growth also requires many other short-term trade offs. In general, for example, protecting jobs in declining industries entails a long-term loss of productive potential. So does running up large public deficits to underwrite current consumption. Similarly, the longer the United States waits to reform its Social Security and Medicare systems, the more the deficits in those systems will crowd out more productive uses of the nation's resources.
Fortunately, for the United States at least, the cost of aging may be offset in part by an ability to reduce its enormous military budget without any compromise of national security. China, for example, may emerge as a formidable economic competitor, but its ability to expand its territory will diminish as its supply of youth dwindles and the cost of its elders soars. By 2030 more than 23 percent of China's population will be 60 or over -- a higher share than seen in Japan today. Just as Japan now lacks the human resources to invade any of its neighbors, or even to maintain a large standing army, China in the next generation will likely turn away from militarism. Instead, it will become even more preoccupied with pampering its few children and with a quest for meaning and community as more and more individuals find themselves aging without the support and comfort of large kinship networks.
Similarly, the "youth bulges" in the Middle East will likely prove to be transient phenomena that do not require an ongoing military response. Just as population aging in the West during the 1980s was accompanied by the disappearance of youthful indigenous terrorist groups like the Red Brigades or the Weather Underground, falling birth rates in the Middle East could well produce societies far less prone to radicalism and political violence. Scanning the future, one can imagine population aging leading to political and economic turmoil of the kind recently seen in Argentina, as citizens revolt against cuts in benefits and other austerity programs. But revolts led by outraged pensioners and laid-off middle-aged workers over changes in domestic policy, while perhaps capable of producing failed states, are not nihilistic by nature.
Yet while global aging will likely diminish straightforward military threats to the United States, the phenomenon creates new and more baffling challenges. Clearly, there is no law of nature that ensures human beings will reproduce themselves. It is in precisely those areas of the world where life is most safe and prosperous that children are scarcest. When the economic and social incentives to procreate and raise families are weak or negative, as they increasingly are in most nations, and when people know how to achieve sexual gratification without producing children, avoiding extreme population aging and decline may require enormously increased incentives to parents, or else a radical shift in values away from individualism. If free and liberal societies do not discover equalitarian means to raise their fertility rates to replacement levels, then the future belongs to societies that use more coercive measures, such as reduced freedom for women, or eugenics programs. Global aging puts much more at stake than simply the sustainability of today's health and pension plans.
In his 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, Paul R. Ehrlich warned: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines -- hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Fortunately, Ehrlich's prediction proved wrong. But having averted the specter of over-population, the world now faces the unexpected challenge of population aging and decline. We are in many ways blessed to have this problem instead of its opposite, but a problem it still is.
3. Climate change due to global warming is continuously causing the sheath of Arctic sea ice to erode. This is the main habitat for polar bears and serves as their primary hunting ground for seals. As the sheath continues to deteriorate, the bears have fewer hunting grounds, access to food, and living space. Combined with pollution due to tourism, oil and gas drilling, and shipping, the fate of polar bears is looking bleak. I find this article interesting because it evaluates the issue of polar bear endangerment from various perspectives.
--------------- Nations Near Arctic Declare Polar Bears Threatened by Climate Change
Paul J. Richards/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images A polar bear near Hudson Bay in Manitoba, Canada, photographed in November 2007. E-MAIL SEND TO PHONE PRINT REPRINTS SHARE
By ANDREW C. REVKIN Published: March 19, 2009 Five countries that created a treaty nearly four decades ago to protect polar bears through limits on hunting issued a joint statement on Thursday identifying climate change as “the most important long-term threat” to the bears.
Related Dot Earth: Countries Say Warming Imperils Polar Bears (March 19, 2009)
Times Topics: Global Warming
More The Big Melt Columns
The statement came at the end of a three-day meeting in Tromso, Norway, of scientists and officials from the United States, Norway, Canada, Russia and Denmark, all with territory abutting the Arctic Ocean that serves as habitat for the bears. (Denmark was represented through Greenland, which is moving toward becoming an independent country.)
Bear experts at the meeting said the treaty parties were committed to collaborating on programs aimed at limiting direct threats to bear populations from increasing tourism, shipping and oil and gas drilling in the warming region.
But they said the countries bound by the 1973 bear agreement would be unable, without worldwide cooperation, to address the looming risk to the species: the prospect that global warming from emissions of greenhouse gases would continue to erode the sheath of Arctic sea ice that the half-ton bears roam in pursuit of seals.
In a telephone interview from Tromso, Rosa Meehan, the division chief in Alaska for marine mammals management of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, said that the agreement — among countries with a range of environmental views — signaled the strength of the science pointing to perils for the bears.
“Polar bears are facing a pretty rough road,” Dr. Meehan said. “The thing we need to do is look to the global community to seriously address and mitigate climate change.” The Norwegian government posted background on the meeting on the Internet at polarbearmeeting.org.
The species has probably existed across the Arctic for several hundred thousand years, researchers say. The animals are resilient, eating walrus, grasses and even snow goose eggs when they cannot hunt their preferred prey, bearded and ringed seals.
The bears were greatly depleted by unregulated hunting across much of the Arctic until the Soviet Union clamped down in 1956 and other countries followed, with the 1973 treaty one result. The current population across the Arctic has been estimated at 22,000 to 25,000 bears.
But last year the United States Interior Department granted the bears threatened status under the Endangered Species Act, citing the threat from retreating summertime sea ice. Other countries have been ratcheting up protections, although about 700 bears a year are still shot in Canada, Alaska and Greenland, according to Norway’s environment agency.
Not everyone from countries ringing the Arctic agrees that the bears need to be singled out for protection in the face of climate change. Fernando Ugarte, head of mammal and bird science at the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, said the government was concerned that the rising pressure to protect bears, particularly in the face of global warming, might prompt other countries to press Greenland to clamp down on hunting.
“I am not sure there is a scientific reason to appoint polar bears as the main icon of climate change,” he said by telephone in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. “There’s a long list of animals that will be affected. Why not the walrus, the narwhal, the ringed seal?” Mr. Ugarte said that scientists disagreed over why people around Baffin Bay and elsewhere had reported an increase in polar bear sightings in recent years. One explanation may be that the local bear population is robust. Another — more likely in Mr. Ugarte’s opinion — is that climate change is forcing the bears into new migration patterns.
The Tromso meeting was watched closely by environmental groups, which had warned that some countries might press to exclude strong language about global warming. The bears have been enduring icons in climate campaigns conducted by such groups, with at least three groups seeking contributions through “adopt a polar bear” programs.
But the animals have also become a focal point for some elected officials and scientists who reject the need for cuts in the heat-trapping greenhouse gases, despite broad scientific consensus linking the gases to warming since 1950. Their argument, pointing to studies by American government scientists and other groups, is that hunting restrictions have caused most of the populations of bears around the Arctic to grow in recent decades and that long-term forecasts of ice retreats are flawed.
3. This article cleared my confusion on the question, 'so, how effective are conservation projects, really? does it even work? Isn't it just wishful thinking?'
When I was in highschool, I was in a newspaper reading group that once dealt with the question: 'when certain species sadly face the destiny of destinction, is the best reaction of mankind to move on, make sure nothing likewise happens, and spend the money more efficiently on human problems like poverty?' I sort of generally commented that animal rights and diversity was important, but the question posed in front of me seemed so convincing. I ended up wondering, maybe spending so much money on sentimental beliefs and superficial guilt was not really worth it, since I will continue to use shampoo and buy plastic bags anyway. Human suffering was more easier to translate, and smiling faces translated fully no matter what language you spoke. And since humans are greedy, careless and imperfect; certain species do face extinction; and monetary intervention in human tragedies seemed to have more impact, I was left hanging with the doubt and uncertainty as to what to place first when it comes to splitting the limited budget of 'good will' that companies and mankind generally permitted. I later learned of the academic arguments behind the importance of life diversity and so on, but it was easier to learn than to know, and it was easier to know than to believe.
As we have learnerd the malthusian perspective, the question still laid wide open in my mind. Of course it is 'impolite' and 'arrogant' to think we subjugate nature, but when it comes to more realistic problem of what to prioritize, I still didn't believe in exactly how some concerned group of people can overturn the habit of neglect, laziness and selfishness that was encoded human history, as if it was inherited through the social engineering. This article was the proof that I was wrong, that pessimism of the outcome without ever trying can be the actual proof of how we don't want to change the way we were.
As the case studies that was dealt in the class showed, the protection movement for the right whale illustrates how honest and responsive nature is to our efforts, and maybe it is us that needs to stop making excuses for the inability of mankind to change, or how small efforts will pay for nothing in the end. We may be hiding behind those comfortable jargons to justify our laziness to change. But the story of the number of whales tripling over the years was truely fascinating.
------------------ The Fall and Rise of the Right Whale
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. — The biologists had been in the plane for hours, flying back and forth over the calm ocean. They had seen dolphins, leatherback turtles, a flock of water birds called gannets and even a basking shark — but not what they were looking for. Then Millie Brower, who was peering with intense concentration through a bubblelike window fitted into the plane’s fuselage, announced “nine o’clock, about a mile off.” The plane made a stomach-churning lurch as the pilots banked left and began to circle. And there, below, were a right whale mother and her new calf, barely breaking the surface, lolling in the swells.
The researchers, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Georgia Wildlife Trust, are part of an intense effort to monitor North Atlantic right whales, one of the most endangered, and closely watched, species on earth. As a database check eventually disclosed, the whale was Diablo, who was born in these waters eight years ago. Her calf — at a guess 2 weeks old and a bouncing 12 feet and 2 tons — was the 38th born this year, a record that would be surpassed just weeks later, with a report from NOAA on the birth of a 39th calf. The previous record was 31, set in 2001.
“It’s a bumper year for calves,” Richard Merrick, an oceanographer for NOAA’s fisheries service, said in an interview. “That’s a good sign.”
Actually, it’s one of so many good signs that researchers are beginning to hope that for the first time in centuries things are looking up for the right whale. They say the species offers proof that simple conservation steps can have a big impact, even for species driven to the edge of oblivion.
North Atlantic right whales, which can grow up to 55 feet long and weigh up to 70 tons, were the “right” whales for 18th- and 19th-century whalers because they are rich in oil and baleen, move slowly, keep close to shore and float when they die.
They were long ago hunted to extinction in European waters, and by 1900 perhaps only 100 or so remained in their North American range, from feeding grounds off Maritime Canada and New England to winter calving grounds off the Southeastern coast.
Since then, the species’ numbers have crept up, but very slowly. NOAA estimates that there are about 325, though scientists in and out of the agency suspect there may be more, perhaps as many as 400. It has been illegal to hunt the right whale since 1935, when the League of Nations put them under protection. Even so, researchers despaired of ever seeing a healthy right whale population here as long as ship strikes still maimed and killed them and fishing gear strangled them.
But “over the last four or five months there’s been a tremendous amount of good news,” said Tony LaCasse, a spokesman for the New England Aquarium, a center of right whale research. For example:
¶Recent changes in shipping lanes, some compulsory and others voluntary, seem to be reducing collisions between whales and vessels.
