Food for a growing world population: Some of the main findings of a study on the long-term prospects of the world food situation

Some progress has been made in curbing global population growth, yet much remains to be done, particularly in 3rd world countries. Population growth reached its zenith between 1950-70. The growth rate then remained at 2% per annum. By the early 1970s, the pace began to slow, and by 1985 it was down to 1.7%. UN sources anticipate a further drop to 1.5% by 2000. The decline has been due primarily to falling birthrates in some developing nations. China with its 1-child policy has been responsible for a major effect, but also there have been notable declines in other Asian and in Latin American countries. One important factor is the inherent dynamic of the population process. The momentum of population growth is remarkable; world numbers are destined to increase for decade upon decade. Fertility levels and overall rates of population growth will determine when different regions of the world are likely to realize stability . Regarding the level at which the world population will stabilize eventually, the figures most commonly quoted by international agencies range from 8000-10,000 million. This total would strain the earth's carrying capacity to an unacceptable degree and produce ecological malpraxis. In 1985 the developed nations accounted for about 1/4 of the world's population. The rate of growth had been slow for over 20 years and currently is 0.6% per annum. The 2 major demographic changes in the area are continuing low birthrates and a marked rise in the relative and absolute numbers of elderly people. In 1985 the less developed world of Africa, Asia, and Latin America housed 3700 million people, about 3/4 of the world's total. During the next 15 years, 85% of the births are expected to occur in the less developed world. Developing countries show great variations with respect to such demographic indices as birthrates, death rates, and infant mortality rates, but they share with developed nations the marked increase in their numbers of old people. This trend is becoming particularly evident in Latin America. Asia, with numbers approaching 3000 million in 1985, is the most populous continent of the developing world and illustrates the variability in reproductive activity characteristic of the 3rd world. In 1985 the population of South America reached just over 400 million with a rate of growth of 2.3% per annum. As in Asia population patterns vary with the common tendency for births to fall. As of 1985 the population situation in Africa continues to be very serious. Little change has taken placed in the crude birthrate over the 1950-85 period. The average life expectancy at birth is only 50 years, and the percentage of the population under age 15 is 45%. As the 21st century nears, the salience of the world's population problem must be increasingly appreciated by national governments and by international development agencies.

The population is one of the most important factors of production, and its characteristics determine whether population growth is a blessing that enhances the state's competitiveness or a burden that strains resources and the environment. There are five perspectives regarding the relationship between population growth and economic growth, which are: Population growth does not contribute to economic growth, Population growth stimulates economic growth, The population effect is neutral, interrelationship, and The relationship changes over time. In Egypt, the correlation between population growth and economic growth is highly significant; the first rate reflects the increase in the size of the population, while the other rate reflects the economic aspect, as well as the growing concern regarding the dangers of population increase on economic growth in Egypt. Purpose: The study intends to explore the correlation between population growth and economic growth in Egypt from 1993 to 2023, with a specific focus on the various governorates in 2023; Determining the impact of population growth on economic growth in Egypt during the period 1993-2023, And how have the rates of economic growth and population growth changed in Egypt, the optimal population size for Egypt, and the limits of the relationship between the annual population growth rate and the economic growth rate. Research methods: The study followed an objective and historical approach, in addition to descriptive and cartographic methods, as well as statistical methods. The data used in this study's statistical analysis were obtained from the Egypt Demographic and Health Survey 2014 (EDHS), Egypt Family Health Survey 2021(EFHS), the Ministry of Planning, Economic Development, and International Cooperation, and CAPMAS 2017. Every governorate in Egypt is covered under the current study. Research results: The study revealed that the current population growth rate in Egypt is 1.90%, which requires an economic growth rate exceeding 5.7% annually for citizens to reap the benefits of development; however, the economic growth has not reached this level. The study revealed that there is a strong inverse correlation (-0.938*) between the population growth rate and the eco-nomic growth rate, especially Upper Egypt governorates are the most in need of care. Recommendations: It recommended the necessity of working on three pillars. The first is the population, through supporting the national strategy for population and development in Egypt (2023 - 2030) and controlling the population growth rate. The second is to work on increasing the economic growth rate, especially in the underprivileged governorates that suffer from a high population growth rate and a low economic growth rate, such as the Red Sea Governorate, Marsa Matrouh Governorate, Assiut Governorate, Minya Governorate, and Fayoum Governorate. The third is to work on integrating the economic dimension with the population dimension.

