If ever there was a time in recent years that the world needed some good news it would be now. So here it is. Things are getting better in general.
A recent study from the International Food Policy Research Institute surveyed the world food situation over the last 30 years and found that people today are better fed than any time in history. Sure there are problems, but the problems are diminishing, not increasing. The study found “that most regions have made substantial inroads against poverty and averted widespread famine in recent years.”
As a result we’ve seen a significant drop in the numbers of malnourished children in the world. In the developing world caloric intake per capita increased by 400 kilocalories up to a daily average of 2,700. And per capita cereal production “rose from 176 kilograms in 1967 to 226 kilograms in 1997, an increase of 28 percent.” Tim Dyson, professor of population studies at the London School of Economics wrote a report just over a year ago for the British Medical Journal. He found that: “Food production should be able to keep up with the growth in world population that is projected to occur over the next 25 years.” One reason is that world wide average of cereal production per hectare has tripled since the 1950s. That’s still about half what farmers in the United States and Europe manage to grow so there is plenty of room for improvement.
Just a few years ago, doomsayer Paul Ehrlich lamented that nations like Vietnam and India would be incapable of feeding themselves. Both nations are now food exporters. Africa remains an exception and is the only continent that is producing less not more. But the problems of Africa are problems of governance and economic incentives which means they are problems that could be addressed if governments on the continent wanted to do so.
Bjorn Lomborg was one of the environmental doomsayers for many years. An environmental statistician at the University of Aarhus, Denmark he set out to prove that optimists were wrong. He particularly set out to prove that the free market economist Julian Simon was wrong in his optimistic projections about the state of humanity: issues like environmental decay, food, pollution, disappearing forests and so forth.
Lomborg hoped to defend the pessimists. But this former Greenpeace activist found that the evidence proved Simon to be right. And his admission, entitled The Sceptical Environmentalist, is being published by Oxford University Press.
He confesses that his fellow Greens either had the numbers all wrong or grossly exaggerated them. “First,” he wrote for the Economist, “energy and other resources have become more abundant, not less…” And when it comes to feeding the world he agrees with the IFPRI and Dyson: “more food is now produced per head of the world’s population than at any time in history. Fewer people are starving.” As for vanishing species, the estimates that 25-50 per cent of world species will disappear, is terribly exaggerated, and the real number, over the next 50 years, will be well below 1 per cent.
As for pollution, he says most of it is transient and found in the early stages of industrialisation. As economies mature, pollution drops significantly, which means that most pollution is “best cured not by restricting economic growth, but by accelerating it.” London, for instance, was infamous for dirty air but it appears that pollution there peaked in 1890 and is now lower than at any time since 1585!
So why all the doom and gloom? Lomborg says there are several reasons. First, scientific funding tends to flow toward problems thus exaggerating the true state of the planet while simultaneously giving researchers an incentive to magnify the nature of any potential problem. The more dire the problem you study the more likely you are to get funding for research. Remember acid rain. When the problem turned out to be virtually non-existent the funding dried up.
Second, environmental groups are fighting for scarce media attention. And that encourages them to exaggerate. Worse, people just assume that environmental lobbyists are not like other lobbyists and are really totally selfless with no agenda of their own. So while a lobbyist from the petroleum industry is listened to with scepticism, a green lobbyist is almost endowed with sainthood.
Third, bad news sells as recent events have shown. Lomborg uses the example of the effects of the El Nino weather phenomenon. US media outlets were filled with stories of the dire consequences of El Nino in the late 90s. But when the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society studied the effects of El Nino they found something slightly different. They added up damage of about $4 billion. But they also found benefits amounting to $19 billion. The warmer winter was credited with saving 850 lives, reduced heating costs and limited Spring flooding due to reduced snow levels as well as reducing hurricanes.
The trends are going in the right direction on so many fronts that the odd setback will not influence matters unduly. When economies are strong and the people are well-fed and healthy, crises are easier to deal with. Minor wars and mild recessions will not change the general trend.
So maybe we can all smile just a little.
Source: Jim Peron is a freelance researcher and writer. This article may be republished without prior consent but with acknowledgement. The patrons, council and members of the Free Market Foundation do not necessarily agree with the views expressed in the article.
FMF Article of the Week\20 November 2001
