Fighting Mother Nature with Biotechnology - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 429

Chapter 17
Fighting Mother Nature
with Biotechnology
Alan McHughen
Introduction
Some two hundred years ago, Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), in thinking about the growth
of the global human population and the various restraints on such population growth,
predicted that humans would sooner or later run out of food and other resources and then
suffer a catastrophic population crash (Malthus 1798). He may have predicted “sooner”
due to ravages of disease, pestilence, and war, but humanity's creative capacity for innova-
tion drove such technological advances as irrigation, fertilizers, plant breeding and ani-
mal husbandry, food preservation storage and transport, along with contaminant control
technologies, modern medical interventions, and other subsequent human manipula-
tions to tweak the food/feed/fiber and fisheries supply to push the “sooner” into “later.”
Nevertheless, Malthus's fundamental argument is sound. We humans inhabit a physically
limited planet with finite resources constraining and denying our fervent desire for or—at
least history of—continued human population growth. The “later” is nigh.
More than 6.8 billion living humans currently occupy Earth. The natural carry-
ing capacity of the planet—that is, Earth's ability to sustain a human population with-
out human technical intervention and without depletion of sustaining resources—is
vigorously debated, but most experts cite 3 to 4 billion or so (see, e.g., Cohen 1995;
Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1990; Ehrlich and Holdren 1971; Pulliam and Haddad 1994) with
the techno-optimists saying we could sustain perhaps 10 billion humans, but only with
massive technological intervention combined with global dietary belt tightening (Smil
2001). The human population and eating habits are, therefore, already unsustainable.
More than a billion humans are chronically malnourished; more than 1,000 humans die
every hour attributable to lack of sustenance ( http://www.afaceaface.org/blog/2011/01/
facts-on-world-hunger/ ). And yet the human population continues to rise, with an
expected peak of more than 9 billion before leveling of around 2050.