Full house: reassessing the Earth's population carrying capacity

Abstract

After decades of steady growth, the world's food supply is no longer keeping up with population increases. Production of fish and grain per person has slowed to the point where feeding the 90 million being added each year is possible only by reducing consumption among those already here. These are the findings in this fourth volume in the Worldwatch Environmental Alert series from the Worldwatch Institute. The bottom line, according to Lester Brown and Hal Kane, is that the world's farmers can no longer be counted on to feed adequately the projected additions to our numbers. Achieving a humane balance between food and people now depends more on family planners than on farmers. This issue will increasingly preoccupy national leaders, reorder national priorities, and dominate international affairs. In this volume, the authors propose a global strategy to restore food security and a budget to implement it. Their global food security budget calls for stepped-up expenditures on both sides of the food/population equation. It includes investments not only to provide family planning services to all who want them, but also to eliminate the underlying causes of high fertility, such as female illiteracy. It also includes investments in an extensive reforestation and soil conservation effort, one that will arrest the deterioration of the agricultural resource base.