January 23, 2003-1
Copyright © 2003 Earth Policy Institute
Population Growth Leading to Land Hunger
Janet Larsen
From the beginning of agriculture until the
middle of the twentieth century, increases in world food production
have come largely from expanding agricultural land. Between 1950
and 1981, the area in grain expanded from 587 million hectares to
its historical peak of 732 million hectares. (1
hectare = 2.47 acres.) By 2000 it had fallen to 656 million
hectares. Meanwhile, with population expanding from 2.5 billion
in 1950 to 6.1 billion in 2000, the cropland area per person shrank
from 0.23 to 0.11 hectaresan
area half the size of a housing lot in suburban America.
The world's grain area is unlikely to expand
much, if at all, during the next half-century. Low grain prices
in recent years have led some farmers to pull back from the more
marginal lands, while others have abandoned degraded fields. In
addition, agriculture has lost millions of hectares of farmland
that have been paved over or covered by urban sprawl.
Where there is limited arable land, fast-growing
populations can shrink cropland area per person to the point where
countries can no longer feed themselves. Governments that can afford
it then compensate by importi/Updates/ng_grain_span_class_.css"mainBody">the
source of more than half the calories humans consume directly. But
in countries that cannot import grain, people go hungry.
Cropland scarcity has forced some densely
populated Asian countries to import most of their grain. After several
decades of shrinking per capita grainland, farmers in Malaysia now
cultivate only 0.03 hectares of grain for each resident. Japan,
South Korea, and Taiwan each harvest less than 0.02 hectares. To
make up for production shortfalls, these four countries currently
import more than 70 percent of the grain they consume, leaving them
vulnerable to supply disruptions.
Egypt is following close behind. It harvests
0.04 hectares of grainland for each of its 70 million people and
imports over 40 percent of its grain. With the water from the Nile
River now fully used, and with Egypt's population increasing by
over 1 million annually, this share of imports will almost certainly
climb.
Half of the world's annual population growth
of 77 million people occurs in just six countriesIndia,
China, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. Each of these
nations faces a steady shrinkage of grainland per person and thus
risks heavy future dependence on grain imports. This raises two
important questions. Will these countries be able to afford to import
large quantities of grain as land hunger increases? And will grain
markets be able to meet their additional demands?
In India, where one out of every four people
is undernourished, 16 million people are added to the population
each year. The grain area per person in India has shrunk steadily
for several decades and is now below 0.10 hectaresless
than half that in 1950. (See .)
As land holdings are divided for inheritance with each succeeding
generation, the 48 million farms that averaged 2.7 hectares each
in 1960 were split into 105 million farms half that size in 1990,
when India's grainland expansion peaked. The average Indian family,
which now has three children, will be hard pressed to pass on viable
parcels of land to future generations.
Pakistan, with five children per family,
is growing even more rapidly. In 1988, Pakistan's National Commission
on Agriculture was already linking farm fragmentation and a rising
reliance on marginal lands to declining farm productivity in some
areas. Since then, the country has grown from just over 100 million
to almost 150 million. Its per person grain area is now less than
0.09 hectares.
In China, the grain area per person has
also shrunk dramatically to a diminutive 0.07 hectares, down from
0.17 hectares in 1950. Shifting agricultural production to higher-value
crops, like fruits and vegetables, and converting farms to forest
for conservation accounts for some of the grainland contraction,
along with losses to nonfarm uses such as buildings and roads.
Though the shrinkage of farmland available
per person in China has slowed in concert with declining family
size, this countrywhose
population of 1.3 billion is as large as the entire world's in 1850is
still expected to add 187 million people to its ranks in the next
50 years. The robustness of China's economy enables it to turn to
world markets to import grain, but this does not guarantee that
those markets can support massive additional demand without hefty
price increases.
The scarcity of arable cropland in sub-Saharan
Africa helps to explain the region's declining production per person
in recent decades. Nigeria, for example, Africa's most populous
country, has seen its population quadruple since 1950 while its
grainland area doubledeffectively
halving the grainland per person. In northern Nigeria, pastoralists
and farmers fleeing the encroaching Sahara, which annually claims
350,000 hectares of land (about half the size of the U.S. state
of Delaware), have increased demands on the already scarce land
elsewhere in the country, sparking ethnic tensions.