HISTORICALLY, EACH MAJOR INHABITED region of the earth has produced its own food supply, and generally, agricultural production has kept pace with population growth. As populations have grown, however, crop failure from drought, flood, or whatever cause, in a given region necessarily affects increasing numbers of people. Estimates are that somewhat less than 2 million humans starved to death in the 17th century, 10 million in the 18th century, 25 million in the 19th century, and perhaps 12 million thus far in the 20th century. Were it not for improved communications, early warnings, the remarkable productivity of North American agriculture, and a worldwide food distribution capability, agriculture in the 20th century might well fail to keep pace with the world population growth of 2 percent per year, and major regional crop failures could now claim more lives than at any time in the past. We have entered a period of great international anxiety about the world's ability to feed its growing population. In 1972, the world food situation was transformed from one of food surpluses and low prices to one of relative food scarcity and high prices. This rapid reversal has raised again a wave of widespread food, population pessimism similar to that which has swept over the world several times since Thomas Malthus wrote his influential essay in 1789. A wide spectrum of opinion exists about the causes of this rapid change in the world food situation and its likely development in the future. One view is that we have reached the limit of the world's ability to feed even our present numbers adequately. Another view is that the events of the early 1970s signal a fundamental shift in the structure of the world's food economy that has led to a period of more or less chronic scarcity and high food prices. The soaring demand for food, spurred on by both continuing population growth and rising affluence, has begun to outrun the productive capacity of the world's farmers and fishermen. If this is the case, the limits to expansion of our food supply will require efforts to reduce consumption by the world's rich to feed the world's poor. A third opinion is that although the situation will be precarious for the next year or two, the factors that combined to cause it can be overcome. In this view, to which I subscribe, food production during the next decade will keep a half a step ahead of population growth, but there will be times and places of critical shortage. This last view is corroborated by a recent United Nations study, a study by the economic research service of the United States Department of Agriculture and a committee of the National Academy of Sciences and National Science Foundation, which I chaired. This committee considered the primary issue in balancing the food-population equation is an early reduction in the population growth rate and the attainment of population equilibrium as soon as possible. The factors that influence the population-food balance may be grouped into those relating to population, to agricultural resources, and to the more general features of the world food system. The main purpose of this article is to describe briefly some of these factors and what I believe can be done about correcting a potentially explosive situation.

The United Nations Millennium Declaration involved member nations in seeking to reduce extreme hunger and poverty measured against targets set for 2015. There may have been some success to date, 1 with the estimated total number of undernourished people falling by 17 per cent since 1990 -1992 (FAO 2013)). But there remained around one in eight people in the world who suffered from chronic hunger in 2011-2013. While the measured progress shows marked regional differences, sub-Saharan Africa remains the region with the highest prevalence of undernourishment. Progress has been slow in South Asia although the experience appears more positive in East and South-East Asia and Latin America.

World population, currently approaching 7.5 billion, will probably exceed 11 billion by the end of the century, almost double what it was at turn of the present century. The growth is uneven, and the result is a redistribution of the world’s population: at the end of this century Europe will have essentially no more people than it had fifty years ago, whereas Africa’s population will have multiplied 20-fold, and will have gone up from under 10% to over 30% of the world’s population. Thus, not only is population growing but it is currently growing in those regions of the world that have the least resources at their disposal, and the result is liable to be a dramatic rise in world inequality; increased conflict over access to resources; and increased migratory pressure from the poor to the richer regions of the world. In this introductory chapter, we discuss the history and sources of growth in world population over the past two centuries (in particular mortality and fertility) and its eventual stabilisation. We consider some of the major links between population and social dynamics in the light of two basic approaches to world population growth: The Malthusian approach, which views growth as a catastrophe, and the Marxian approach, which sees both population growth and its outcomes as contingent on social conditions and responses. We focus on the mutual relationship between population and societal change at all levels, the micro-, the meso- and the macro-levels, a relationship that is also reflected in the papers in this collection. However, there is also agency in population growth and the introduction concludes with a consideration of the options which humanity faces given the anticipated growth of world population and its redistribution.

Is widely accepted that food supply and quality are major problems in the 21st century. Due to the growth of the world's population, there is a pressing need to improve the productivity of agricultural crops, which hinges on different factors such as geographical location, soil type, weather condition and particular attributes of the crops to plant. In many regions of the world, information about those factors is not readily accessible and dispersed across a multitude of different sources. One of those regions is Nepal, in which the lack of access to this knowledge poses a significant burden for agricultural planning and decision making. Making such knowledge more accessible can boot up a farmer's living standard and increase their competitiveness on national and global markets. In this article, we show how we converted several available, although not easily accessible, datasets to RDF, thereby lowering the barrier for data re-usage and integration. We describe the conversion, linking, and publication process as well as use cases, which can be implemented using the farming datasets in Nepal.

