Give a warm welcome to the 7 billionth human

The 7-billionth human, who will be born in the next few days, may get a warm welcome from its family, but there are plenty around who see its arrival as a disaster.

Pessimistic environmentalists who see no alternative to capitalism and profit-driven growth, argue that more people equals more consumption equals more climate change and eco-destruction. They share 19^th views popularised by the Rev Thomas Malthus.

The truth is more complex. Areas of the world where consumption is highest, for example, are those where the birth rate is medium (the USA and United Kingdom) to low (Germany, Italy, France). If lower consumption were the goal, a forced one-child policy in the United States would do it.

Population growth - where the number of births outstrips the number of deaths - is dependent on each woman replacing herself with a daughter. In China, a chain of events has been put in train by the violent elimination of hundreds of thousands of girls that could, over the longer term, lead to a population collapse. In parts of India it is the same. China is already classified as a low-population growth country, India as “intermediate”.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has set out three future scenarios for growth - low, medium and high. Taking the medium variant as the most likely, they show that by 2100, only the population of high-fertility countries would still be increasing.

The populations of both the low-fertility countries - which include China, Russia, Brazil and the United States – and the intermediate-fertility countries – which include India and the United Kingdom – would be declining at a rate of approximately 0.3% per year. In high-fertility countries, the rate of increase would be 0.5% per year. These are mainly countries in Africa and some parts of Asia.

A small improvement in living standards and social conditions, giving women greater control of their own reproduction, would transform the situation and bring stabilisation quickly. As UNFPA explains: "Small differences in fertility levels sustained over long periods have a major impact on the future population."

The social problems of an ageing population are already being felt across Europe and most acutely in Italy and Germany, where there are simply not enough young people working to generate tax revenue to pay for pensions for the older generation - or even to look after them.

“Young people hold the key to the future, with the potential to transform the global political landscape and to propel economies through their creativity and capacities for innovation,” said UNFPA executive director Dr Babatunde Osotimehin. “We should be investing in the health and education of our youth. This would yield enormous returns in economic growth and development for generations to come.”

Of course, the exact opposite is happening. Capitalism in crisis is creating a disaster for the new generation.

There are 1.8 billion young people between the ages of 10 and 24. More than 75 million of those aged between 15-24 are unemployed, whilst around 250 million aged under 13 are working, often full-time, when they should be in education. A million young people are out of work in Britain, the highest total ever.

“With planning and the right investments in people now — to empower them to make choices that are not only good for themselves, but also for our global commons—our world of 7 billion can have thriving sustainable cities, productive labour forces that fuel economies, and youth populations that contribute to the well-being of their societies," says the UNFPA.

The desire of young people for just such a transformation is driving the global uprising. They see that they cannot look to the existing system to deliver a future. It can only be achieved by eliminating the crisis-ridden capitalist system, replacing it with a society based on respect for life, consumption for need not profit, and protection of the planet's ecology.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Liberate science to tackle world hunger

Growing enough food to feed the world’s population is already achieved, though poor people often can’t access or afford it and rich countries waste as much as 30%.

The fact that population growth will peak in around 2050 means that it should be possible to produce sufficient food, provided there is a transformation to more sustainable farming and land use. And provided, of course, that there is a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions and global warming is capped and then reversed.

The scientific journal Nature, in a special issue on food and farming, concludes: “Producing enough food for the world's population in 2050 will be easy. But doing it at an acceptable cost to the planet will depend on research into everything from high-tech seeds to low-tech farming practices.” Nature calls for a “second green revolution” and says:

Such a revolution will require a wholesale realignment of priorities in agricultural research. There is an urgent need for new crop varieties that offer higher yields but use less water, fertilizers or other inputs — created, for example, through long-neglected research on modifying roots — and for crops that are more resistant to drought, heat, submersion and pests. Equally crucial is lower-tech research into basics such as crop rotation, mixed farming of animals and plants on smallholder farms, soil management and curbing waste. (Between one-quarter and one-third of the food produced worldwide is lost or spoiled.)

But the call for “a wholesale realignment of priorities in agricultural research” is a big demand. Public investment in agricultural research has collapsed and the only investors are profit-driven corporations like Monsanto and Du Pont. It is certainly not possible to feed the world with the current profit-driven, smash-and-grab approach of global agri-business.

Far from transforming the way land is used, transnationals are buying it up for intensive industrialised use. Even marginal land that will be entirely destroyed by two or three seasons of chemical-driven agriculture is being grabbed. Genetic modification in the hands of corporations continues to produce unforeseen outcomes that leave the profits of the transnationals intact but leave farmers duped – or forced – into planting GM seed – bankrupt.

