Overpopulation is not a subject much discussed in the present day for good reason. By now, it is a problem associated with authoritarian solutions. After the horrifying forced abortions of China's "One Child Policy" and the terrifying prospect at least for men of forced vasectomies courtesy of Indira Gandhi, the movement to curb overpopulation seemed to have lost steam in the early '80s. In fact, I thought it was a completely dead issue, until I read an article in The New York Times on Monday reporting that the United Nations predicts the world population to increase to 10.1 billion people by 2100. Within the last dozen years, we've already added another billion people to the population, reaching 7 billion total. If birthrates don't change, the UN projects that the population of Africa already so wounded by AIDS, wars and famines will triple. On a smaller scale, the population of Yemen, which already faces "critical water shortages," will quadruple.
I don't believe that the UN estimates will ultimately pan out, for the awful reason that those estimates don't take war and starvation into account. Natural and manmade events stand a decent chance of eliminating great masses of humankind, who will die of hunger or be killed or displaced by resource-driven struggle. Rather than get into a discussion of birth control and family planning issues of international policy on which I can have little impact, in my modest role as an opinion columnist I want to offer suggestions that are relevant to our lives as college students. And that is the question of food waste and its connection to overpopulation.
If the population is going to increase by 3 billion people, and we want to prevent as many people as possible from dying, we must make drastic changes in the way we treat food. One billion people are already malnourished, so you can imagine the problems that the increase in population will cause. According to author Tristram Stuart, the United States wastes roughly 40 million tons of food a year more than enough to nourish that hungry billion. Considering that the United Kingdom wastes an estimated 20 million tons, this is far from a uniquely American fault.
Everyone wastes food. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that leftover bits of food comprise the second largest fraction of total waste (paper products are the largest). Stuart writes that 40 to 50 percent of all food harvested is never eaten and much of it is disposed simply for cosmetic reasons. Americans would evidently rather eat a relatively bland but picture-perfect tomato than a weirdly-shaped one. The first step to improving the situation would be to make some noise about this state of affairs and abolish any purely cosmetic standards for food sold in supermarkets.
Vegetarianism is also connected to this question. All of the grains and soybeans that are used to fatten cattle are also major sources of waste. An amount of food that could be used to feed a great many starving humans is poured into an animal that will ultimately only feed a few. Eating less meat would eliminate our need to over-breed animals we could let great numbers of them die out naturally, freeing up massive surpluses of plant-based food.
Yet many people who talk about these issues are considered to be somewhat outside the mainstream. Mainstream "environmentalists" like Al Gore and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are not vegetarians (although, to be fair, they probably pay someone else to be), even though it should be the first thing any environmentalist does or recommends. One simply cannot claim to be an environmentalist while countenancing wildly wasteful dietary practices and avoiding such a basic personal sacrifice as vegetarianism.
If we're going to avert the massive waste of life that may be incurred by this enormous population increase (barring some major advances in food production), we need to pay sustainability more than lip service. Otherwise, Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" could become something more than satire it is, practically speaking, true that we may end up "eating" infants, since we are wasting the food that would nourish them.
