What Happened to the "O" Word?

Every day we get a new angle on the world food crisis. The media is on track to give this story saturation coverage. But even though articles and news reports on the topic number in the tens of thousands, with hundreds more added each day, there is one word you won't find being used anywhere.

The word is: "overpopulation."

If you are of the generation that experienced the Cold War, that word will sound familiar. As will the phrase "population explosion." These expressions were used a lot back in the 1970's. You had a multitude of grim-faced scientists warning that, if growth rates continue, the global population might hit six billion by the turn of the century. The world will run out of resources, they said, and population growth rates have to be curbed if a catastrophe is to be avoided.

Then, in the 1980's, oil prices fell to a record low, fresh oil fields were discovered, new strains of grains improved yields, and the warning cries were dismissed. The scientists were wrong - they didn't take into account the development of technology. Bureaucrats in countries such as Japan and Italy started fretting about their populations shrinking (pretty insane considering that both of these countries are overcrowded, as anyone who has been on a train in Tokyo or tried to find an apartment in Rome will tell you). By the the turn of the century, the threat of overpopulation had completely disappeared, and the word "overpopulation" had dropped from the popular lexicon.

Well, guess what. Overpopulation is here! We hit the six billion mark and we're running out of food. Those scientists back in the 1970's, it turns out, were right. It seems there is in fact a limit to the number of human beings the planet can sustain. And six billion is pretty close to that limit. That is why not just food prices, but commodity prices - everything from copper to cement - are at record highs.

While the media coverage skips the "o" word, it often features a "human element," a so-called peg to give the story an emotional angle the audience can identify with - usually an individual personally affected by the crisis. Is it coincidence that the human element always has a large number of offspring? A BBC story about climbing tortilla prices mentions a woman struggling to buy tortillas - she has a family of six. A news story about how rising food prices affect UN food aid mentions an unemployed man in Afghanistan - he has five children. Or an article about rising cooking oil prices features an Indian laborer - his household numbers nine.

It doesn't take a mathematician to figure out that if a lot of people have families with more than four children apiece, then you're on course for overpopulation sooner rather than later. "Overpopulation" is a polite word for "too many mouths to feed" - mouths that were brought into existence by those responsible for feeding them. The media portrays the culprits of the food crisis as its victims - and they are. We humans are responsible for overpopulating the planet, and we are the ones suffering the consequences. This is a crisis entirely of our own doing.

Of course, the current world food crisis may soon pass, especially if oil prices come down. With lower oil prices, fertilizer will be less expensive, and so will driving a tractor, or shipping grain by bulk across the oceans. If oil prices fall low enough, acreage currently reserved for biofuels will be rolled back in favor of cereal crops. In addition, some kind of crisis in China - economic or political - would put the brakes on a good part of the consumption which has been driving prices so high, and everyone will be breathing a huge collective sigh of relief.

But you can bet that, sooner or later, unless the global population growth rate is drastically slowed, oil prices, commodity prices, and food prices will shoot up again, and we will have another world food crisis, even worse than the one that hit back in '08. And the next one will probably feature real famines and starvation, as opposed to the threat of famines and starvation. Will our leaders be wise enough to curb population growth in time? Will the same G8 leadership that came up with a policy which encouraged population growth in poor countries ("Make Poverty History") come up with a policy which discourages population growth?

Will heavily overpopulated countries that cannot feed themselves and consequently rely on food imports - Iran, Mexico, Philippines, to name a few - be pressured to curb the rampant growths of their populations? Curiously, in recent years, Iran has been the only country that has already started taking active measures to curb population growth. Will the other countries be encouraged to follow Iran's lead?

There is another country which is not wholly infertile, but with a population far too large to be sustained by the produce from its own fields. That country is Iraq. Call it a bizarre silver lining courtesy of the Bush Administration - in recent years Iraq's population has been falling rapidly, mainly due to massive outbound migration and lowered fertility rates. Funny how Mother Nature has ways of regulating things.

You can bet that, if we don't do something to regulate the size of the global population of our species, Mother Nature will figure out a way to keep us in check.