¶The Bush administration agreed last year to lower speed limits for large vessels in coastal waters where right whales congregate.
¶Fishing authorities in the United States are beginning to impose gear restrictions designed to reduce the chances whales and other marine mammals will be entangled in fishing lines. Canada is considering similar steps.
¶In December, researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spotted an unusually large aggregation of right whales in the Gulf of Maine. A month later, a right whale turned up in the Azores, a first since the early 20th century.
¶And last year, probably for the first time since the 1600s, not one North Atlantic right whale died at human hands.
“We are seeing signs of recovery,” Dr. Merrick said. He and others warn that it is far too soon to say the whales are out of danger. Calving seasons are known for their ups and downs. A single whale in the Azores does not prove the species is recolonizing its old haunts. Not everyone embraces the new shipping regulations. And so far this year, five whales have turned up entangled with fishing gear. Rescuers removed all or almost all of the gear from the five, including one whale freed last week after being successfully sedated for the process, a first. Efforts to protect the whales are costly. Surveying alone costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, said Barb Zoodsma, a NOAA biologist who coordinates survey efforts in the Southeast. In 2003, three researchers and a pilot died when their plane went down off Amelia Island, Florida. “It’s a very expensive endeavor, and we are very cognizant of that fact,” Ms. Zoodsma said. Some wonder if it is worth it. “We have been pressured by some folks on the outside to say this is a lost cause,” said Greg Silber, who coordinates whale recovery efforts for NOAA, which is charged with protecting marine mammals and endangered species like the right whale.
The whales are so few and distinct in appearance that researchers identify them not just by number but by nickname. The whales are identifiable by patterns of growths on their skin called callosities. These callosities are colonized by pale, licelike creatures in patterns discernable even at a distance.
When survey teams spot a right whale, they can enter its description in an online database maintained by the aquarium and accessible to researchers around the world.
Sightings offer important clues to the movements and habits of the creatures. When the pod of whales was sighted in December, in the Jordan Basin, about 70 miles south of Bar Harbor, the individual whales were well known. But no one had seen them hang out in the basin before. Now, researchers think it may be a previously unknown wintering ground or even a place where whales mate.
When researchers learn where whales are, they can work to keep shippers out of the way. That is what happened in July, when shipping lanes that cross Stellwagen Bank, a national marine sanctuary north of Cape Cod, were moved slightly to the north. “One of the sanctuary staff had documented where the whale sightings were,” Mr. LaCasse said. The lanes now run through a less frequented area. And the sanctuary sends thank-you notes to ships that steer clear of the whales.
A similar change occurred off Saint John, New Brunswick, a hub for shipping oil into the Maritime Provinces. Lanes going into the city were moved a few years ago, after negotiations with the International Maritime Organization. Voluntary lane changes are in effect in places like Boston, Dr. Silber said. “The measured economic impact to mariners was minimal,” he said. But the changes brought “huge benefits” to the animals.
“Compliance appears to be quite high,” he said, adding, “We are optimistic.”
Moira Brown, a senior scientist at the aquarium, said researchers working with Canadian officials designated “an area to be avoided” south of New Brunswick where right whales congregate in summer. “Compliance there has been very good,” Dr. Brown said.
But entanglements with fishing gear continue to be a big problem.
When the researchers spotted Diablo, for example, she had something white on her fluke and, for a few anxious moments, they thought she might be snagged on fishing gear. Instead, like an estimated 80 percent to 85 percent of adult right whales, she carried a scar from a previous entanglement.
Entanglements can be lethal for the whales, Ms. Zoodsma said, especially if lines get caught in whales’ mouths or around their flippers. NOAA trains people to disentangle them, she said, but “when you have a 40-ton animal in a stressful situation” the work can be unpleasant and dangerous. And it is labor intensive. Last week’s effort to sedate and free an entangled whale involved a spotter plane, four boats and multiple attempts, she said. That is why preventing entanglements “is a first priority,” Ms. Zoodsma said. New efforts center on new gear, like lines that lie along the ocean floor or marker buoys that sit at the bottom until a fishing boat finds them electronically and signals them to bob to the surface.
Dr. Brown said the United States was taking a first step in this direction with regulations going into effect this spring. She said discussions were under way with fishing authorities in Canada. Meanwhile, researchers continue efforts to discover as much as they can about where the animals spend their time, what they eat and what natural factors may affect their health. One of their most unusual efforts involved dogs trained to sniff whale scat, which the animals usually produce at the surface. The samples the dogs helped collect offered valuable information about what the whales were eating and where they were feeding. They can also offer hormone clues about whether females are pregnant. Researchers want this information because despite this year’s baby boom, right whales are not reproducing as they should. The scientists want to know if the problem is impaired fertility, spontaneous miscarriage or some other issue.
In their book “The Urban Whale” (Harvard University Press, 2007), Scott D. Kraus and Rosalind M. Rolland, scientists at the aquarium, say they believe the last North American right whale deliberately hunted by people was a calf swimming with its mother off Palm Beach, Fla., in 1935.
But people will continue to kill right whales. Ship strikes “are still going to happen,” Dr. Merrick said. “To totally eliminate them would mean we would have to eliminate shipping.”
In the end, Ms. Zoodsma said, the value of a species is something “each individual has to sort that out for themselves.” But if right whales were to vanish, she said, “it would be a tremendous loss for future generations.” --- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/science/17whal.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=science
2. "Late Victorian Holocaust" and World Population Theories - Part I
3. I partly read the above book(which is also avaiable in a Korean translation) during weekend. Although I know about droughts and floods in China and Korea of the 19th century, I was not aware of the scale and the social effects of these natural disasters. Which has mostly been ignored by all the lecturers I had during 2 years at university. For short, I became even more aware of the effect of environment on men and the relevance of a sociology taking it into account.
The El Nino phenomen, as one of the main topics of this book, devastated countries around the world from Brazil to Egypt to Korea at the end of the 19th century. The overlapping of El Nino and a big part of the "underdeveloped" world is especially interesting. Although there might be no convincing evidence that El Nino regularly caused disasters in its area of occurence in the past, future might be different. Forecasted climate change can cause serious problems to the El Nino countries and dimish or even prevent growth - despite virtual food for everyone and modern technology that can grow plants in deserts.
By accident I found 3 articles dealing with population issues on a blog and became interested in them due to the last week about Malthus.
All three ar dealing with the issue of growing population, but quite different - from a potential risk/risky potential to a view of total overpopulation or optimistic outlook. First, the article about UN's population report was said to adjust its assumed population for 2050 to over 9 billion people. This was ironically necessary due to two factors: less people dying of HIV and a rise in life expectancy. These dropping and risings in numbers in the poorest countries might be the greatest chance or the greatest risk for these countries. Depending on if they can educate the more in people and give them jobs. Maybe I have missed the point, but to achieve high education might not be the easiest and not at last one of the first things you think about when you are one of the poorest countries and your economy is not going well. The last point which already is the reason for being on the list of the poorest countries might also make it difficult to provide jobs. For the people already alive as well as the 2 generations to go until 2050. China can be seen as a good example , missing the 12 million new jobs it would need to get all newcomers employed. Despite skyrocketing grotwh and western fertility rate. To argument a more in youth until 2050 is a chance for economic growth like the UN might be right. But in my oppinion this will only lead to a decline in wages, China-like work environment and living standard. Which in the 21st century should not be a desirable goal. ----- U.N.: Young and Old Boom on the Road to 9 Billion By Andrew C. Revkin
Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
The world has more than 1 billion teenagers who, without education and job prospects, may contribute to instability and, in places like Sudan, end up being child soldiers, according to demographers and security specialists. Masafumi Yamamoto for The New York Times
Japanese convenience stores, which served mainly young customers decades ago, now cater to elderly customers. Sueko Inoue shopped in a Lawson store in Awaji. [UPDATE 3/13: There's a fascinating roundup of views of the new United Nations population projections in our new "Room for Debate" blog.]
The United Nations Population Division has updated its population forecasts through 2050, and concludes that, despite a longstanding global decline in fertility rates, the world is still on a path to exceed 9 billion people by mid-century, with the vast majority of the increase coming in the world’s poorest countries.
In those countries, large proportions of the population are children or teenagers, who could contribute either to a large workforce and economic gains or — in the absence of education and jobs — to instability and conflict.
The other fast-growing group around the globe is the oldest segment of the populations, according to the United Nations — and that trend also can pose challenges, particularly in the absence of a large working-age population. ( This article from 2004 explored how Japan is coping with an aging population: automated help for the elderly, including human washing machines.)
Three factors have nudged population projections upward over the past decade, Hania Zlotnik, the director of the population division, said in an interview: lengthening lifespans; the success of HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention efforts, particularly in Africa; and “a slower than expected decline in fertility” (meaning the number of children a woman bears).
Staff members at the population division warned in interviews that the updated projection for 2050 is premised on continuing declines in the fertility rate, but those declines are no longer a safe bet. The demand for reproductive information and contraceptives still exceeds the supply in dozens of developing countries, according to the report and separate assessments by other population groups — meaning that tens of millions of women are probably having larger families than they want.
Conditions that keep girls out of school, ranging from a lack of toilets to the demand for their labor gathering firewood and water, also contribute to elevated birth rates.
Some milestones have been passed in the report, U.N. officials said. India now has a higher population density than Japan. Africa’s total population has topped 1 billion for the first time.
The report contained hints that 9 billion is the new floor for population by 2050, instead of a best guess.
The importance of sustaining a decline in fertility by increasing access to family planning was stressed in the report summary:
The urgency of realizing the projected reductions of fertility is brought into focus by considering that, if fertility were to remain constant at the levels estimated for 2005-2010, the population of the less developed regions would increase to 9.8 billion in 2050 instead of the 7.9 billion projected by assuming that fertility declines. That is, without further reductions of fertility, the world population could increase by nearly twice as much as currently expected.
Officials at the U.N. Population Fund, which supports family planning programs around the world, said the new projections illustrated the importance of rich countries continuing to help poorer ones to ensure that couples have no more children than they want. [UPDATE, 10:30: President Obama signed a bill on Wednesday that sets the stage for restoration of United States contributions to the population fund.]
The population division’s country-by-country data on population trends can be sifted and explored online. The United States, whose population is growing faster than most other wealthy countries, has just over 300 million people now and will probably top 400 million by 2050. The report projects that the United States will, on average, gain 1.1 million people a year from 2010 to 2050 through immigration, nearly five times as many immigrants as Canada, which has the second highest inward immigration flow.
Given that Americans, per person, produce many times more carbon dioxide emissions than people in developing countries (at least for a few more decades), the growth in the United States has added significance for climate projections, said Leiwen Jiang, senior demographer at Population Action International, a nonprofit research group.
There are reams of fascinating findings. Check your country or some other detail that interests you and post what you find.