The experience in Rwanda, Africa's most
densely populated country, highlights the potentially serious ramifications
of land scarcity. Between 1950 and 1990, Rwanda's population tripled
from 2.1 million to 6.8 million. The per capita grainland availability
fell to 0.03 hectares. James Gasana, Rwanda's Minister of Agriculture
and Environment in 1990-92, has noted that rapid population growth
led to farm fragmentation, land degradation, deforestation, and
famine. These stresses ignited the undercurrent of ethnic strife,
erupting in civil war in the early 1990s and culminating in horrific
genocide in 1994, when some 800,000 people were killed. Gasana
points out that violence was concentrated in the communes where
the food supply was inadequate.
A 2000 headline from the Pan African News
Agency, discussing a ministry of lands survey, read "Rwanda: Land
Scarcity May Jeopardize Peace Process." Now with a population that
has rebounded to 8.1 million, and with the average family having
six children, pressure on the land in Rwanda is again mounting.
Most of the 3 billion people to be added
to world population in the next 50 years will be born in areas where
land resources are scarce. If world grainland area stays the same
as in 2000, the 9 billion people projected to inhabit the planet
in 2050 would each be fed from less than 0.07 hectares of grainlandan
area smaller than what is available per person today in land-hungry
countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
By 2050, India and Nigeria would cultivate
0.06 hectares of grainland for each person, less than one tenth
the size of a soccer field. China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia
would drop even lower, to 0.04-0.05 hectares of grainland per person.
Faring worse would be Egypt and Afghanistan with 0.02 hectares,
as well as Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Uganda,
with just 0.01 hectares. These numbers are in stark contrast to
those of the less densely populated grain exporters, which may have
upwards of 10 times as much grainland per person. For Americans,
who live in a country with 0.21 hectares of highly productive grainland
per person, surviving from such a small food production base is
difficult to comprehend.
With most of the planet's arable land already
under the plow and with additional cropland being paved over and
built on each year, there is little chance that the world grain
area will rebound. At the same time, the annual rise in cropland
productivity of 2 percent from 1950 to 1990 has decreased to scarcely
1 percent since 1990, and may drop further in the years ahead. This
slowing of productivity gains at a time when the land available
per person is still shrinking underlines the urgency of slowing
world population growth.
Copyright
© 2003 Earth Policy Institute
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FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
From Earth Policy Institute
Lester R. Brown, Eco-Economy:
Building an Economy for the Earth (New York: W.W. Norton
& Company, 2001).
Janet Larsen, "Population Growing by 80 Million
Annually," in Lester R. Brown, Janet Larsen, and Bernie Fischlowitz-Roberts,
The Earth Policy Reader
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002).
Lester R. Brown, "Paving the Planet: Cars and Crops
Competing for Land," Earth Policy
Alert, 14 February 2001.
From Other Sources
Robert Engelman and Pamela LeRoy, Conserving
Land: Population and Sustainable Food Production (Washington,
DC: Population Action International, 1995).
James K. Gasana, "Natural Resource Scarcity and
Violence in Rwanda," in Richard Matthew, Mark Halle, and Jason Switzer,
eds., Conserving
the Peace: Resources, Livelihoods and Security (Winnipeg,
Manitoba: International Institute for Sustainable Development and
IUCN-The World Conservation Union, 2002).
Peter Gizewski and Thomas Homer Dixon, "Environmental
Scarcity and Violent Conflict: The Case of Pakistan," Occasional
Paper for the Project on Environment, Population and Security
(Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science
and the University of Toronto, April 1996.
LINKS
Population Action International
http:/www.populationaction.org
Population Reference Bureau
http:/www.prb.org
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization
http:/www.fao.org
United Nations Population Division
http:/www.un.org/esa/
population/unpop.htm
United Nations Population Information Network
http:/www.un.org/popin
United States Department of Agriculture
http:/www.usda.gov
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