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California Drought Population Concerns; Can’t Feed 9 Billion People
California Drought Resurrects Old Population Growth Concerns. With California in its fourth year of drought, population growth has again appeared in California’s consciousness. “When you increase a population significantly,” said Pattison, general manager of the Mountain House Community Services District in East Bay area, California, “you reach a point of what’s called ‘demand hardening,’ and you cannot conserve your way out of a situation where there’s just too many people and overcommitment of demand across the spectrum.”
How Will We Feed a World of Nine Billion People? By 2040 the world will have two billion more mouths to feed. Already more than 800 million people are malnourished and another two billion are short of essential micronutrients, which affect health. Joel K. Bourne Jr., a former senior editor for National Geographic, explains how biofuels distort food prices; how Iran offers an unlikely model for reducing population; and why the world needs a Pink Revolution. The British Foreign Office, in a report based on a university study in coordination with Lloyd’s of London — one of the most conservative and oldest insurers on the planet — suggests that failure to change course on climate change will uproot the global food supply system and trigger an unprecedented epidemic of food riots by 2040.