Population growth, and other population characteristics, have been computed and made available online for over 2000 animal species in the Add-my-Pet (AmP) collection, assuming constant food and temperature environments. The AmP collection – online database of Dynamic Energy Budget model parameters, implied properties and referenced underlying data – provides an unique opportunity to study how energetics of individuals relates to population growth. For the comparisons of traits, we assume that the background hazard rate is zero, but aging applies to all species and ‘thinning’ to species with high reproduction rates. The new concept ‘thinning’ is a state-dependent hazard rate such that the feeding rate of a cohort does not change in time: the increase of individual feeding rates due to growth is exactly compensated by a reduction in numbers. Thinning affects population growth rate, but the impact differs substantially between species. Some 11% of species do not survive thinning, even at abundant food. The population growth rate relates to the underlying energetics; we discuss and suggest explanations for how population growth rates fit into all known patterns in the co-variation of parameter values: body size-scaling, metabolic acceleration, waste-to-hurry, supply-demand spectrum and altricial-precocial spectrum. We show that, after reproduction, age at puberty dominates population growth. The specific population growth rate scales with maximum body weight in the same way as the weight-specific respiration scales with body weight. DEB theory, which explains both, shows, however, that no direct relationship exists between the population growth rate and respiration. We suggest that the similarity in scaling results from the equality between specific population growth and specific growth rate at maximum growth of structure, and might be an evolutionary relict from times that life consisted of dividing unicellulars; population and body growth are directly connected for unicellulars. We show that the specific growth rate at maximum growth equals 1.5 times the von Bertalanffy growth rate, in a DEB context, which is a new interpretation of the latter growth rate. We expected the population growth rate to co-vary with specific somatic maintenance rate, based on a previously discovered pattern, called the waste-to-hurry strategy, where growth and reproduction are increased by simultaneously increasing assimilation and somatic maintenance in species that live off temporarily abundant food supplies. We did find this effect in ecdysozoa and spiralia, which comprise roughly 95% of animal species, but hardly so in tetrapods. The reason might be that specific somatic maintenance also co-varies with specific maturity levels at puberty for tetrapods. The scaled functional response at which the population growth rate is zero is very close to that at which puberty can just be reached in absence of thinning, and somewhat higher in presence of thinning. The specific population growth rate at abundant food correlates negatively with the functional response for which population growth rate is zero. It also correlates negatively with the precociality index, i.e. the ratio of maturity levels at puberty and birth: the more precocial, the larger neonate size, the smaller reproduction rate, especially in restricted taxa such as mammals and cartilaginous fish. Like other traits, the population growth rate shows considerable segregation among taxa, where mammals have a relatively low rate, glires a relatively high rate among mammals, followed by marsupials; afrotherians have the lowest population growth rates.

Aquaculture is the fastest growing food‐producing sector in the world. It is developing, expanding and intensifying in almost all regions of the world. The global population is increasing, thus, the demand for aquatic food products is also increasing. Production from capture fisheries has levelled off and most of the main fishing areas have reached their maximum potential. Sustaining fish supplies from capture fisheries will, therefore, not be able to meet the growing global demand for aquatic food and aquaculture is considered to be an opportunity to bridge the supply and demand gap of aquatic food in most regions of the world. However, in our efforts to achieve this potential, the sector will face significant challenges. Key development trends indicate that the sector continues to intensify and diversify and is continuing to use new species and modify its systems and practices. Markets, trade and consumption preferences strongly influence the growth of the sector, with clear demands for the production of safe and quality products. As a consequence, increasing emphasis is placed on enhanced enforcement of regulation and better governance of the sector. It is increasingly realized that sustainable development and responsible production of aquaculture, in the long run, cannot be achieved without the full participation of the producers in the decision‐making and regulation process, which has led to efforts to empower farmers and their associations and move toward increasing self‐regulation. These factors are all contributing to an improvement in the management of the sector, typically through the promotion of ‘better management’ practices of producers. This review discusses the role of aquaculture, as at large a small‐scale farmer driven production sector, in the quest for sustainable development, reducing poverty and improving food security on a global scale.

