Gwynne Dyer: A Frog in (Every) Pot
A good Malthusian read from Gwynne:
A Frog in the Pot
The foundation of every civilization is an adequate food supply: human beings simply cannot live at the density of population that civilization implies without a reliable agriculture. But the supply of good agricultural land is limited, and the number of human beings is not.
A (still unpublished) study carried out by the World Bank some years ago concluded that India (all of which is in the tropics or sub-tropics) would lose 25 per cent of its food production when the average global temperature is only two degrees C higher. China would lose an astounding 38 per cent, even though most of it is in the temperate zone. And all that is before their underground water sources are pumped dry.
But what is becoming clear, just in the past few years, is that the developed countries will also have trouble feeding themselves. Part of the problem is that many of them depend heavily on underground aquifers for irrigation, and the water is running out.
For example, the amount of irrigated land in Texas has dropped by 37 per cent since 1975. The amount in Kansas has fallen by nearly 30 per cent in the past three years. And now it is becoming clear that the impact of warming will also be much greater than anticipated in the developed countries.
And you know what frogs do, right? They croak.
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