There will be lots more to come here on the two questions at the heart of this blog, which will largely shape the quality of life (human and otherwise) on this planet through the next few generations: How many people? How much stuff? ------------------------------------ http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/un-young-old-boom-on-road-to-9-billion/#more-883
2. "Late Victorian Holocaust" and World Population Theories - Part II
3. The second one, although not directly Malthusian argues that with the climate change world population would end up on the "carrying capacity" of our planet around 1 billion. Since I don't believe in this world view I was not really shocked by that "scientific" oppinion. I was more scared by the fact that he advised the head of state in Germany which might have rebound on me as a German. When I just think about the number of 1 billion, only one out of 6 to 7 persons living today would remain. Although there is nothing to laugh about in such a situation I would luckily live on the better side of the planet, namely the rich one. Somehow it would be a mean irony if in 40 years the populations of the nations famous for polluting and overusing have better chances to get a seat in a new earth equilibrium. Since his research result is based on data like average consumption per capita etc. altering of this data will also change the outcome and thereby his argument is a mere (intended) provocation.
The third one in an interview with an optimist about population trends which can be summarized by "there are already solutions, we just have to use them". Even dimensions like an Africa threefold the men size of Europe are said to be managable by technology.
Finally, I found two pages showing data of population growth until 2050 and migration trends. Which might be more important than general population growth in an age of imploding and exploding nations when it comes to population size.
------ Scientist: Warming Could Cut Population to 1 Billion By James Kanter
Lizette Kabré. Climate congress, Copenhagen 2009.
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, spoke several times at the climate conference in Copenhagen.[UPDATE, 1:45 p.m.: A roundup of economists' and scientists' views at the Copenhagen climate meeting and a reaction from Mike Hulme, a participating scientist.]
COPENHAGEN — A scientist known for his aggressive stance on climate policy made an apocalyptic prediction on Thursay.
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said that if the buildup of greenhouse gases and its consequences pushed global temperatures 9 degrees Fahrenheit higher than today — well below the upper temperature range that scientists project could occur from global warming — Earth’s population would be devastated. [UPDATED, 6:10 p.m: The preceding line was adjusted to reflect that Dr. Schellnhuber was not describing a worst-case warming projection. h/t to Joe Romm.] “In a very cynical way, it’s a triumph for science because at last we have stabilized something –- namely the estimates for the carrying capacity of the planet, namely below 1 billion people,” said Dr. Schellnhuber, who has advised German Chancellor Angela Merkel on climate policy and is a visiting professor at Oxford.
At that temperature, there would be “no fluctuations anymore, we can be fairly sure,” said Dr. Schellnhuber, exercising his characteristically dark sense of humor at the morning plenary session on the closing day of an international climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. [Earlier post: The conference organizers have sought to jog policymakers with a stronger assessment of global warming's risks, but some scientists warned the approach could backfire.]
“What a triumph,” Dr. Schellnhuber said. “On the other hand do we want this alternative? I think we can do much, much better,” he told the conference.
Dr. Schellnhuber, citing his own research, said that at certain “tipping points,” higher temperatures could cause areas of the ocean to become deoxygenated, resulting in what he calls “oxygen holes” between 600 and 2,400 feet deep. These are areas so depleted of the gas that they would badly disrupt the food chain.
Unabated warming would also lead to “disruption of the monsoon, collapse of the Amazon rain forest and the Greenland ice sheet will meltdown,” he said. But on the bright side, he noted, in a joking reference to the meeting’s Danish hosts, the retreat of the sheath of ice covering Greenland, which is Danish-controlled territory, “would increase your usable land by, I don’t know, 10,000 percent.”
“But I’m not sure whether you want to do this,” he said.
-------
October 25, 2007, 3:07 pm The Population Cluster Bomb? By Andrew C. Revkin
A crowded street in the southern Indian city of Bangalore. (Credit: Reuters) One of the underlying assumptions of Dot Earth is that the human population will hit nine billion before peaking some time midcentury. There are some readers and population campaigners who question this kind of presumption and wish we could avoid that kind of growth, for obvious reasons.
The reason I stuck with it is that it’s hard to find a demographer or other expert on population and social trends who sees even a small chance of humankind’s peaking at anything lower than nine billion — barring some catastrophic epidemic or asteroid strike.
What’s more interesting is that the overall number, whatever you choose, could be a red herring. Many population experts foresee the next few decades evolving in a way that is very different from the global-scale, catastrophic “population bomb” concept that caught hold in the 1960s.
What they depict is more like a dangerous scattering of cluster bombs, as the world splits into two types of countries: those with aging, shrinking populations, like Japan and much of Europe, and those regions, like most of Africa and parts of south Asia, still mired in poverty, disease, illiteracy or government dysfunction with resulting high birth and death rates.
Jesse Ausubel at Rockefeller University calls them “imploders and exploders,” and Jason DeParle’s continuing Border Crossings series on population flows around the world has perfectly captured the consequences.
I caught Joseph Chamie, a sociologist and demographer, on the phone a couple of nights ago to explore the inevitability of nine billion and these other trends. It’s telling that he used to run the United Nations Population Division but recently migrated (~sorry~) to the Center for Migration Studies.
It is flows of people, and regional population crises, that will matter most in the next two generations, Dr. Chamie said.
Q. The framing conception for this blog is how do we head toward nine billion people with the fewest regrets, but that obviously comes with the built-in notion that we’re heading toward nine billion people. Should I be confident that that’s pretty much unavoidable?
A. I don’t think anyone doubts we’re going to be approaching nine billion. A lot of it of course has to do with fertility levels.
Q. Do wealth and urbanization always lead to reduced population rates? A. Generally, prosperity brings so many different forces that keep fertility below replacement. You have urbanization, you have women’s education, you have women’s employment, you have higher survival for children so that couples say, “Well, two’s fine.”
Q. Is it more significant that you have these different population trends in different places or just that we’re heading toward nine billion?
A. You’re having changes in ratios between countries. Right after World War II Europe was almost three times as big as Africa. By 2050 Africa will be three times as big as Europe. These changes are very, very important, and the balance has implications for production, consumption and also relations between those countries.
Then you start thinking, Russia has this number of people. Pakistan is bigger. Pakistan has nuclear weapons; well, so does Russia. So you start thinking about what is a power, and what’s not a power.
I’ve been talking for 10 years about Pakistan being a problem area, even before Al Qaeda. Look at the growth in this country. It’s a hotbed and it’s growing so rapidly. It was less than 50 million in 1950, and it’s going to be like the fourth biggest country in the world.
Q. The notion way back in the 20th century that population was a bomb — has that fizzled or is there just a slow fuse on the bomb? Is heading toward nine billion, having two more Chinas essentially, a problem?
A. Certain regions of the world are going to have very, very stressful situations. Africa is projected to add a billion more people, India a half-billion more people. And that means stresses and strains and all sorts of adjustments.
The demographic transition is an adjustment from high levels of death and birth rates to low levels. Places like Iran, Tunisia, Thailand, Indonesia, they’re going through that transition much faster than Europe did. Iran and Tunisia are going through it in 25 years. France went through it in 125 years. Hopefully we can expedite the transition in Africa as well. You have to bring down mortality. You have to have education for girls and woman. You have to get them employed, actively engaged in society so there are alternatives to having lots of children and raising a large family.
It’s in everyone’s interest to bring down the death rates and educate girls, boys, get them working, and that will hopefully slow down the growth.
It’s happening. At the peak, growth was about 87 million a year, and we’re down to about 76 million per year now.
Q. We just had this Page One story by my colleague Donald McNeil about how we finally got down under 10 million childhood deaths per year. Given that the overall population has been growing, that actual improvement is even more rapid than it might seem.
A. We’re going to see even more of this. There are going to be increasing gains in longevity at the top, many more people above 100. According to U.N. projections that’s the most rapidly growing age group, and it’s predominantly women. When you have more women among the elderly, health care becomes an issue, and they vote.
Q. So the old story of a kind of uniform picture of a population bomb has been replaced by what?
A. It’s a very complex symphony. It’s not just one note. You just don’t hear a drum going boom, boom, boom.
Q. The climate impact of people is uniform. All the greenhouse gases mix, so as energy demands go up that creates an interesting problem.
A. It’s going to be problematic on the environment. We’re already seeing that. But even if we stabilized at nine billion or eight billion it’s the production and consumption of goods that’s creating this pressure. Even though the population of India is three or four times that of the United States, we produce more greenhouse emissions. All things being equal, a stabilized population will create less impact on the planet.
Q. But there’s a long way to go before we stabilize. Do you have your own vision of a path through this transition that comes out with a world that has reasonable functional ecosystems and resources left over for the stable population to come?
A. First of all there’s enough food for everybody. In fact, some places have too much food. Obesity is a problem. We’re going to have to make changes in society, changes in lifestyles. I’m optimistic about that because we’ve seen changes. Smoking? Gone.
Women are having a tremendous impact around the world, and that has a moderating impact.
I’m confident there’ll be technologies to increase less-polluting energy. It’s going to be a bumpy road and in some places very bumpy. And you’re going to have increased mortality. You have to be prepared for those big shocks, like the bird flu.
But if you look in the past, we had great successes. Think about polio. I went up to Alaska a couple of years ago and was talking about Jonas Salk. A girl came up and asked why “salt” was important? I said, “Salk, Jonas Salk, who came up with a vaccine against polio.”
She said, “Polio, what’s polio?”
Q. I detect an optimist.
A. With regard to the energy situation, the food, the technology, they’re all very promising. I’m rather optimistic. The path is clear. There’s no secret recipe that people are keeping hidden from you like Coca-Cola. We know the recipe for development. We just have to implement it.
A very down to earth* kind of guy. I'm an environmental sociologist interested in establishing material and organizational sustainability worldwide. I'm always looking for interesting materials/technologies, inspiring ideas, or institutional examples of sustainability to inspire others to recognize their choices now. To be fatalistic about an unsustainable world is a sign of a captive mind, given all our options.
*(If "earth" is defined in a planetary sense, concerning comparative historical knowledge and interest in the past 10,000 years or so anywhere...) See both blogs.
Youngone Suh
ReplyDeleteIn Korea, we use this expression : “You don’t joke/play around with food.”
Food is a sensitive issue worldwide due to constant rising health issues. However it looks like Kenya has confronted with some major aliment security problem. In this editorial, I could feel how helpless the food consumers in Kenya must be. Imagine your country trying to poison you, what could one possibly do? While food supply is one thing, food security seems to be another. Being aware of the fact that Korea also imports dry goods or cereals from other countries, it is apparent that a real tight and secure monitoring of the whole food supply process is necessary in between trading nations. It is quite disturbing to buy goods from which its agricultural source is poorly taken care of or concealed for some unknown reason. After all food IS everything: national duty to security, national healthcare, etc. Sadly, 50 years ago, in Korea, ‘food’ was scarce … but now ‘safe’ food is scarce.
● Here are some additional information on “Aflatoxin” before the article.(wikipedia)
Aflatoxins are naturally occurring mycotoxins that are produced by many species of Aspergillus, a fungus, most notably Aspergillus flavus and Aspergillus parasiticus. Aflatoxins are toxic and among the most carcinogenic substances known.[1] After entering the body, aflatoxins are metabolized by the liver to a reactive intermediate, aflatoxin M1, an epoxide. (to put it in easier words: it is a kind of toxic substance emitted by the fungus of grains that can cause people cancer … I also read it somewhere over the internet that this substance was in dog food 2 years ago, and killed 23 dogs… drove pet owners quite angry http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzmhmWEntsA.)
