We can get an idea about this question looking at the planet's bio-mass. google wikipedia Biomass Ecology.The link is faulty.

For every tonne of humans there are 16,000 tonnes of plants and animals excluding bacteria on this planet.

Scroll down to Global Rate of production per year.( Biomass billions of tonnes)
Cultivated Lands - 11 BT.
Oceans - 39 BT
Total Forests - 40 BT

Allowing for ample food of 0.5 tonnes per person pa the world needs only 3.5 Billion Tonnnes of food to survive. The world produces 4 BT but half of this is thrown away while a billion people suffer mal-nutrition. Cultivated land presently produces over 3 times our needs.The oceans if looked after can produce 10 times our present needs and fish farming is in it's infancy.

New techniques in intentsive glass house farming can increase food production many fold.

The world can easily support twice the present number with proper management/production of food.

The population alarmists are making our Govts more oppressive by threatening global anarchy will ensue because of food shortages and it is a total lie.

The Green movement originated out to the latte sipping socialists who want the planet for the few.They are quite happy to consume cheap products off the sweat of cheap Chinese workers and at the same time condemn them for too much pollution and using too much energy + resources.They are quite happy to enjoy their priviliged positions of middle class welfare achieved off the back of the taxes paid by workers here.Also they are delighted to put bio-fuels in their tanks which reduces food production in poor countries and call this progress.

Arjay,

"The Green movement originated out to the latte sipping socialists who want the planet for the few. They are quite happy to consume products off the sweat of Chinese workers and at the same time condemn them for too much pollution and consuming too much energy + resources....."

Crap!...you're more likely to hear a Green supporter questioning rampant consumerism in the West and the connection with Chinese pollution than not.

Get a load of this...here are the purveyors of junk science and their financial supporters.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZdCfoDiMDg

Is the Planet Over Populated ?
Not by people but by morons, yes !

Poirot, The science is not settled and never will be.

We've gone from Global Warming,ocean acidification,drastic sea level rises,climate change and now extreme weather.Well which is it? Sydney had it's hottest day on record but it was only 0.44 deg hotter than the record set in 1930's.Note we also have the heat island effect in the cities with cars,concrete and bitumin.The rest of our summer has been quite mild as the last 2 summers have been.The northern hemisphere is suffering extreme cold.This is not evidence of warming.

I'm arguing that the planet is not over populated in terms of food production and that the alarmists are causing unnecessary angst and pain.We need to clean the planet up in many ways and save forests and the oceans.The doom sayers need to pull their heads in because the elites on this planet are using over population to justify more wars and cause a scarcity of food.

Yes individual,most of those morons are incapable of entering debate.They just have to parrot someone else's ideas as their own.They are incapable of analysising facts or reaching their own conclusions.

It's one thing to make food available to the masses, but it's another to make it accessible and more importantly, affordable.

Here in Oz, Food production costs are out of control to such a point that many small family farmers are being swallowed up by larger, more production efficient ones, in fact, the numbers are something like 300 farmers leaving the land PER MONTH.

If anyone hasn't viewed a doco called 'Food Inc' , I suggest they do so, as we here are headed in the same direction as America, whereby large conglomerates are taking over the entire food production, transportation and distribution chain, including retailing.

Now while I don't mean to involve politics in every thread, here we have a typical situation of incompetence, from a PM who is sitting there saying we here are poised to become a food super supplier, with out of control IR, limited prime farm land and most importantly, limited water.

As for being over populated I'm not sure, however it does appear that the majority of food stuffs is grown in countries where populations are small.

All this means is that in order to get food to the masses, will mean more costs in this already cost burdoned industry.

Good luck is all I can say.

And yet again you provide the evidence Individual!
Arjay well you mixed up in your first post a thread of great promise.
The simple answer is yes yes.
A fact, world wide, while I dislike greens, folk fearing real damage to the environment joined greens groups.
And to an extent few wish to see, dragged both sides towards them on this issue.
Lucky, for me,and Democratic Socialist party,s all over the world, they are incapable of considered thought.

Arjay,

Re: the science "not" being settled....(we know:)

Re: your denialist blather - fancy, that.

All dem sciency fellas never took dat stuff into account.

They're obviously a lot of drongos, if you can sum up their folly in a single paragraph.

Yes rehctub Govts and big business are working together to drive the small farmer off the land.The Greens are at the forefront of farmer oppression. We also have fracking destroying good farmland.Cubby Station had higher offers from locals but China got the sale.Corruption?

The aim of the multi-nationals is to control food like they do oil and thus control the population totally.