The Chinese government is investing in research, but in a reckless and uncontrolled way. From “cloud-seeding” to GM seeds, China is carrying out a massive experiment on its land and people. It has emerged that companies that are part-owned by the state agriculture research institutes where the seeds were developed, have sold genetically modified rice seed to Chinese farming corporations. The relevant safety certificates were never issued.

The reality is that capitalism’s only response to this contemporary set of challenges has been a dramatic increase in market speculation in food and land. New investment funds are being established to profit from the global land grab, with Morgan Stanley to the fore.

And a further devastating price spike is on the horizon as thousands of hectares of grain crops in Punjab – Pakistan’s “bread basket” –have been swept away by the floods, whilst the wheat crop in Russia and Ukraine has been devastated by unprecedented drought. The UN has called for calm, as the world market price for wheat surged – by 7% on one day last week – on forecasts that 25m tonnes has been lost from the global harvest.

It is often said that people have lost confidence in science and its ability to make the world a better place. But it is the economic and political system within which science functions that is untrustworthy. Already thousands of scientists are working on responses to global warming, often in institutions that receive little or no funding.

Released from the need to focus on increased profits by their funding masters, science could contribute not only to feeding the world, but also to transforming agriculture into an activity that works in harmony with the evolutionary biology of plants and people.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Too many people? No - too much capitalism!

The climate summit scheduled for Copenhagen in December is in big trouble before it even gets under way. Major divisions have opened up between the United States, Europe and China and there are serious doubts about whether an effective international agreement can be reached on cuts on carbon emissions.

It appears that the US wants a completely new treaty, rather than a Kyoto Mark II. This would delay any action on CO2 emissions by years, while scientists insist that deep cuts are needed right now to prevent a climate catastrophe. China, in turn, is saying that any deal at Copenhagen must not penalise developing economies like its own.

Inadvertently, the Chinese have hit the nail on the head. There is a deepening global economic recession and each country is desperate to promote a “return to growth” (and profits). So Copenhagen will necessarily avoid any decisions that jeopardise this objective.

Yet it is precisely the grow-or-die nature of capitalism that is historically the principal cause of climate chaos. We don’t expect the leaders of world capitalism to accept that and create a sustainable, not-for-profit economy in place of the rapacious market-driven madness currently in place.

So now the search is on for “cheaper” so-called solutions to global warming. And rising to the top of the list is the old chestnut of “population control”. Put simply, the argument is that there are too many people on the planet and cutting their numbers would help in tackling climate change.

Heading the charge are bodies like the Optimum Population Trust, whose new report suggests that family planning is more “cost effective” because it is five times cheaper than low-carbon technologies in reducing carbon emissions. The US-based Worldwatch Institute is campaigning “to slow, and ultimately end, the unsustainable growth of world population - a critical force behind many of today's most serious problems”. Other organisations like People and Planet and the Green Party say more or less the same thing.

Of course, population growth is an issue. But is not the cause of the explosion in carbon emissions over the last 30 or so years. The problem is not population numbers themselves but land distribution and distribution of resources. People aren't hungry because the population of their country is too big. They are hungry because they are poor and can't afford food.

They are hungry because they are seen as sources of profits by the agri-corporations who control the production and supply of food, and who work with corrupt governments to plunder resources. Deforestation and over-fishing, for example, takes place for their benefit and not for the people in countries where population growth is fastest. This is the case in the criminal destruction of virgin forest to make disposable nappies or to grow palm oil plants so the advanced economies can fuel private cars.

In any case, the countries where population growth is slow, or even negative as in Germany and Italy, are the countries that use the majority of the world's resources. No one is suggestion reducing populations in these countries!

Advocates of population control pure and simple effectively hold human beings in general responsible for and identify them with an economic system over which they have no control whatsoever. They ignore completely the fact that it is unlimited growth in the drive for profit that is destroying the planet.

As for capitalist politicians heading for Copenhagen, bringing population numbers up the climate agenda helps them to sidestep the main issue – the need to make deep cuts in emissions immediately. They can simply blame the world’s population for the crisis!

There is a more sinister dimension to the question. In an economic crisis, where there is too much unusable labour power, there is always a reopening of the question of population growth. This is about capitalism not wanting to feed mouths that are not creating profit. The elimination of surplus people in the context of capitalist crisis like the one we're in now will take the form of famine, war and genocide.

Penny Cole and Paul Feldman