Furthermore, Aflatoxin-producing members of Aspergillus are common and widespread in nature. They can colonize and contaminate grain before harvest or during storage. Host crops are particularly susceptible to infection by Aspergillus following prolonged exposure to a high humidity environment or damage from stressful conditions such as drought, a condition which lowers the barrier to entry.
------------------------------------------------
[Editorial] The never-ending story of Africa’s hunger tragedy: where lies food safety?
African Journal of Food Agriculture Nutrition and Development
Vol.9 No1 2009
By Ruth Oniang'o, Editor-in-Chief
A January 9,2009 story in the local press reports that Kenya shilling 83million (equivalent 8 million US dollars) worth of maize was ordered destroyed by a local court. The maize totalling about 32,000 90kg bags was tested and found positive for unacceptable levels of aflatoxin; the maize was unfit for human consumption. The destruction of the maize comes at a time when rains have failed and nearly 10 million Kenyans in a population of 36 million face starvation. There is a major shortage of maize, the main staple in the country. The story in the newspaper was small, mixed up with other corruption stories but the headline was big. The National Cereals and Produce Board of Kenya (NCPB), supposedly the gate keeper of Kenya’s food grain systems had to wait to be taken to court before they could decide what to do with grain which clearly was now poison to Kenyans.
The worry for many Kenyans should be: If it has to take one government agency to report another, what more is being hidden from Kenyans regarding the quality of their marketed food? After the court ruling that the maize should be burnt, NCPB pleaded to have the maize sold to a glue making company to get funds to cover storage and handling costs. This clearly is very worrying, that a government agency whose responsibility includes ensuring a safe maize supply for Kenyans is more concerned with the storage costs than with their own failure and inability to safeguard Kenyans’ health. The other question is: What guarantee is there that other stored maize is not contaminated? In the same province (Eastern) where Siakago is people have died before from aflatoxin poisoning after consuming contaminated maize. At the time, about a year ago, and more times before there was big publicity about the lethal contamination, and deaths being blamed on the quality of maize with some terming it as GM (genetically modified) maize. As it is now there is little information as to the type of maize and the strain of aflatoxin and the actual levels of contamination.
The Kenyan story surely cannot be unique. The food systems in Africa are in dire need of serious attention. Facilities and personnel to monitor and maintain a safe food supply are in short supply.
Not much investment has been put in this area, unfortunately. As it is now, we need to preserve as much food as possible. It just does not make sense to call for increased food productivity, or for food aid when capacity to store what is given or harvested is not adequate. Who should be trusted with a country’s food safely? What systems need to be put in place to ensure what people eat is safe and protected from metal, bacterial and fungal poisoning? A country which knows what it is doing will invest in the training of personnel in the area of food safety and allied fields. The kind of report I have just alluded to in the case of Kenya gives the country a very bad image in interntional trade. Food is the most traded commodity internationally and can give producing countries good foreign exchange income, but only if the commodities do not get rejected out of safety concerns by recipient countries. Many developing countries lack the human resource capacity to be able to compete in international food trade. As such, whatever capacity exists gets focused on trying to meet recipient country standards requirements. The result is that internal food systems are highly threatened by exposure to contaminating forces and thus food associated morbidity and mortality rise rapidly.
Africa still has a chance to undertake effective agriculture: crop, livestock and aquaculture to enhance not only internal food security but to produce enough to trade internationally. This, however, will not happen if Africa’s food production systems are not safeguarded against contamination. Safeguard facilities require policy prioritization and budgetary investment.
I am well known for the quote:
Food is the first medicine.
Likewise, Food can be poison.
-----------------------
http://www.ajfand.net/Issue22/Issue22editorial.htm
1. Mark Whitaker
ReplyDelete2. More Difficulties with Malthusianism as a Theory about Environmental Degradation: Data on Population Delcine; the Demographic Transition/Urbanization (and Environmental Pollution)
3. As the past week had argued in class, raw population may be an indirect variable, though it is never experienced that way, only filtered through particular organizational forms of consumption; the direct variables of environmental problems and famine (what Malthus really was arguing about instead of environmental problems) are far more organizational and policy related than related to raw demographic scale. Malthus's originating ideas of permanent timeless historical cycles of population growth is not an historically valid thesis; the arguments about people "timelessly, innately" being unable to catch up with food have been critiqued for generations (see Boserup's article) via technological changes. Still, the idea of Malthus is mobilized by many Western elites as a kind of unexamined cultural idea in much media concerning environmentalist thought. The point of this past week was to examine its thesis and any data for or against in particular cases of famine or demographic expansion to provide some critiques of its simple timeless two variable model.
Anyway, here's a nice summary of some "deep slow movements" of statistics about population that call into question Malthus once more:
All told, some 59 countries, comprising roughly 44 percent of the world's total population, are currently not producing enough children to avoid population decline, and the phenomenon continues to spread. By 2050, according to the latest United Nations projections, 75 percent of all countries in even under-developed regions will be reproducing at below replacement levels.
-------------------
The Population Implosion
How will global aging change our future?
By Phillip Longman, New America Foundation
New America Foundation | February 1, 2004
A NEW CHALLENGE FACES THE WORLD. It is not a problem that can be photographed, reduced to a sound bite, or rendered into the conventional formulations of Left and Right. It has everything to do with sex, death, money, and power, yet is rarely the subject of a headline. Rather, its reality dwells beneath the surface of everyday events, in the realm of what historian Arnold Toynbee once called the "deeper, slower movements that, in the end, make history." The trend, if properly managed, presents many positive opportunities for mankind, but also poses deep risks to the world's standard of living and geo-political order.
In 2003, the number of human beings on Earth increased by roughly 75 million. Thus it is hardly surprising that the prospect of over-population continues to cause widespread alarm around the globe. Yet a closer look at demographic trends shows world population growth has already slowed dramatically over the last generation and is headed on a course for absolute decline.
Indeed, forecasts by the United Nations and others show world population growth could well turn negative during the lifetime of people now in their forties and fifties, and is very likely to do so before today's children reach retirement age.
Long before then, many nations will shrink in absolute size, and the average age of the world's citizens will shoot up dramatically, as the elderly in many parts of the world become far more numerous than children.
These predictions come with considerable certainty. The primary reason is the unprecedented fall in fertility rates over the last generation that is now spreading to every corner of the globe.
[Some of it related to environmental pollution as well: drastic drops in human sperm counts in many countries over the past 20 years, assumed due to body burden of chemicals.]
In both hemispheres, in nations rich and poor, in Christian, Taoist, Confucian, Hindu, and especially Islamic countries, one broad social trend holds constant at the beginning of the twenty-first century: As more and more of the world's population moves to crowded urban areas [there is what is called the 'demographic transition' toward choosing small families and education, etc.], and as the economy demands more and more education from men and women alike, people are producing fewer and fewer children.
Today, global fertility rates are half what they were in 1972.
No industrialized nation still produces enough children to sustain its population over time, or to prevent rapid population aging. Germany could easily lose the equivalent of the current population of East Germany over the next half-century. Russia's population is already contracting by three-quarters of a million a year. Japan's population meanwhile is expected to fall by as much as one-third -- a decline equivalent, the demographer Hideo Ibe once noted, to that experienced in medieval Europe during the scourges of the plague.
Yet the steepest drops in fertility, and the most rapid rates of population aging, are now occurring in the developing world [and its demographic transition], where many nations are now growing old before they reach economic prosperity. Today, when Americans think of Mexico, for example, they think of televised images of desperate, unemployed youths swimming the Rio Grande or slipping through border fences. Yet because Mexican fertility rates have dropped so dramatically, Mexico will not only be a less youthful country than the United States by mid-century, its population will be older than Japan's is today.
The same is true for much of the rest of Latin America, according to UN projections.
Similarly, those televised images of desperate, unemployed youth broadcast from the Middle East create a misleading impression. Fertility rates are falling faster in the Middle East than anywhere else on earth, and as a result, the region's population is aging at an unprecedented rate.
It took the United States 50 years to go from a median age of 30 to today's 35. By contrast, during the first fifty years of the twenty-first century, Algeria will increase its median age from 21.7 to 40, according to UN projections.
China's low fertility, brought on in part by its one-family/one-child policy, has put the country on a course in which by 2020 its labor supply will be shrinking and its median age will be far older than that of the United States.
By mid-century, China could easily be losing 20 to 30 percent of its population per generation.
[Korea is already far below replacement at 1.19 ratio of childbirth to adults.]
India's fertility rate has dropped by roughly a fifth since the first half of the 1990s.
Already, residents of the [more industrial/developed] major southern provinces Kerala and Tamil Nadu produce too few children to replace themselves, as will be true for Indians as a whole by the end of the next decade if current trends continue.
Meanwhile, the country's sudden drop in fertility means that its population will be aging three times faster than will the U.S. population over the next half century.
By 2050, the median age in India is expected to be 37.9, making its population older than that of the United States today.
All told, some 59 countries, comprising roughly 44 percent of the world's total population, are currently not producing enough children to avoid population decline, and the phenomenon continues to spread. By 2050, according to the latest United Nations projections, 75 percent of all countries in even under-developed regions will be reproducing at below replacement levels.
How will the global economy and balance of power evolve, given current trends in fertility and population aging? Let us begin with the positive possibilities.
SLOWER WORLD POPULATION GROWTH offers many benefits, some of which have already been realized. Many economists believe, for example, that falling birthrates made possible the great economic boom that occurred first in Japan, and then in many other Asian nations beginning in the 1960s. As the relative number of children declined, so did the burden of their dependency, thereby freeing up more resources for investment and adult consumption. In East Asia, the working-aged population grew nearly four times faster than its dependent population between 1965 and 1990, freeing up a huge reserve of female labor and other social resources that would otherwise have been committed to raising up children. Today, China's rapid industrialization is aided by a dramatic decline in the share of dependent children in the population.
Over the next decade the Middle East could benefit from a similar "demographic dividend." In every single country of the Middle East, birth rates fell during the 1990s, often dramatically. The resulting "middle aging" of the Middle East will ease the overall dependency ratio over the next 10 to 20 years, thereby freeing up more resources for infrastructure and industrial development. As young adults account for a declining share of the population, the appeal of radicalism may also diminish, as Middle Eastern societies become increasingly dominated by middle-aged people concerned with such practical issues as health care and retirement savings. Because of population momentum from the past, there will still be considerable strains on water and other natural resources in the region, but much less than if the rate of population growth was not declining.
Yet even if declining fertility rates can bring a "demographic dividend," that dividend eventually has to be repaid. At first there are fewer children to feed, clothe, and educate, leaving more for adults to enjoy. But soon enough, if fertility continues to remain below replacement levels, there are fewer productive workers as well, while there are also more and more dependent elderly, who each consume far more resources than children do. Even after considering the cost of education, a typical child in the United States consumes 28 percent less than the typical working age adult, while elders consume 27 percent more, mostly in health-related expenses. Persons 65 and over receive 11 times more in federal spending per person than do children under age 18.