Monsanto wants their sterile GM crops to dominate the food market so they will have total control.Withpout seeds were are enslaved again.

the pro-population increasers should sit back for a moment & work out how more people will not contribute to a declining quality of existence for all living things on this planet.
Haven't they ever heard of economic migration ? Don't they know that these people come from highly over-populated places ? I'd like to suggest to the proponents to put their preference for increased population onto their I.d. so that they can be sent to overpopulated cities/countries for a couple of years & see how comfortable they'll be able to live in comparison to the supposedly under-populated Australia. Does their growth mentality come from their growth in stupidity ?
I prefer a quality of life any day to hundreds of neighbours milling around aimlessly.

Good post, individual.

Arjay,

Life isn't like the sort of competition that students used to have in the 1960s, where the object was to cram the greatest number of people into a telephone booth or Volkswagen Beetle. The object is to have no more people than can lead decent lives with some human dignity, in a healthy environment where the other species can live too.

Food is never going to be equally distributed, and waste is never going to be completely eliminated (although we can certainly do better). This is a pipe dream. You are also ignoring looming problems from the end of cheap oil, climate change, peak phosphate rock, etc. Furthermore, you need to recognise that people need more than just food, and there are limits to how far we can use the environment as a sink for wastes.

The Global Footprint Network is an international thinktank of scientists, engineers, and economists that has been doing calculations on carrying capacity and consumption based on figures from the UN, national governments, and papers in peer reviewed journals. Their 2010 atlas might prove enlightening, especially the graph on p. 21, where they plot rank on the UN Human Development Index (human well-being) against environmental footprint (consumption per person). It is clear that it would take the resources of approximately three Earths to give everyone in the global population a modest Western European standard of living.

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/images/uploads/Ecological_Footprint_Atlas_2010.pdf

They also say that we are in about 40% environmental overshoot, essentially because we are using up renewable resources faster than they can be replenished. If we divided all the earth's resources equally among the global population, we would all have the average standard of living of Jordan. Allowing for environmental overshoot, we would have the average standard of living of Burma or Uzbekistan.

http://overpopulationisamyth.com/ The rate of pop growth has slowed dramatically.They say it will peak at 9 billion and decline by a billion every 20 yrs.The increasing cost of food will slow rates dramatically.

Give women an education and access to birth control and pop falls as in the West.We need to raise living standards and education in poor countries so that it does happen.Releasing these countries from debt wold be a big start.

Interesting subject Arjay.
None of the responses so far have mentioned something that is my soap box.
You may not be aware that for every calorie of food energy that we
produce requires 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy.
This is made up largely of diesel for farm machinery and transport.
Fertilisers produced from natural gas and other nitrogen products.
Energy used by food processors.
Transport and refrigeration at the retail end of the process.

Now, if you plot oil & coal production and population you find that
the graphs track EXACTLY from about 1850 to date.
The reason of course is the industrialisation of food production and distribution.
It was this energy gain that enabled many people to leave the land
and work in factories during the 19th century.

The energy for food production will become much more expensive and in
some countries such as Australia will be rationed !
A terrifying thought for many but oil for food production will have
to have priority. Gradually the number of farmers will have to change
from about 1 in every 100 people to more like 1 in every 10 or 15.
The ratio at the beginning of the 18th century was about 1 in 3.
Earlier than that it was that everyone worked on the land.

With the reduction in energy production, a reduction in population
will inevitably track. Starvation ? Women's malnutrition ?
Who knows, but a start down this track has already started and a date
can even be placed on it. The date of the Egyptian revolution, which
was a protest on food costs.

Bazz there is no shortage of energy.Currently in the West we have an elite who want total control.Read Agenda 21 of the United Nations.

I'd like to see the world's pop stabalise and reduce somewhat but not the drastic changes by some of our elites in the West want.They have really go a lot of people offside.

This is another reason for the establishment of the BRICS Nations.India and China have the largest populations and now have banded together with Brazil,South Africa and Iran for military and economic security.They are launching a new Bank for development.

Sorry Arjay, you are wrong. Peak Crude oil occurred in 2006, IEA 2010 !
At present we are on the predicted plateau.
All the unconventional oil that all the hype is all about may delay the
real problem by a couple of years or so.
If the US and Europe had not cut back their oil usage by 5 and 2 million
barrels a day we would already be talking about rationing.
However the hidden problem is net oil production and the export land model.
Do your research on that Arjay, and there is not even a conspiracy there !

By next year we will only have one refinery,( in WA), and will rely on
what others will be prepared to let us buy.

This what the BITRE report was about that the government tried to hide.