When Population Growth and Resource Availability
Collide Earth Policy Institute:
Written by
Earth
Policy Institute
By Lester R. Brown
As land and water become scarce, competition for these vital resources
intensifies within societies, particularly between the wealthy and those who
are poor and dispossessed. The shrinkage of life-supporting resources per
person that comes with population growth is threatening to drop the living
standards of millions of people below the survival level, leading to
potentially unmanageable social tensions.
Access to land is a prime source of social tension. Expanding world
population has cut the grainland per person in half, from 0.23 hectares in
1950 to 0.10 hectares in 2007. One tenth of a hectare is half of a building
lot in an affluent U.S. suburb. This ongoing shrinkage of grainland per
person makes it difficult for the world’s farmers to feed the 70 million
people added to world population each year. The shrinkage in cropland per
person not only threatens livelihoods; in largely subsistence societies, it
threatens survival itself. Tensions within communities begin to build as
landholdings shrink below that needed for survival.
The Sahelian zone of Africa, with one of the world’s fastest-growing
populations, is an area of spreading conflict. In troubled Sudan, 2 million
people have died and over 4 million have been displaced in the long-standing
conflict of more than 20 years between the Muslim north and the Christian
south. The more recent conflict in the Darfur region in western Sudan that
began in 2003 illustrates the mounting tensions between two Muslim
groups–camel herders and subsistence farmers. Government troops are backing
Arab militias, who are engaging in the wholesale slaughter of black Sudanese
in an effort to drive them off their land, sending them into refugee camps
in neighboring Chad. At least some 200,000 people have been killed in the
conflict and another 250,000 have died of hunger and disease in the refugee
camps.
The story of Darfur is that of the Sahel, the semiarid region of grassland
and dryland farming that stretches across Africa from Senegal in the west to
Somalia in the east. In the northern Sahel, grassland is turning to desert,
forcing herders southward into the farming areas. Declining rainfall and
overgrazing are combining to destroy the grasslands.
Well before the rainfall decline the seeds for the conflict were being sown
as Sudan’s population climbed from 9 million in 1950 to 39 million in 2007,
more than a fourfold rise. Meanwhile, the cattle population increased from
fewer than 7 million to 40 million, an increase of nearly sixfold. The
number of sheep and goats together increased from fewer than 14 million to
113 million, an eightfold increase. No grasslands can survive such rapid
continuous growth in livestock populations.
In Nigeria, where 148 million people are crammed into an area not much
larger than Texas, overgrazing and overplowing are converting grassland and
cropland into desert, putting farmers and herders in a war for survival.
Unfortunately, the division between herders and farmers is also often the
division between Muslims and Christians. The competition for land, amplified
by religious differences and combined with a large number of frustrated
young men with guns, has created a volatile and violent situation where
finally, in mid-2004, the government imposed emergency rule.
Rwanda has become a classic case study in how mounting population pressure
can translate into political tension, conflict, and social tragedy. James
Gasana, who was Rwanda’s Minister of Agriculture and Environment in 1990–92,
warned in 1990 that without “profound transformations in its agriculture,
[Rwanda] will not be capable of feeding adequately its population under the
present growth rate.” Although the country’s demographers projected major
future gains in population, Gasana said that he did not see how Rwanda would
reach 10 million inhabitants without social disorder “unless important
progress in agriculture, as well as other sectors of the economy, were
achieved.”
In 1950, Rwanda’s population was 2.4 million. By 1993, it had tripled to 7.5
million, making it the most densely populated country in Africa. As
population grew, so did the demand for firewood. By 1991, the demand was
more than double the sustainable yield of local forests. As trees
disappeared, straw and other crop residues were used for cooking fuel. With
less organic matter in the soil, land fertility declined.
As the health of the land deteriorated, so did that of the people dependent
on it. Eventually there was simply not enough food to go around. A quiet
desperation developed. Like a drought-afflicted countryside, it could be
ignited with a single match. That ignition came with the crash of a plane on
April 6, 1994, shot down as it approached the capital Kigali, killing
President Juvenal Habyarimana. The crash unleashed an organized attack by
Hutus, leading to an estimated 800,000 deaths of Tutsis and moderate Hutus
in 100 days.
Many other African countries, largely rural in nature, are on a demographic
track similar to Rwanda’s. Tanzania’s population of 40 million in 2007 is
projected to increase to 85 million by 2050. In the Democratic Republic of
the Congo, the population is projected to triple from 63 million to 187
million.
Africa is not alone. In India, tension between Hindus
and Muslims is never far below the surface. As each successive generation
further subdivides already small plots, pressure on the land is intense. The
pressure on water resources is even greater. With India’s population
projected to grow from 1.2 billion in 2007 to 1.7 billion in 2050, a
collision between rising human numbers and shrinking water supplies seems
inevitable. The risk is that India could face social conflicts that would
dwarf those in Rwanda. The relationship between population and natural
systems is a national security issue, one that can spawn conflicts along
geographic, tribal, ethnic, or religious lines.
Disagreements over the allocation of water among countries that share
river systems is a common source of international political conflict,
especially where populations are outgrowing the flow of the river. Nowhere
is this potential conflict more stark than among Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia
in the Nile River valley. Agriculture in Egypt, where it rarely rains, is
wholly dependent on water from the Nile. Egypt now gets the lion’s share of
the
Nile’s water, but its population of 75 million is projected to reach 121
million by 2050, thus greatly expanding the demand for grain and water.
Sudan, whose 39 million people also depend heavily on food produced with
Nile water, is expected to have 73 million by 2050. And the number of
Ethiopians, in the country that controls 85 percent of the river’s
headwaters, is projected to expand from 83 million to 183 million.
Since there is already little water left in the Nile when it reaches the
Mediterranean, if either Sudan or Ethiopia takes more water, then Egypt will
get less, making it increasingly difficult to feed an additional 46 million
people. Although there is an existing water rights agreement among the three
countries, Ethiopia receives only a minuscule share of water. Given its
aspirations for a better life, and with the Nile being one of its few
natural resources, Ethiopia will undoubtedly want to take more.
In the Aral Sea basin in Central Asia, there is an uneasy arrangement
among five countries over the sharing of the two rivers, the Amu Darya and
the Syr Darya, that drain into the sea. The demand for water in Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan already exceeds the
flow of the two rivers by 25 percent. Turkmenistan, which is upstream on the
Amu Darya, is planning to develop another half-million hectares of irrigated
agriculture. Racked by insurgencies, the region lacks the cooperation needed
to manage its scarce water resources. Geographer Sarah O’Hara of the
University of Nottingham who studies the region’s water problems, says, “We
talk about the developing world and the developed world, but this is the
deteriorating world.”
# # #
Adapted from Chapter 6, “Early Signs of Decline,” in Lester R. Brown,
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2008), available on-line at http://www.earthpolicy.org/Books/Seg/PB3ch06_ss5.htm
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