Largely because of this imbalance, population aging puts severe strains on government budgets. In Germany, for example, public spending on pensions, even after accounting for a reduction in future benefits written into current law, is expected to swell from an already staggering 10.3 percent of GDP to 15.4 by 2040 -- even as the number of workers available to support each retiree shrinks from 2.6 to 1.4. Meanwhile, the cost of government health-care benefits for the elderly is expected to rise from today's 3.8 percent of GDP to 8.4 percent by 2040.
Theoretically, raising the retirement age could help to ease the burden of unfunded old age benefits, but declining fitness among the general population places severe obstacles to more productive aging. The dramatic increases in obesity and sedentary lifestyles so evident in the United States today, for example, are now spreading to many other nations, and are likely to overwhelm any public health benefits achieved through medical technology. According to the International Association for the Study of Obesity, an "alarming rise in obesity presents a pan-European epidemic." A full 35 percent of Italian children are overweight. In the case of European men, the percentage who are overweight or obese ranges from over 40 percent in France to 70 percent in Germany. Meanwhile, as Western lifestyles spread throughout the developing world so do Western ways of dying. According to the World Health Organization, half of all deaths in places such as Mexico, China, and the Middle East are now caused by non-communicable diseases related to Western lifestyle, such as cancers and heart attacks induced by smoking and obesity.
POPULATION AGING AND DECLINE also present severe challenges to the global economy. One reason is that population growth is a major source of economic growth. More people create more demand for the products capitalists sell, and more supply of the labor capitalists buy. Economists may be able to construct models of how economies could grow amidst a shrinking population, but in the real world it has never happened.
New businesses flock to areas where the population is increasing, such as the Sun Belt, and avoid or leave areas where population is falling. Across the Great Plains of the United States, for example, where fewer people now live than in the 1920s, thousands of small towns are caught in a vicious cycle of depopulation, as younger workers and local business flee in search of economic opportunity, leaving behind shuttered storefronts, empty schools, and understaffed nursing homes. Drought and falling commodity prices may in this instance have set the cycle in motion, but once depopulation begins, new investment soon vanishes. Indeed, capitalism has never flourished except when accompanied by population growth, and is now languishing in those parts of the world (Japan, Europe, the Great Plains of the United States), where population has become stagnant.
A nation's gross domestic product (GDP) is literally the sum of its labor force times average output per worker. Thus, a decline in the number of workers implies a decline in an economy's growth potential. When the size of the workforce is falling, economic growth occurs, if at all, only through compensating increases in productivity. The European Commission, for example, projects that Europe's potential economic growth rate over the next 50 years will fall by 40 percent due to the shrinking size of the European work force. Italy expects its working-age populations to plunge by 41 percent by 2050, meaning that output per worker will have to increase by at least that amount just to keep Italy's rate of economic growth from falling below zero. With a shrinking labor supply, Europe's future economic growth will depend entirely on getting more out of each remaining worker (many of them unskilled, recently arrived immigrants) even as it has to tax workers at higher and higher rates to pay for old age pensions and health care.
Meanwhile, abundant evidence also suggests that these very population trends work to depress the rate of technological and organizational innovation. Cross-country comparisons imply, for example, that after the proportion of elders increases in a society beyond a certain point, the level of entrepreneurship and inventiveness decreases. In 2002, Babson College and the London School of Business released their latest index of entrepreneurial activity by country. It shows that there is a distinct correlation between countries with a high ratio of workers-to-retirees and countries with a high degree of entrepreneurship, and that conversely, in countries in which a large share of the population is retired, the amount of new business formation is low. So, for example, among the most entrepreneurial countries on earth are India and China, where (at least for now) there are roughly five people of working age for every person of retirement age. Meanwhile, Japan and France are among the least entrepreneurial countries on earth and have among the lowest ratio of workers-to-retirees.
There are many possible reasons for this correlation. One, of course, may be that aging workers and investors tend to be less flexible and more risk averse. Both common sense and a vast literature in finance and psychology support the claim that as we approach retirement age, we become more reluctant to take risks with our careers and nest eggs. It is not surprising, therefore, that aging countries such as Japan, Italy, and France are marked by exceptionally low rates of job turnover, and by exceptionally conservative use of capital.
Because prudence required that older investors take less risks with their investments, we can also expect that as populations age, investor preference will shift toward safe bonds and bank deposits and away from speculative stocks and venture funds. As populations age further, we can expect an ever-higher share of citizens to be cashing out their investments and spending down their savings. Neither of these trends is consistent with a future marked by high levels of high-risk investment in new technology. Instead, many observers believe that population aging will eventually cause steep and destabilizing drops in stock and real estate prices.
Also to be considered are the huge public deficits projected to be run by major industrialized countries over the next several decades. Because of the mounting costs of pensions and health care, government-financed research and development expenditures as well as educational spending will likely be under increasing budgetary pressure. Moreover, massive government borrowing could easily crowd out financial capital that would otherwise be available to the private sector for investment in new technology. Even after assuming a rebound in fertility rate levels, a massive increase in the percentage of women in the labor force, and large cuts in future pension benefits, the European Commission recently calculated that population aging in Europe will lead to an increase in public spending of between 3 and 7 percentage points of GDP in most member states by 2050. To finance the cost of aging, Germany would have to increase its public indebtedness by as much as 384 percent while the French national debt would rise to more than three times the country's entire annual economic output. Population aging gives Japan an even gloomier long-term financial outlook.
Theoretically, a highly efficient, global financial market could lend financial resources from rich, old countries that are short on labor, to young, poor countries that are short on capital, and make the whole world better off. But for this to happen, old countries would have to contain their deficits, while also investing their savings in places that are themselves either on the threshold of hyper-aging (China, India, Mexico) or highly destabilized by religious fanaticism, disease, and war (most of the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia), or both.
Moreover, who exactly, under this scenario would buy the products produced by these investments? Japan, Korea, and the other recently industrialized countries relied on massive exports to the United States and Europe to develop. But if the population of Europe and Japan is falling away, while the only population growth in the United States comes from old people, where will the demand come from to support development in places like the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa?
Population aging is also likely to depress economic activity by creating huge legacy costs for employers. This is particularly true in the United States, where health and pension benefits are largely provided by the private sector. General Motors (GM) now has 2.5 retirees on its pension rolls for every active worker, and an unfunded pension debt of $19.2 billion. Honoring its legacy costs to retirees now adds $1,800 to the cost of every vehicle GM makes, according to a 2003 estimate by Morgan Stanley. Just between 2001 and 2002, the U.S. government's projected short-term liability for bailing out failing private pension plans increased from $11 billion to $35 billion, with huge defaults expected from the steel industry.
An aging workforce may also be less able or inclined to take advantage of new technology. This seems to be part of what is behind Japan's declining rates of productivity growth in the 1990s. Before that decade, the aging of Japan's highly educated work force was a weak, but positive force in increasing the nation's productivity, according to studies. Older workers "learned by doing," developed specialized knowledge and craft skills, as well as the famous company spirit that made Japan an unrivaled manufacturing power. But by the 1990s, the continued aging of Japan's workforce contributed to Japan's declining competitiveness.
No longer did the Japanese firms with the oldest workforces show the strongest rates of productivity growth; instead they showed the weakest. Japan was able to use information technology to compensate for its vanishing supply of low-skilled, younger workers, but did not succeed in using information technology to boost the productivity of its highly skilled older workers. Yoshiaki Nakamura of the University of Tokyo and other economists have found that during the 1990s, Japanese firms reached the limits of what productivity increases could be achieved by deepening the skills and experience of Japan's manufacturing workers, who were essentially hardworking, but aging craftsmen. Aging went from having a mildly positive to a negative effect on productivity growth that technology could not overcome.
Population aging works against innovation in another way as well. As growth in population dwindles, so does the need to increase the supply of just about everything, save health care. That means there is less incentive to find ways to making a gallon of gas go farther, or of increasing the capacity of existing infrastructure. Population growth is the mother of necessity. Without it, why bother to innovate when you could be contentedly enjoying an ample supply of affordable houses, open roads, and comparatively abundant natural resources? An aging society may have an urgent need to gain more output from each remaining worker, but without growing markets, individual firms have little incentive to learn how to do more with less -- and with a dwindling supply of human capital, they have fewer ideas to draw on.
IMMIGRATION IS AT BEST only a partial solution. To be sure, the United States and other developed nations derive many benefits from their imported human capital. Yet immigration does less than one might think to ease the challenges of population aging. One reason is that most immigrants arrive not as babies, but with a third or so of their lives already behind them, and then go on to become elderly themselves. In the short term, immigrants can help to increase the ratio of workers to retirees, but in the long term they add much less youth to the population than would newborn children.
Indeed, according to a study by the United Nations Population Division, in order to maintain the current ratio of workers to retirees in the United States over time, it would be necessary to absorb an average of 10.8 million immigrants annually through 2050. At that point, the U.S. population would be 1.1 billion, 73 percent of whom would be immigrants who had arrived in this country since 1995 or their descendents. Just housing such a flow would require the equivalent of building another New York City every 10 months.
Meanwhile, it is unclear how long the United States and other developed nations can sustain even current rates of immigration. One reason, of course, is the heightened security concerns about terrorism. Another is the prospect of a cultural backlash against immigrants, the chances of which increase as native birthrates decline. In the 1920s, when widespread apprehension about declining native fertility found voice in books like Lothrop Stoddard's, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, the American political system responded by shutting off immigration. Germany, Sweden, and France did the same in the 1970s as the reality of population decline among the native born started to set in.
Another constraint on immigration to the United States involves supply. Birth rates, having already fallen well below replacement levels in Europe and Asia, are now plummeting throughout Latin America as well, creating the prospect that America's last major source of imported manpower will offer a declining pool of applicants. The fall in Mexican fertility rates has been so dramatic that the country is now aging at a far more rapid pace than the United States, and is destined to do so for at least the next two generations. According to UN projections, the median age of Americans will increase by four and a half years during the first half of the twenty-first century, reaching 39.7 years by 2050. By contrast, during the same period Mexico's median age will increase 20 years, leaving half the population over age 42. Put another way, during the course of a year, the U.S. population as a whole ages by little more than one month, while the Mexican population ages by nearly five months. Notes Enrique Quintana, co-author of a book on Mexico's aging population, "Picture a scenario in which almost 23 million people are over the age of 60, most of them have few descendents and many of them scant savings, no job, no retirement coverage scheme. The results can hardly be described as anything but catastrophic."
Long before Mexico reaches this point, the supply of Mexicans available to work in the United States could easily evaporate, as the example of Puerto Rico shows. When most Americans think of Puerto Rico, they think of a sunny, over-crowded island that sends millions of immigrants to the West Side of New York or to Florida. Yet with a fertility rate well below replacement level and a median age of 31.8 years, Puerto Rico no longer provides a net flow of immigrants to the mainland, despite an open border and a lower standard of living.
Sub-Saharan Africa still produces many potential immigrants to the United States, as does the Middle East and parts of South Asia. But to attract immigrants from these regions, the U.S. must compete with Europe, which is closer geographically and has a more acute need for imported labor. Europe also offers higher wages for unskilled work, more generous social benefits, as well as large, already established populations of immigrants from these areas.
