Candide
Demographic transitions never play out quickly. Even China’s brutal one-child policy took decades to lower fertility rates, and demographic momentum means that China’s population is still growing despite fertility being below replacement. And China is suffering growing problems because of the distortions its policy created in the age profile.

Only anti-child policies even more brutal than China’s, or mass deaths on a scale that far exceed the tolls of the two world wars, would stop the world’s population growing for the next few decades.

The article is right to focus on raising food production. This is a more sensible and humane way to alleviate hunger and malnutrition. In the past 50 years food production has grown more quickly than population, and there's every reason to think this can be sustained, as long as the anti-food lobby don't get their way.

There's nothing wrong with the anti-pops perpetuating a lie, lord knows the media have covered us with Mayan end of the world doom day scenarios, rising sea levels, scorpions rising out of the earth, etc, so it's no wonder we're all a bit jumpy.

But here's the thing: growing more food is a very good idea. Using technology to grow more food to sell is a great idea. Trotting out "I'm against it' for ever initiative that might help alleviate human suffering because it doesn't conform to the Mein Kampf of sustainability is ignorance writ large.

People will see through it and the Greens (even with some of their good ideas) will be brushed aside.

Some of the Green groups really are Luddites. The hysterical opposition to genetic engineering or nuclear power on the Left is just as irrational as climate change denial on the Right. We are likely to need these technologies in the future.

All the same, it is foolhardy to count on miracle technologies to save us. Grain production per person peaked in 1984. See the World Food Price Index

http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/wfs-home/foodpricesindex/en/

There may well be physiological limits. Wheat and chickens are vastly more productive than in 1900, but race horses can't run much faster - and not for want of trying. People like to chant that Malthus was wrong, even though Haiti and Rwanda are good evidence he was right, but a lot of the optimists of the 1950s were definitely wrong:

"Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter... It is not too much to expect that our children will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age."

This from a speech in 1954 by Lewis Strauss, the head of the US Atomic Energy Commission, not a science fiction magazine. I would just love that free electric power and cure for aging.

Rhian et al. are celebrating falling world fertility, as we should, but don't seem to understand the full implications of demographic momentum and environmental overshoot. I have seen a calculation that the population of India would double before it stabilized, due to demographic momentum, even if the fertility rate fell to replacement level tomorrow and stayed there. Aquifers are being pumped dry under its wheat belt. There is an Indian government report that 40% of the children are currently malnourished and nearly 60% stunted due to past malnutrition. See

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/10/child-malnutrition-india-national-shame

How is this likely to get better with twice as many people?

Hasbeen, even if your case study is true exactly as you state it, it is not representative of what happened with the vegetation management legislation. I’m sure you would agree that it is an extreme example of things not going as they should have.

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Ateday, nice to know you are a brother in arms. Welcome to OLO.

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Cheryl, you seem to think that it is a good thing that the fertility rate is declining. So then, you would also think it a good thing if we helped it along a bit, as Yabby has suggested. Divergence points out that even with the current rate of fertility decline, the global population is going to be very much larger before it stabilises.

The declining fertility needs a very big help along.

And you would also presumably think that this sort pro-active approach on population should go hand in hand with a proactive approach on food production, yes?

Mmmmm….yeah right!

So let me get it straight then – you think it is good that our fertility rate is declining, but totally obnoxious for us to do anything to promulgate that rate of reduction. And you think that we should be maximising food production (supply) and doing nothing at all about the still very rapidly increasing population (demand)… and not striving to match supply with demand, but simply putting all out efforts into increasing supply and letting demand do its own thing entirely!?!?

Divergence
I don’t celebrate world fertility, but neither do I bemoan it. It’s a fact of life, and incredibly difficult to change through government policies. I also think choices about how many children to have are best left to individuals, which is why I’d support aid for voluntary family planning but vehemently oppose the coercive variety.

Yes, India still has a lot of poor and malnourished people, but the fact is that both poverty rates and malnutrition have declined despite the country’s rising population.

As I posted here:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=14202&page=0
The data show that the green revolution contributed enormously to improvements in welfare in India. Poverty and malnutrition have fallen, food production has risen steadily faster than population, and in many years India is a net exporter of grains.

http://data.worldbank.org/country/india

I remember a few decades ago eco-alarmists saying it was pointless trying to save India’s hungry because their population would inevitably overrun their food production. They were wrong then and they are wrong now.

The source you linked to shows world cereal production on a steady upward trend, reaching an all-time high in 2011:

http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/wfs-home/csdb/en/

Per capita consumption has plateaued, but the FAO attributes that to weaker demand, not supply constraints:

http://www.fao.org/docrep/004/y3557e/y3557e08.htm

There is a scientifically way to demonstrably lower/curtail population growth, and that is to ensure that the female demographic is educated.
Our foreign aid ought to be taken out of the hands of corrupt officials, and given as direct funding to NGO's, that diligently pursue non gender specific education outcomes.
As other writers have noted, what we waste here in the west, would feed the rest of the starving world!
Also, there are studies that seem to confirm that some critical reafforestation, helps to recharge the monsoonal rains that travel north and south from equatorial Africa, assisting essential food production; and or, winding back desertification.
I also believe we can make a solid case for exporting wattle and wisteria seeds, for production of these extremely hardy perennials, in sub Saharan Africa.
And we can teach them how to make and install simple digesters, that will create enough cooking gas, to take the burden of finding fuel or firewood out of the remaining forests, and off of the backs of young females, who really ought to be at school, rather than fetching wood and water for lazy, lay about able-bodied men, who value women as mere bagatelle, inasmuch as how many sheep, cattle, camels, horses or goats they need to part with to buy one?
Sure here are parts of the world where that and or child brides are culturally acceptable, along with a whole host of primitive or barbaric practise and witchcraft, that only education that mandates the inclusion of the female demographic, can eventually wipe out.
Rhrosty.