As U.S. and Other Wealthy Nations Slash Aid, UN Warns of "Silent Tsunami of Hunger" in Global Food Crisis

We turn now to what the United Nations World Food Program has called a silent tsunami of hunger. Its been described as the worst food crisis since the 1970s. According to the Food and Agricultural Organization, more than a billion people or one-sixth of the world's population go hungry every day. Last year alone 37 countries experienced riots over skyrocketing food prices.

But the world's richest nations have slashed their funding for food aid to their lowest levels in two decades. The World Food Program warned this week that more than 40 million people will have their food rations reduced or eliminated because of the drastic aid cuts. According to Josette Sheeran, the head of the World Food Program, wealthy nations "think the world food crisis is over, but in 80% of countries food prices are actually higher than one year ago."

For more on the food crisis and the related crisis in agriculture, we're joined now by award-winning Indian journalist, writer, and activist Devinder Sharma. He closely monitors how international agriculture, biotechnology, and trade policies negatively impact food security and farming communities in the global south in general and India in particular. Trained as an agricultural scientist, he is the author of "Gatt and India - The Politics of Agriculture;" "GATT to WTO: Seeds of Despair," and "In the Famine Trap."

Along with Democracy Now's podcast above, two recent articles bring some background to the argument that unchecked population and consumption will lead to a dim future if not to great disasters. Bill McKibben recalls 1972's The Limits to Growth as he discusses a recent study in Nature. Tom Turner focuses on Paul Erlich, who wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, and has hotly debated population issues ever since.

While they are interesting reading, neither article offers us a realistic solution to overpopulation or over-consumption. While some may be convinced to bear two, one or zero children or choose to live low-impact lives, it can be expected that far more will continue to procreate and consume as much as they can afford, if not more. In the face of prolonged recession, we may see the greenwashing of our consumption give way to actual conservation. In the face of war and riots, we may well see unwelcome "solutions" like government intervention in procreation, as occurred in China, and even less welcome natural interventions, such as the famine, compounded by greed, described above.

A Timely Reminder of the Real Limits to Growth

I thought of Limits to Growth last week, when Nature published a lead article by a large and illustrious team headed by the Stockholm scientist Johan Rockstrom. Titled "A Safe Operating Space for Humanity," it set boundaries for nine interlinked planetary thresholds, arguing that if we crossed them we risked destroying the "unusual stability" that has marked the Holocene, which is the name scientists use for the last 10,000 years, the period when civilization arose.

The almost-good news is, we don't know enough about two processes that lead to crossing those thresholds -- the loading of aerosols and particulates in the atmosphere, and the effects of chemical pollution -- to know if we've already gone too far.

The bad news is, we're close to crossing most of the rest of the boundaries. The authors estimate that we currently allow 9.5 million tons of phosphorus to flow annually into our oceans, mostly because of fertilizer use, and that past 11 million tons we may well trigger "large-scale ocean anoxic events." Ozone concentrations in the atmosphere -- 290 Dobson units before the Industrial Revolution and 283 at present -- can't dip below 276 without catastrophe, the authors note.

Oh, and the worse news is, we're already well past three of the borders. We're removing almost four times as much nitrogen from the atmosphere for human use as is safe, and the result are things like wide-scale water pollution and the addition of heat-trapping gases like nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. The species extinction rate, the authors argue, is probably 10 times the tolerable level of 10 species per million species per year, though they add that they're less certain of this than other numbers. "However, we can say with some confidence that Earth cannot sustain the current rate of loss without significant erosion of ecosystem resilience."

The Vindication of a Public Scholar Forty Years After The Population Bomb Ignited Controversy, Paul Ehrlich Continues to Stir Debate

The Population Bomb was an immediate sensation, eventually selling some three million copies. The radio host Arthur Godfrey, a major figure back in the day, sent a copy to Johnny Carson, who invited Ehrlich to appear on "The Tonight Show" - which he did, more than 20 times. During Ehrlich's first appearance, Carson allowed him to make a pitch for a new organization he had helped establish. It was called Zero Population Growth (ZPG), and Ehrlich gave out the address and asked people to join. Two days later, more mail arrived at the Los Altos, CA post office where ZPG was located than on any previous day in history. ZPG quickly grew to 600 chapters and a membership of 60,000. Ehrlich was eventually invited to become a correspondent for NBC News, with which he would travel the world, sometimes taking six months to produce a five-minute piece. The young Stanford prof was becoming downright famous. His explosive book had made many people scared about Earth's future - and had made many others angry.

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The Population Bomb made some radical predictions. "The battle to feed all of humanity is over," it begins. "In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Almost immediately, the book - and its author - began to take fire. The book so incited Charles McCabe, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, that he wrote 14 columns attacking Ehrlich between 1970 and 1982, calling him "Dr. Doom" and "the Cassandra of the contraceptive set."

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When asked about the new administration and the overwhelming challenges it faces - global warming, a crumbling economy, fluctuating gas prices - Ehrlich is hopeful, but cautious. He insists, for example, that bailing out Detroit is a fine idea so long as Detroit agrees to build rail lines and train cars rather than automobiles. He scoffs at the arguments over whether to drill for oil in the ocean or the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. "We shouldn't be burning fossil fuels no matter where they're found." He worries that the old guard, personified by Larry Summers - Obama's chief economic advisor and Commerce Secretary under Bill Clinton - may be allowed to steer recovery efforts in such a direction that we'll rebuild the economic system that got us into the environmental fix we find ourselves in today. "Larry Summers may be smart enough to get it going again and too stupid to understand we don't want it going again," he says.

And then there's the planet's population, which is still growing and still very much on Ehrlich's mind. The problem is not just raw numbers - it's numbers multiplied by consumption. The US now has less than five percent of the world's population and consumes about 25 percent of its resources. If the world's people all consumed like Americans, we'd be done for quickly. Controlling numbers, as difficult as that is, is easier than controlling consumption, Ehrlich thinks.

Reflecting on the warnings he made 40 years ago, Ehrlich acknowledges that he and Anne underestimated the success people would have developing higher-yielding grains, and how that spurred further population growth. But he also points out that there have been perhaps 300 million deaths since Bomb was published that were caused in large part by malnourishment and undernourishment. He claims that the success of the "green revolution" of the 1970s is already running into the difficulties he and others predicted, while global hunger is now increasing. And he likes to remind people that Bomb included a carefully worded caveat about the scenarios it sketched out: "Remember, these are just possibilities, not predictions. We can be sure that none of them will come true exactly as stated, but they describe the kinds of events that might occur in the next few decades."

For all of the things the popular book got wrong (or had mistimed), it got many other issues right. The book, which was about so much more than simply population, remains impressively prescient. "All of the junk we dump into the atmosphere, all of the dust, all of the carbon dioxide, have effects on the temperature balance of the Earth," the Ehrlichs wrote, long before the risk of global warming was understood. The book spoke of the scourge of pesticides and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. And it made this outrageous assertion: "If our current rape of the watersheds, our population growth, and our water use trends continue, in 1984 the United States will quite literally be dying of thirst." This was clearly premature, but here's what the Web digest Earth Week, a valuable summary of scientific observations, said on March 7, 2009: "A warming and drying climate across the southwestern United States could eventually make major cities in the region uninhabitable. . . .With severe drought from California to Oklahoma, a broad swath of the Southwest is basically robbed of having a sustainable lifestyle."