Moreover, it is by no means clear how many potential immigrants these regions will produce in the future. Birthrates are falling in sub-Saharan Africa as well, even as war and disease leave mortality rates extraordinarily high. UN projections for the continent as a whole show fertility declining to 2.4 children per woman by mid-century, which may well be below replacement levels if mortality does not dramatically improve. Although the course of the HIV/AIDS epidemic through Sub-Saharan Africa remains uncertain, the Central Intelligence Agency projects that AIDS and related diseases could kill as many as a quarter of the region's inhabitants by 2010.
GLOBAL AGING IS A SLOW moving phenomenon. The long-term deficits and unfunded liabilities it creates are more akin to termites in the basement than to a wolf at the door. Yet it is also true that any solutions to the challenges presented by global aging will take decades to achieve, and must therefore be initiated in short order.
For example, the single greatest requirement of an aging society is sustained improvement in productivity. Yet the productive potential of workers 30 or 40 years from now depends critically on the health and education of today's children. We cannot expect, for example, that today's 10-year-olds will grow up to be far more productive workers than today's 50-year-olds ever were, or that they will be able to work for a far greater share of their lives, unless we quickly address problems like the rising incidence of childhood obesity and childhood poverty.
Sustaining future productivity growth also requires many other short-term trade offs. In general, for example, protecting jobs in declining industries entails a long-term loss of productive potential. So does running up large public deficits to underwrite current consumption. Similarly, the longer the United States waits to reform its Social Security and Medicare systems, the more the deficits in those systems will crowd out more productive uses of the nation's resources.
Fortunately, for the United States at least, the cost of aging may be offset in part by an ability to reduce its enormous military budget without any compromise of national security. China, for example, may emerge as a formidable economic competitor, but its ability to expand its territory will diminish as its supply of youth dwindles and the cost of its elders soars. By 2030 more than 23 percent of China's population will be 60 or over -- a higher share than seen in Japan today. Just as Japan now lacks the human resources to invade any of its neighbors, or even to maintain a large standing army, China in the next generation will likely turn away from militarism. Instead, it will become even more preoccupied with pampering its few children and with a quest for meaning and community as more and more individuals find themselves aging without the support and comfort of large kinship networks.
Similarly, the "youth bulges" in the Middle East will likely prove to be transient phenomena that do not require an ongoing military response. Just as population aging in the West during the 1980s was accompanied by the disappearance of youthful indigenous terrorist groups like the Red Brigades or the Weather Underground, falling birth rates in the Middle East could well produce societies far less prone to radicalism and political violence. Scanning the future, one can imagine population aging leading to political and economic turmoil of the kind recently seen in Argentina, as citizens revolt against cuts in benefits and other austerity programs. But revolts led by outraged pensioners and laid-off middle-aged workers over changes in domestic policy, while perhaps capable of producing failed states, are not nihilistic by nature.
Yet while global aging will likely diminish straightforward military threats to the United States, the phenomenon creates new and more baffling challenges. Clearly, there is no law of nature that ensures human beings will reproduce themselves. It is in precisely those areas of the world where life is most safe and prosperous that children are scarcest. When the economic and social incentives to procreate and raise families are weak or negative, as they increasingly are in most nations, and when people know how to achieve sexual gratification without producing children, avoiding extreme population aging and decline may require enormously increased incentives to parents, or else a radical shift in values away from individualism. If free and liberal societies do not discover equalitarian means to raise their fertility rates to replacement levels, then the future belongs to societies that use more coercive measures, such as reduced freedom for women, or eugenics programs. Global aging puts much more at stake than simply the sustainability of today's health and pension plans.
In his 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, Paul R. Ehrlich warned: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines -- hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Fortunately, Ehrlich's prediction proved wrong. But having averted the specter of over-population, the world now faces the unexpected challenge of population aging and decline. We are in many ways blessed to have this problem instead of its opposite, but a problem it still is.
---
http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/the_population_implosion
1. Anne Severe
ReplyDelete2. Climate Change Endangers Polar Bears
3. Climate change due to global warming is continuously causing the sheath of Arctic sea ice to erode. This is the main habitat for polar bears and serves as their primary hunting ground for seals. As the sheath continues to deteriorate, the bears have fewer hunting grounds, access to food, and living space. Combined with pollution due to tourism, oil and gas drilling, and shipping, the fate of polar bears is looking bleak. I find this article interesting because it evaluates the issue of polar bear endangerment from various perspectives.
---------------
Nations Near Arctic Declare Polar Bears Threatened by Climate Change
Paul J. Richards/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A polar bear near Hudson Bay in Manitoba, Canada, photographed in November 2007.
E-MAIL
SEND TO PHONE
PRINT
REPRINTS
SHARE
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: March 19, 2009
Five countries that created a treaty nearly four decades ago to protect polar bears through limits on hunting issued a joint statement on Thursday identifying climate change as “the most important long-term threat” to the bears.
Related
Dot Earth: Countries Say Warming Imperils Polar Bears (March 19, 2009)
Times Topics: Global Warming
More The Big Melt Columns
The statement came at the end of a three-day meeting in Tromso, Norway, of scientists and officials from the United States, Norway, Canada, Russia and Denmark, all with territory abutting the Arctic Ocean that serves as habitat for the bears. (Denmark was represented through Greenland, which is moving toward becoming an independent country.)
Bear experts at the meeting said the treaty parties were committed to collaborating on programs aimed at limiting direct threats to bear populations from increasing tourism, shipping and oil and gas drilling in the warming region.
But they said the countries bound by the 1973 bear agreement would be unable, without worldwide cooperation, to address the looming risk to the species: the prospect that global warming from emissions of greenhouse gases would continue to erode the sheath of Arctic sea ice that the half-ton bears roam in pursuit of seals.
In a telephone interview from Tromso, Rosa Meehan, the division chief in Alaska for marine mammals management of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, said that the agreement — among countries with a range of environmental views — signaled the strength of the science pointing to perils for the bears.
“Polar bears are facing a pretty rough road,” Dr. Meehan said. “The thing we need to do is look to the global community to seriously address and mitigate climate change.” The Norwegian government posted background on the meeting on the Internet at polarbearmeeting.org.
The species has probably existed across the Arctic for several hundred thousand years, researchers say. The animals are resilient, eating walrus, grasses and even snow goose eggs when they cannot hunt their preferred prey, bearded and ringed seals.
The bears were greatly depleted by unregulated hunting across much of the Arctic until the Soviet Union clamped down in 1956 and other countries followed, with the 1973 treaty one result. The current population across the Arctic has been estimated at 22,000 to 25,000 bears.
But last year the United States Interior Department granted the bears threatened status under the Endangered Species Act, citing the threat from retreating summertime sea ice. Other countries have been ratcheting up protections, although about 700 bears a year are still shot in Canada, Alaska and Greenland, according to Norway’s environment agency.
Not everyone from countries ringing the Arctic agrees that the bears need to be singled out for protection in the face of climate change. Fernando Ugarte, head of mammal and bird science at the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, said the government was concerned that the rising pressure to protect bears, particularly in the face of global warming, might prompt other countries to press Greenland to clamp down on hunting.
“I am not sure there is a scientific reason to appoint polar bears as the main icon of climate change,” he said by telephone in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. “There’s a long list of animals that will be affected. Why not the walrus, the narwhal, the ringed seal?” Mr. Ugarte said that scientists disagreed over why people around Baffin Bay and elsewhere had reported an increase in polar bear sightings in recent years. One explanation may be that the local bear population is robust. Another — more likely in Mr. Ugarte’s opinion — is that climate change is forcing the bears into new migration patterns.
The Tromso meeting was watched closely by environmental groups, which had warned that some countries might press to exclude strong language about global warming. The bears have been enduring icons in climate campaigns conducted by such groups, with at least three groups seeking contributions through “adopt a polar bear” programs.
But the animals have also become a focal point for some elected officials and scientists who reject the need for cuts in the heat-trapping greenhouse gases, despite broad scientific consensus linking the gases to warming since 1950. Their argument, pointing to studies by American government scientists and other groups, is that hunting restrictions have caused most of the populations of bears around the Arctic to grow in recent decades and that long-term forecasts of ice retreats are flawed.
Walter Gibbs contributed reporting from Oslo.
---
http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1GGLS_enKR304KR304&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=20bears.
1. Young Hui NA
ReplyDelete2. Prevention is the best form of protection
3. This article cleared my confusion on the question, 'so, how effective are conservation projects, really? does it even work? Isn't it just wishful thinking?'
When I was in highschool, I was in a newspaper reading group that once dealt with the question: 'when certain species sadly face the destiny of destinction, is the best reaction of mankind to move on, make sure nothing likewise happens, and spend the money more efficiently on human problems like poverty?' I sort of generally commented that animal rights and diversity was important, but the question posed in front of me seemed so convincing. I ended up wondering, maybe spending so much money on sentimental beliefs and superficial guilt was not really worth it, since I will continue to use shampoo and buy plastic bags anyway. Human suffering was more easier to translate, and smiling faces translated fully no matter what language you spoke. And since humans are greedy, careless and imperfect; certain species do face extinction; and monetary intervention in human tragedies seemed to have more impact, I was left hanging with the doubt and uncertainty as to what to place first when it comes to splitting the limited budget of 'good will' that companies and mankind generally permitted. I later learned of the academic arguments behind the importance of life diversity and so on, but it was easier to learn than to know, and it was easier to know than to believe.
As we have learnerd the malthusian perspective, the question still laid wide open in my mind. Of course it is 'impolite' and 'arrogant' to think we subjugate nature, but when it comes to more realistic problem of what to prioritize, I still didn't believe in exactly how some concerned group of people can overturn the habit of neglect, laziness and selfishness that was encoded human history, as if it was inherited through the social engineering. This article was the proof that I was wrong, that pessimism of the outcome without ever trying can be the actual proof of how we don't want to change the way we were.
As the case studies that was dealt in the class showed, the protection movement for the right whale illustrates how honest and responsive nature is to our efforts, and maybe it is us that needs to stop making excuses for the inability of mankind to change, or how small efforts will pay for nothing in the end. We may be hiding behind those comfortable jargons to justify our laziness to change. But the story of the number of whales tripling over the years was truely fascinating.
------------------
The Fall and Rise of the Right Whale
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. — The biologists had been in the plane for hours, flying back and forth over the calm ocean. They had seen dolphins, leatherback turtles, a flock of water birds called gannets and even a basking shark — but not what they were looking for.
Then Millie Brower, who was peering with intense concentration through a bubblelike window fitted into the plane’s fuselage, announced “nine o’clock, about a mile off.” The plane made a stomach-churning lurch as the pilots banked left and began to circle. And there, below, were a right whale mother and her new calf, barely breaking the surface, lolling in the swells.
The researchers, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Georgia Wildlife Trust, are part of an intense effort to monitor North Atlantic right whales, one of the most endangered, and closely watched, species on earth. As a database check eventually disclosed, the whale was Diablo, who was born in these waters eight years ago. Her calf — at a guess 2 weeks old and a bouncing 12 feet and 2 tons — was the 38th born this year, a record that would be surpassed just weeks later, with a report from NOAA on the birth of a 39th calf. The previous record was 31, set in 2001.
