WASHINGTON (AFP) - – A growing, more affluent population
competing for ever scarcer resources could make for an
"unrecognizable" world by 2050, researchers warned at a major US
science conference Sunday.
The United Nations has predicted the global population will
reach seven billion this year, and climb to nine billion by 2050,
"with almost all of the growth occurring in poor countries,
particularly Africa and South Asia," said John Bongaarts of the
non-profit Population Council.
To feed all those mouths, "we will need to produce as much food
in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000," said Jason Clay
of the World Wildlife Fund at the annual meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
"By 2050 we will not have a planet left that is recognizable" if
current trends continue, Clay said.
The swelling population will exacerbate problems, such as
resource depletion, said John Casterline, director of the
Initiative in Population Research at Ohio State University.
But incomes are also expected to rise over the next 40 years --
tripling globally and quintupling in developing nations -- and add
more strain to global food supplies.
People tend to move up the food chain as their incomes rise,
consuming more meat than they might have when they made less money,
the experts said.
It takes around seven pounds (3.4 kilograms) of grain to produce
a pound of meat, and around three to four pounds of grain to
produce a pound of cheese or eggs, experts told AFP.
"More people, more money, more consumption, but the same
planet," Clay told AFP, urging scientists and governments to start
making changes now to how food is produced.
Population experts, meanwhile, called for more funding for
family planning programs to help control the growth in the number
of humans, especially in developing nations.
"For 20 years, there's been very little investment in family
planning, but there's a return of interest now, partly because of
the environmental factors like global warming and food prices,"
said Bongaarts.
"We want to minimize population growth, and the only viable way
to do that is through more effective family planning," said
Casterline.