Under current models of food production, the answer largely depends on the kind of diet that is adopted. Over a year, the average American consumes 800 kilograms of grain in the form of food and secondary animal feed. Were that to become the global average then the present level of grain production, slightly above 2 billion metric tonnes, would only support a global population of 2.5 billion. By contrast if the average was in line with the Mediterranean diet, where each person consumes around 400 kilograms of grain a year, the earth could maintain a population double that. Finally, if all of us ate – directly and indirectly – the same quantity of grains as the average Indian, then present methods of food production could sustain a planetary population of 10 billion, more or less where we ’ll be by the closing decades of this century.
Put bluntly it is the meat and dairy consumption typical to diets of the Global North which have us living beyond our ecological means. Current levels of food production could even meet demand for 2050, but it would require a typical diet almost absent of animal protein.
There is at least some good news, however. While the Earth’s human population has exploded since the dawn of the Second Disruption, it is likely to peak at 10 billion this century – thereafter either falling or remaining static. From the perspective of mouths to feed that means it won’t look that diferent from today – an extra 3 billion people – which is what the world has added since 1974. Indeed, it is rising expectations in diet, combined with declining crop yields as a result of climate change, which represent the biggest hurdles in eliminating world hunger.
Claims about rising populations and the natural limits of the Earth are nothing new. Indeed Thomas Malthus, one of the most important thinkers in the early history of political economy, was obsessed by the issue. In his 1798 polemic An Essay on the Principle of Population, he observed how any increase in food production led to a growth in population rather than an improvement in the average standard of living. His resulting conclusion was stark. ‘The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.’
Food Without Animals
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