“It’s a bumper year for calves,” Richard Merrick, an oceanographer for NOAA’s fisheries service, said in an interview. “That’s a good sign.”
Actually, it’s one of so many good signs that researchers are beginning to hope that for the first time in centuries things are looking up for the right whale. They say the species offers proof that simple conservation steps can have a big impact, even for species driven to the edge of oblivion.
North Atlantic right whales, which can grow up to 55 feet long and weigh up to 70 tons, were the “right” whales for 18th- and 19th-century whalers because they are rich in oil and baleen, move slowly, keep close to shore and float when they die.
They were long ago hunted to extinction in European waters, and by 1900 perhaps only 100 or so remained in their North American range, from feeding grounds off Maritime Canada and New England to winter calving grounds off the Southeastern coast.
Since then, the species’ numbers have crept up, but very slowly. NOAA estimates that there are about 325, though scientists in and out of the agency suspect there may be more, perhaps as many as 400. It has been illegal to hunt the right whale since 1935, when the League of Nations put them under protection. Even so, researchers despaired of ever seeing a healthy right whale population here as long as ship strikes still maimed and killed them and fishing gear strangled them.
But “over the last four or five months there’s been a tremendous amount of good news,” said Tony LaCasse, a spokesman for the New England Aquarium, a center of right whale research. For example:
¶Recent changes in shipping lanes, some compulsory and others voluntary, seem to be reducing collisions between whales and vessels.
¶The Bush administration agreed last year to lower speed limits for large vessels in coastal waters where right whales congregate.
¶Fishing authorities in the United States are beginning to impose gear restrictions designed to reduce the chances whales and other marine mammals will be entangled in fishing lines. Canada is considering similar steps.
¶In December, researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spotted an unusually large aggregation of right whales in the Gulf of Maine. A month later, a right whale turned up in the Azores, a first since the early 20th century.
¶And last year, probably for the first time since the 1600s, not one North Atlantic right whale died at human hands.
“We are seeing signs of recovery,” Dr. Merrick said. He and others warn that it is far too soon to say the whales are out of danger. Calving seasons are known for their ups and downs. A single whale in the Azores does not prove the species is recolonizing its old haunts. Not everyone embraces the new shipping regulations. And so far this year, five whales have turned up entangled with fishing gear. Rescuers removed all or almost all of the gear from the five, including one whale freed last week after being successfully sedated for the process, a first.
Efforts to protect the whales are costly. Surveying alone costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, said Barb Zoodsma, a NOAA biologist who coordinates survey efforts in the Southeast. In 2003, three researchers and a pilot died when their plane went down off Amelia Island, Florida.
“It’s a very expensive endeavor, and we are very cognizant of that fact,” Ms. Zoodsma said. Some wonder if it is worth it. “We have been pressured by some folks on the outside to say this is a lost cause,” said Greg Silber, who coordinates whale recovery efforts for NOAA, which is charged with protecting marine mammals and endangered species like the right whale.
The whales are so few and distinct in appearance that researchers identify them not just by number but by nickname. The whales are identifiable by patterns of growths on their skin called callosities. These callosities are colonized by pale, licelike creatures in patterns discernable even at a distance.
When survey teams spot a right whale, they can enter its description in an online database maintained by the aquarium and accessible to researchers around the world.
Sightings offer important clues to the movements and habits of the creatures. When the pod of whales was sighted in December, in the Jordan Basin, about 70 miles south of Bar Harbor, the individual whales were well known. But no one had seen them hang out in the basin before. Now, researchers think it may be a previously unknown wintering ground or even a place where whales mate.
When researchers learn where whales are, they can work to keep shippers out of the way. That is what happened in July, when shipping lanes that cross Stellwagen Bank, a national marine sanctuary north of Cape Cod, were moved slightly to the north. “One of the sanctuary staff had documented where the whale sightings were,” Mr. LaCasse said. The lanes now run through a less frequented area. And the sanctuary sends thank-you notes to ships that steer clear of the whales.
A similar change occurred off Saint John, New Brunswick, a hub for shipping oil into the Maritime Provinces. Lanes going into the city were moved a few years ago, after negotiations with the International Maritime Organization. Voluntary lane changes are in effect in places like Boston, Dr. Silber said. “The measured economic impact to mariners was minimal,” he said. But the changes brought “huge benefits” to the animals.
“Compliance appears to be quite high,” he said, adding, “We are optimistic.”
Moira Brown, a senior scientist at the aquarium, said researchers working with Canadian officials designated “an area to be avoided” south of New Brunswick where right whales congregate in summer. “Compliance there has been very good,” Dr. Brown said.
But entanglements with fishing gear continue to be a big problem.
When the researchers spotted Diablo, for example, she had something white on her fluke and, for a few anxious moments, they thought she might be snagged on fishing gear. Instead, like an estimated 80 percent to 85 percent of adult right whales, she carried a scar from a previous entanglement.
Entanglements can be lethal for the whales, Ms. Zoodsma said, especially if lines get caught in whales’ mouths or around their flippers. NOAA trains people to disentangle them, she said, but “when you have a 40-ton animal in a stressful situation” the work can be unpleasant and dangerous. And it is labor intensive. Last week’s effort to sedate and free an entangled whale involved a spotter plane, four boats and multiple attempts, she said. That is why preventing entanglements “is a first priority,” Ms. Zoodsma said. New efforts center on new gear, like lines that lie along the ocean floor or marker buoys that sit at the bottom until a fishing boat finds them electronically and signals them to bob to the surface.
Dr. Brown said the United States was taking a first step in this direction with regulations going into effect this spring. She said discussions were under way with fishing authorities in Canada. Meanwhile, researchers continue efforts to discover as much as they can about where the animals spend their time, what they eat and what natural factors may affect their health. One of their most unusual efforts involved dogs trained to sniff whale scat, which the animals usually produce at the surface. The samples the dogs helped collect offered valuable information about what the whales were eating and where they were feeding. They can also offer hormone clues about whether females are pregnant. Researchers want this information because despite this year’s baby boom, right whales are not reproducing as they should. The scientists want to know if the problem is impaired fertility, spontaneous miscarriage or some other issue.
In their book “The Urban Whale” (Harvard University Press, 2007), Scott D. Kraus and Rosalind M. Rolland, scientists at the aquarium, say they believe the last North American right whale deliberately hunted by people was a calf swimming with its mother off Palm Beach, Fla., in 1935.
But people will continue to kill right whales. Ship strikes “are still going to happen,” Dr. Merrick said. “To totally eliminate them would mean we would have to eliminate shipping.”
In the end, Ms. Zoodsma said, the value of a species is something “each individual has to sort that out for themselves.” But if right whales were to vanish, she said, “it would be a tremendous loss for future generations.”
---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/science/17whal.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=science
1. Martin Weiser
ReplyDelete2. "Late Victorian Holocaust" and World Population Theories - Part I
3. I partly read the above book(which is also avaiable in a Korean translation) during weekend. Although I know about droughts and floods in China and Korea of the 19th century, I was not aware of the scale and the social effects of these natural disasters. Which has mostly been ignored by all the lecturers I had during 2 years at university. For short, I became even more aware of the effect of environment on men and the relevance of a sociology taking it into account.
The El Nino phenomen, as one of the main topics of this book, devastated countries around the world from Brazil to Egypt to Korea at the end of the 19th century. The overlapping of El Nino and a big part of the "underdeveloped" world is especially interesting. Although there might be no convincing evidence that El Nino regularly caused disasters in its area of occurence in the past, future might be different. Forecasted climate change can cause serious problems to the El Nino countries and dimish or even prevent growth - despite virtual food for everyone and modern technology that can grow plants in deserts.
By accident I found 3 articles dealing with population issues on a blog and became interested in them due to the last week about Malthus.
All three ar dealing with the issue of growing population, but quite different - from a potential risk/risky potential to a view of total overpopulation or optimistic outlook.
First, the article about UN's population report was said to adjust its assumed population for 2050 to over 9 billion people. This was ironically necessary due to two factors: less people dying of HIV and a rise in life expectancy. These dropping and risings in numbers in the poorest countries might be the greatest chance or the greatest risk for these countries. Depending on if they can educate the more in people and give them jobs. Maybe I have missed the point, but to achieve high education might not be the easiest and not at last one of the first things you think about when you are one of the poorest countries and your economy is not going well. The last point which already is the reason for being on the list of the poorest countries might also make it difficult to provide jobs. For the people already alive as well as the 2 generations to go until 2050. China can be seen as a good example , missing the 12 million new jobs it would need to get all newcomers employed. Despite skyrocketing grotwh and western fertility rate. To argument a more in youth until 2050 is a chance for economic growth like the UN might be right. But in my oppinion this will only lead to a decline in wages, China-like work environment and living standard. Which in the 21st century should not be a desirable goal.
-----
U.N.: Young and Old Boom on the Road to 9 Billion
By Andrew C. Revkin
Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
The world has more than 1 billion teenagers who, without education and job prospects, may contribute to instability and, in places like Sudan, end up being child soldiers, according to demographers and security specialists.
Masafumi Yamamoto for The New York Times
Japanese convenience stores, which served mainly young customers decades ago, now cater to elderly customers. Sueko Inoue shopped in a Lawson store in Awaji. [UPDATE 3/13: There's a fascinating roundup of views of the new United Nations population projections in our new "Room for Debate" blog.]
The United Nations Population Division has updated its population forecasts through 2050, and concludes that, despite a longstanding global decline in fertility rates, the world is still on a path to exceed 9 billion people by mid-century, with the vast majority of the increase coming in the world’s poorest countries.
In those countries, large proportions of the population are children or teenagers, who could contribute either to a large workforce and economic gains or — in the absence of education and jobs — to instability and conflict.
The other fast-growing group around the globe is the oldest segment of the populations, according to the United Nations — and that trend also can pose challenges, particularly in the absence of a large working-age population. ( This article from 2004 explored how Japan is coping with an aging population: automated help for the elderly, including human washing machines.)
Three factors have nudged population projections upward over the past decade, Hania Zlotnik, the director of the population division, said in an interview: lengthening lifespans; the success of HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention efforts, particularly in Africa; and “a slower than expected decline in fertility” (meaning the number of children a woman bears).
Staff members at the population division warned in interviews that the updated projection for 2050 is premised on continuing declines in the fertility rate, but those declines are no longer a safe bet. The demand for reproductive information and contraceptives still exceeds the supply in dozens of developing countries, according to the report and separate assessments by other population groups — meaning that tens of millions of women are probably having larger families than they want.
Conditions that keep girls out of school, ranging from a lack of toilets to the demand for their labor gathering firewood and water, also contribute to elevated birth rates.
Some milestones have been passed in the report, U.N. officials said. India now has a higher population density than Japan. Africa’s total population has topped 1 billion for the first time.
The report contained hints that 9 billion is the new floor for population by 2050, instead of a best guess.