This paper presents ex post decomposition analysis of wage inequality change using multisector general equilibrium models. The analytical structure used is a specific-factors model of trade, which we calibrate to UK data for the two years 1979 and 1975. We first calibrate our general equilibrium trade model to observations on wage inequality, trade, production and consumption spanning these years, capturing the separate influences of trade, technology and demographics on inequality. Between these years wage inequality changed, but multiple changes in exogenous variables occurred (world prices, technology, endowments). We use calibration techniques to determine parameter values consistent with both the equilibria and the changes in exogenous variables contributing to the wage inequality change being decomposed. We then compute counterfactual equilibria in which only some of the changes in exogenous variables are present to allow us to assess what portion of the observed change is attributable to the various contributing factors. Our findings are that the roles of trade and factor-biased technological change are relatively larger than in earlier literature. We also find that changes in factor endowments to offset increased inequality generated by trade and skilled-biased technological changes, a feature that seems to have gone relatively unnoticed in earlier literature.

Rates of overweight and obesity have increased dramatically in all regions of the world over the last few decades. Almost all of the world's population now has ubiquitous access to low-cost, but highly-processed, energy-dense, nutrient-poor food products. These changes in the food supply, rather than decreases in physical activity, are most likely the primary driver of population weight gain and obesity. To-date, the majority of prevention efforts focus on personalised approaches targeting individuals. Population-wide food supply interventions addressing sodium and trans fat reduction have proven highly effective and comparable efforts are now required to target obesity. The evidence suggests that strategies focusing upon reducing the energy density and portion size of foods will be more effective than those targeting specific macronutrients. Government leadership, clearly specified targets, accountability and transparency will be the key to achieving the food supply changes required to address the global obesity epidemic.

Maximum prophet

The topic of food supply includes subjects such as the world food situation, food crises, food security and global diversion of production. The topic gives rise to many questions. An important question is whether access to food will be a limiting factor for the world's development and population growth. At the global level, to date, food production has been able to keep pace with population growth. The improved food situation in recent decades has largely been achieved by increasing productivity. As a result, the level of food security—calculated as the prevalence of malnourishment in the world—has improved. Food crises have played a major role in food supply and in the global security of supply, and it seems likely that food crises will occur more frequently in the future.

Updated International Society of Geriatric Oncology COVID-19 working group recommendations on COVID-19 vaccination among older adults with cancer

The subtitle of the article by Charles Mann, “Reseeding the Green Revolution” (Special News Report: World Food Prospects, [22 Aug., p. 1038][1]) reads, “High-yielding varieties of wheat, rice, and maize helped double world grain production. A repeat performance is now needed [because of continuing world population growth], and that will require a new commitment to agricultural research.” It seems important to repeat the question that Garrett Hardin ([1][2]) often asked: “Do we have a shortage of food or a longage of people?” Is it responsible for scientists to hold out the hope that endless population growth can be matched by endless doublings of world food production? At some point, probably sooner rather than later, we are going to run into the limits set by the law of conservation of stuff. The people of the world would be better served if we scientists gave our primary attention to the achievement of zero or negative population growth, first in the United States and then worldwide, so that further increases in agricultural production could be devoted to substantially improving diets worldwide. 1. [↵][3]1. G. Hardin , Science 162, 1243 (1968). [OpenUrl][4][CrossRef][5][PubMed][6][Web of Science][7] [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.277.5329.1038 [2]: #ref-1 [3]: #xref-ref-1-1 View reference 1 in text [4]: {openurl}?query=rft.jtitle%253DScience%26rft.stitle%253DScience%26rft.issn%253D0036-8075%26rft.aulast%253DHardin%26rft.auinit1%253DG.%26rft.volume%253D162%26rft.issue%253D5364%26rft.spage%253D1243%26rft.epage%253D1248%26rft.atitle%253DThe%2BTragedy%2Bof%2Bthe%2BCommons%26rft_id%253Dinfo%253Adoi%252F10.1126%252Fscience.162.3859.1243%26rft_id%253Dinfo%253Apmid%252F9563937%26rft.genre%253Darticle%26rft_val_fmt%253Dinfo%253Aofi%252Ffmt%253Akev%253Amtx%253Ajournal%26ctx_ver%253DZ39.88-2004%26url_ver%253DZ39.88-2004%26url_ctx_fmt%253Dinfo%253Aofi%252Ffmt%253Akev%253Amtx%253Actx [5]: /lookup/external-ref?access_num=10.1126/science.162.3859.1243&link_type=DOI [6]: /lookup/external-ref?access_num=9563937&link_type=MED&atom=%2Fsci%2F277%2F5333%2F1745.4.atom [7]: /lookup/external-ref?access_num=A1968C243100008&link_type=ISI

No discussion about food supply can be separated from its interaction with human populations. The earth’s population was slightly less than six billion in 1996 and is projected to double in less than 50 years, providing the annual increase of about 1.5% annually continues. Clearly, food production must increase accordingly, in order to accommodate such population growth.