ould be that even greater tracts of marginal land would have to be cleared and cultivated.
This loss of rich forests and grasslands to farming is one of the ecological costs of population growth. Others are soil deterioration and erosion and declines in fisheries and decertification. Experts debating the population/hunger issue often fail to consider the ecological stresses and costs associated with the demand for more food. Rates of population growth rose gradually from the dawn of agriculture to the middle of the 19th century. By 1940, when modern industrial technology was first applied to farming on a large scale, the annual rate of population increase reached 1 percent. After 1940, breakthroughs in disease control brought an unprecedented imbalance between births and deaths and further increases in population growth. Today, the earth's population is growing annually at a rate of
Current patterns in population growth, however, tend to divide the nations of the world into two groups, leading to what Brown and Jacobson call the "demographically divided world." Nearly half the world, including the industrialized nations and China, have either established a balance between births and deaths or are in the process of doing so. These nations have population growth rates of 0.8 percent on average. A second
group of nations, where birth rates remain high (2.8 percent in the Middle East and Africa) (World Bank 40) are threatened by rapid ecological deterioration and declining standards of living.
Traditional demographic theories classified all societies into one of three stages. During the first stage, which characterizes pre-modern societies, both birth and death rates are high and population grows slowly. In the second stage, living conditions improve as public health measures, including mass immunizations, are introduced and food production expands. Birth rates remain high, but death rates fall and population grows...