The importance of sustaining a decline in fertility by increasing access to family planning was stressed in the report summary:
The urgency of realizing the projected reductions of fertility is brought into focus by considering that, if fertility were to remain constant at the levels estimated for 2005-2010, the population of the less developed regions would increase to 9.8 billion in 2050 instead of the 7.9 billion projected by assuming that fertility declines. That is, without further reductions of fertility, the world population could increase by nearly twice as much as currently expected.
Officials at the U.N. Population Fund, which supports family planning programs around the world, said the new projections illustrated the importance of rich countries continuing to help poorer ones to ensure that couples have no more children than they want. [UPDATE, 10:30: President Obama signed a bill on Wednesday that sets the stage for restoration of United States contributions to the population fund.]
The population division’s country-by-country data on population trends can be sifted and explored online. The United States, whose population is growing faster than most other wealthy countries, has just over 300 million people now and will probably top 400 million by 2050. The report projects that the United States will, on average, gain 1.1 million people a year from 2010 to 2050 through immigration, nearly five times as many immigrants as Canada, which has the second highest inward immigration flow.
Given that Americans, per person, produce many times more carbon dioxide emissions than people in developing countries (at least for a few more decades), the growth in the United States has added significance for climate projections, said Leiwen Jiang, senior demographer at Population Action International, a nonprofit research group.
There are reams of fascinating findings. Check your country or some other detail that interests you and post what you find.
There will be lots more to come here on the two questions at the heart of this blog, which will largely shape the quality of life (human and otherwise) on this planet through the next few generations: How many people? How much stuff?
------------------------------------ http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/un-young-old-boom-on-road-to-9-billion/#more-883
1. Martin Weiser
ReplyDelete2. "Late Victorian Holocaust" and World Population Theories - Part II
3. The second one, although not directly Malthusian argues that with the climate change world population would end up on the "carrying capacity" of our planet around 1 billion. Since I don't believe in this world view I was not really shocked by that "scientific" oppinion. I was more scared by the fact that he advised the head of state in Germany which might have rebound on me as a German. When I just think about the number of 1 billion, only one out of 6 to 7 persons living today would remain. Although there is nothing to laugh about in such a situation I would luckily live on the better side of the planet, namely the rich one. Somehow it would be a mean irony if in 40 years the populations of the nations famous for polluting and overusing have better chances to get a seat in a new earth equilibrium. Since his research result is based on data like average consumption per capita etc. altering of this data will also change the outcome and thereby his argument is a mere (intended) provocation.
The third one in an interview with an optimist about population trends which can be summarized by "there are already solutions, we just have to use them". Even dimensions like an Africa threefold the men size of Europe are said to be managable by technology.
Finally, I found two pages showing data of population growth until 2050 and migration trends. Which might be more important than general population growth in an age of imploding and exploding nations when it comes to population size.
Population:
http://esa.un.org/unpp/p2k0data.asp
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/world/20070622_CAPEVERDE_GRAPHIC.html#
------
Scientist: Warming Could Cut Population to 1 Billion
By James Kanter
Lizette Kabré. Climate congress, Copenhagen 2009.
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, spoke several times at the climate conference in Copenhagen.[UPDATE, 1:45 p.m.: A roundup of economists' and scientists' views at the Copenhagen climate meeting and a reaction from Mike Hulme, a participating scientist.]
COPENHAGEN — A scientist known for his aggressive stance on climate policy made an apocalyptic prediction on Thursay.
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said that if the buildup of greenhouse gases and its consequences pushed global temperatures 9 degrees Fahrenheit higher than today — well below the upper temperature range that scientists project could occur from global warming — Earth’s population would be devastated. [UPDATED, 6:10 p.m: The preceding line was adjusted to reflect that Dr. Schellnhuber was not describing a worst-case warming projection. h/t to Joe Romm.]
“In a very cynical way, it’s a triumph for science because at last we have stabilized something –- namely the estimates for the carrying capacity of the planet, namely below 1 billion people,” said Dr. Schellnhuber, who has advised German Chancellor Angela Merkel on climate policy and is a visiting professor at Oxford.
At that temperature, there would be “no fluctuations anymore, we can be fairly sure,” said Dr. Schellnhuber, exercising his characteristically dark sense of humor at the morning plenary session on the closing day of an international climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. [Earlier post: The conference organizers have sought to jog policymakers with a stronger assessment of global warming's risks, but some scientists warned the approach could backfire.]
“What a triumph,” Dr. Schellnhuber said. “On the other hand do we want this alternative? I think we can do much, much better,” he told the conference.
Dr. Schellnhuber, citing his own research, said that at certain “tipping points,” higher temperatures could cause areas of the ocean to become deoxygenated, resulting in what he calls “oxygen holes” between 600 and 2,400 feet deep. These are areas so depleted of the gas that they would badly disrupt the food chain.
Unabated warming would also lead to “disruption of the monsoon, collapse of the Amazon rain forest and the Greenland ice sheet will meltdown,” he said.
But on the bright side, he noted, in a joking reference to the meeting’s Danish hosts, the retreat of the sheath of ice covering Greenland, which is Danish-controlled territory, “would increase your usable land by, I don’t know, 10,000 percent.”
“But I’m not sure whether you want to do this,” he said.
-------
October 25, 2007, 3:07 pm
The Population Cluster Bomb?
By Andrew C. Revkin
A crowded street in the southern Indian city of Bangalore. (Credit: Reuters)
One of the underlying assumptions of Dot Earth is that the human population will hit nine billion before peaking some time midcentury. There are some readers and population campaigners who question this kind of presumption and wish we could avoid that kind of growth, for obvious reasons.
The reason I stuck with it is that it’s hard to find a demographer or other expert on population and social trends who sees even a small chance of humankind’s peaking at anything lower than nine billion — barring some catastrophic epidemic or asteroid strike.
What’s more interesting is that the overall number, whatever you choose, could be a red herring. Many population experts foresee the next few decades evolving in a way that is very different from the global-scale, catastrophic “population bomb” concept that caught hold in the 1960s.
What they depict is more like a dangerous scattering of cluster bombs, as the world splits into two types of countries: those with aging, shrinking populations, like Japan and much of Europe, and those regions, like most of Africa and parts of south Asia, still mired in poverty, disease, illiteracy or government dysfunction with resulting high birth and death rates.
Jesse Ausubel at Rockefeller University calls them “imploders and exploders,” and Jason DeParle’s continuing Border Crossings series on population flows around the world has perfectly captured the consequences.
I caught Joseph Chamie, a sociologist and demographer, on the phone a couple of nights ago to explore the inevitability of nine billion and these other trends. It’s telling that he used to run the United Nations Population Division but recently migrated (~sorry~) to the Center for Migration Studies.
It is flows of people, and regional population crises, that will matter most in the next two generations, Dr. Chamie said.
Q. The framing conception for this blog is how do we head toward nine billion people with the fewest regrets, but that obviously comes with the built-in notion that we’re heading toward nine billion people. Should I be confident that that’s pretty much unavoidable?
A. I don’t think anyone doubts we’re going to be approaching nine billion. A lot of it of course has to do with fertility levels.
Q. Do wealth and urbanization always lead to reduced population rates?
A. Generally, prosperity brings so many different forces that keep fertility below replacement. You have urbanization, you have women’s education, you have women’s employment, you have higher survival for children so that couples say, “Well, two’s fine.”
Q. Is it more significant that you have these different population trends in different places or just that we’re heading toward nine billion?
A. You’re having changes in ratios between countries. Right after World War II Europe was almost three times as big as Africa. By 2050 Africa will be three times as big as Europe. These changes are very, very important, and the balance has implications for production, consumption and also relations between those countries.
Then you start thinking, Russia has this number of people. Pakistan is bigger. Pakistan has nuclear weapons; well, so does Russia. So you start thinking about what is a power, and what’s not a power.
I’ve been talking for 10 years about Pakistan being a problem area, even before Al Qaeda. Look at the growth in this country. It’s a hotbed and it’s growing so rapidly. It was less than 50 million in 1950, and it’s going to be like the fourth biggest country in the world.
Q. The notion way back in the 20th century that population was a bomb — has that fizzled or is there just a slow fuse on the bomb? Is heading toward nine billion, having two more Chinas essentially, a problem?
A. Certain regions of the world are going to have very, very stressful situations.
Africa is projected to add a billion more people, India a half-billion more people. And that means stresses and strains and all sorts of adjustments.
The demographic transition is an adjustment from high levels of death and birth rates to low levels. Places like Iran, Tunisia, Thailand, Indonesia, they’re going through that transition much faster than Europe did.
Iran and Tunisia are going through it in 25 years. France went through it in 125 years. Hopefully we can expedite the transition in Africa as well. You have to bring down mortality. You have to have education for girls and woman. You have to get them employed, actively engaged in society so there are alternatives to having lots of children and raising a large family.
It’s in everyone’s interest to bring down the death rates and educate girls, boys, get them working, and that will hopefully slow down the growth.
It’s happening. At the peak, growth was about 87 million a year, and we’re down to about 76 million per year now.
Q. We just had this Page One story by my colleague Donald McNeil about how we finally got down under 10 million childhood deaths per year. Given that the overall population has been growing, that actual improvement is even more rapid than it might seem.
A. We’re going to see even more of this. There are going to be increasing gains in longevity at the top, many more people above 100. According to U.N. projections that’s the most rapidly growing age group, and it’s predominantly women. When you have more women among the elderly, health care becomes an issue, and they vote.
Q. So the old story of a kind of uniform picture of a population bomb has been replaced by what?
A. It’s a very complex symphony. It’s not just one note. You just don’t hear a drum going boom, boom, boom.
Q. The climate impact of people is uniform. All the greenhouse gases mix, so as energy demands go up that creates an interesting problem.
A. It’s going to be problematic on the environment. We’re already seeing that. But even if we stabilized at nine billion or eight billion it’s the production and consumption of goods that’s creating this pressure. Even though the population of India is three or four times that of the United States, we produce more greenhouse emissions. All things being equal, a stabilized population will create less impact on the planet.
Q. But there’s a long way to go before we stabilize. Do you have your own vision of a path through this transition that comes out with a world that has reasonable functional ecosystems and resources left over for the stable population to come?
A. First of all there’s enough food for everybody. In fact, some places have too much food. Obesity is a problem. We’re going to have to make changes in society, changes in lifestyles. I’m optimistic about that because we’ve seen changes. Smoking? Gone.
Women are having a tremendous impact around the world, and that has a moderating impact.
I’m confident there’ll be technologies to increase less-polluting energy. It’s going to be a bumpy road and in some places very bumpy. And you’re going to have increased mortality. You have to be prepared for those big shocks, like the bird flu.
But if you look in the past, we had great successes. Think about polio. I went up to Alaska a couple of years ago and was talking about Jonas Salk. A girl came up and asked why “salt” was important? I said, “Salk, Jonas Salk, who came up with a vaccine against polio.”
She said, “Polio, what’s polio?”
Q. I detect an optimist.
A. With regard to the energy situation, the food, the technology, they’re all very promising. I’m rather optimistic. The path is clear. There’s no secret recipe that people are keeping hidden from you like Coca-Cola. We know the recipe for development. We just have to implement it.
------------------------------------
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/scientist-warming-could-cut-population-to-1-billion/
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/the-population-cluster-bomb/
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete