During the first fifteen centuries of the Christian era, the world's population grew at a rate of 2 percent to 5 percent per century. The rate today in many countries is between 3 percent and 4 percent per year - meaning an increase of more than nineteenfold in the next century if nothing changes. It now takes less than a decade to add a billion people to the earth's population. The consequences of this unprecedented growth are the grounds for controversy. Continued growth at current levels will quickly outstrip the world's food supplies. Figures show global hunger has increased inexorably in recent years. One can look at the rates at which global food production has risen, outpacing population growth in recent years, and deduce that hunger is merely the result of the inequitable allocation of food supplies. A 1983 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization study (Brown and Jacobson 13) concluded that, with modern technology, only 19 countries, with a total population of 104 million, would be unable to feed their peoples at minimum levels by the year 2000 - how this would be paid for, the study did not say. Nevertheless, that would mean a substantial reduction in hunger, even with much greater populations. There seems to be some hope that the hunger problem can be solved.
A further look at the U.N. study, though, begins to shed some light on the true consequences of food self-sufficiency for an additional billion people. To sustain the new population, the study assumed that all possible land could be cultivated and indeed would be brought into production. This included, for example, a sevenfold expansion of Latin American cropland, which
would require the plowing of vast portions of the Amazon basin. The study also assumed that no land capable of producing food for human consumption would be used to support livestock, and no allowance was made for green vegetables or nonfood crops, such as cotton. The result w...