Abstract
The ability of food systems to feed the world’s population will continue to be constrained in the face of global warming and other global challenges. Often missing from the literature on future food security are different scenarios of population growth. Also, most climate models use given population projections and consider neither major increases in mortality nor rapid declines in fertility. In this paper, we present the current global food system challenge and consider both relatively high and relatively low fertility trajectories and their impacts for food policy and systems. Two futures are proposed. The first is a “stormy future” which is an extension of the “business as usual” scenario. The population would be hit hard by conflict, global warming, and/or other calamities and shocks (e.g., potentially another pandemic). These factors would strain food production and wreak havoc on both human and planetary health. Potential increases in mortality (from war, famine, and/or infectious diseases) cannot be easily modeled because the time, location, and magnitude of such events are unknowable, but a challenged future is foreseen for food security. The second trajectory considered is the “brighter future,” in which there would be increased access to education for girls and to reproductive health services and rapid adoption of the small family norm. World average fertility would decline to 1.6 births per woman by 2040, resulting in a population of 8.4 billion in 2075. This would put less pressure on increasing food production and allow greater scope for preservation of natural ecosystems. These two trajectories demonstrate why alternative population growth scenarios need to be investigated when considering future food system transitions. Demographers need to be involved in teams working on projections of climate and food security.
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Data availability
This is a review paper so all of the population and food data used in the paper are from the peer-reviewed literature or are publicly available (e.g., the United Nations and Wittgenstein for population data and FAO for food data).
Notes
How accurate are population projections? In hindsight, UN projections for individual countries have sometimes had considerable error and the error of course increases the longer the time interval between the projection and the actual population count. From a study in 2000, the mean absolute error across countries at ten years duration was 7% and at 30 years was 16% (National Research Council (USA), 2000). However, for the world, the percentage error even at 30 years from projection to actual was less than 4%.
World population reached 1 billion in 1800, 2 billion in 1930, and passed 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 billion in 1960, 1974, 1987, 1999 and 2011 respectively. This has been very rapid growth in the last century, i.e., a nonagenarian today has seen world population quadruple in his/her lifetime.
Also, with declines in fertility, the population ages so for example, the median age in Mexico in 2020 was 29 years but in 2075 the estimate is 48 years (United Nations Population Division, 2022). Countries need to prepare for this eventuality.
We chose the year 2075 instead of 2100 which many authors use, because very few people alive today will be alive in 2100 so the forecasts for that year depend almost entirely on projections of fertility (and mortality) over the next 77 years. As a rough indication of this, with the world population by age from UNPD and a model life table with expectation of life of 72.5 years (close to the world average now according to the Population Reference Bureau 2022 Data Sheet), 34% of people alive today can be expected to be alive in 2075 but only 4% can be expected to be alive in 2100. Fertility projections even 30 years hence can be quite far off. An example is the extended baby boom after World War II.
Two children per woman replaces the generation but replacement fertility is technically taken as 2.1 since some births do not survive to reproductive age.
Unless otherwise specified, all population and fertility numbers given in the text are drawn from data (estimates and projections) released by the UNPD in 2022 (United Nations Population Division, 2023).
It is noteworthy that all the United Nations projections use the same downward trend in mortality (United Nations Population Division, 2023). Except for major calamities, trends in fertility are far more important than trends in mortality for determining population forecasts.
After they have estimated trends in fertility and mortality, both groups of demographers utilize the cohort-component method of population projection (Preston et al., 2001). This method uses the population for a given country by age and sex groups at time “t” together with fertility and mortality rates estimated for that time for the country to produce the population by age and sex at time “t+n” where n has typically been 5 years. (However, the UNPD is now using single year age groups and time intervals.) Then, also with a Bayesian approach (Azose & Raftery, 2015) estimated net numbers of immigrants (or emigrants) are added (or subtracted). Also, the European group added another dimension—education—to the model.
Note that sustainable population size is clearly less than maximum size.
Maurice King and co-authors (1995) defined a population as demographically trapped if “it has exceeded or is projected to exceed the combination of 1) the carrying capacity of its own ecosystem, b) its ability to obtain products, and particularly food, produced by other ecosystems except as food aid, and c) its ability to migrate to other ecosystems in a manner which preserves (or improves) its standard of living (up-migration).”
Therefore, the sustainable population size of 2–4 billion cannot be achieved in the foreseeable future with these trajectories. An alternative is the one-child family norm, but aside from the coercive program in China, there is no country that provides an example for this level of fertility, though some European countries do come close (Spain and Italy both have TFR values of 1.3.) Though it has been recommended before (King et al., 1995), adoption of the one-child family norm in Africa is clearly not feasible at this point.
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Staff of Johns Hopkins libraries assisted with securing some references and Fannie Fonseca-Becker assisted with checking of reference citations. We also thank the reviewers for their very helpful suggestions on earlier versions of the manuscript.
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Stan Becker drafted the population sections. Jessica Fanzo drafted the food sections. Both worked on tables, figures, and references as well as the “Introduction” and “Conclusion” sections and approved the final version of the text
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Becker, S., Fanzo, J. Population and food systems: what does the future hold?. Popul Environ 45, 20 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-023-00431-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-023-00431-6