Download Do too many people already cause hunger

Do too many people already cause hunger? If that were the case, then
reducing population density might indeed alleviate hunger. But for one
factor to cause another, the two must consistently occur together.
Population density and hunger do not.
Hunger is not caused by too many people sharing the land. In the
Central America and Caribbean region, for example, Trinidad and
Tobago show the lowest percentage of stunted children under five and
Guatemala the highest (almost twelve times greater); yet Trinidad and
Tobago's cropland per person-a key indicator of human population
density-is less than half that of Guatemala's. Costa Rica, with only half of
Honduras' cropped acres per person, boasts a life expectancy-one
indicator of nutrition-eleven years longer than that of Honduras and
close to that of northern countries.
In Asia, South Korea has just under half the farmland per person found
in Bangladesh, yet no one speaks of overcrowding causing hunger in
South Korea.
Surveying the globe, we in fact can find no direct correlation between
population density and hunger. For every Bangladesh, a densely
populated and hungry country, we find a Nigeria, Brazil, or Bolivia,
where significant food resources per capita coexist with hunger. Or we
find a country like the Netherlands, where very little land per person
has not prevented it from eliminating hunger and becoming a large net
exporter of food.
But what about population growth? Is there not an obvious correlation
between rapid population growth and hunger? Without doubt, most
hungry people live in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where populations
have grown fastest in recent decades. This association of hunger and
rapid population growth certainly suggests a relationship between the
two. But what we want to probe is the nature of that link. Does rapid
population growth cause hunger, or do they occur together because
they are both consequences of similar social realities?
In 1989 Cornell University sociologists Frederick Buttel and Laura
Raynolds published a careful study of population growth, food
consumption, and other variables in ninety-three third world countries.
Their statistical analysis found no evidence that rapid population
growth causes hunger. What they did find was that the populations of
poorer countries, and those countries where the poorest 20 percent of
the population earned a smaller percentage of a nation's total income,
had less to eat. In other words, poverty and inequality cause hunger.
Buttel and Raynolds did not explicitly look for the causes of high
population-growth rates. However, University of Michigan ecologist
John Vandermeer conducted a follow-up study using 1994 data that
explicitly asked that question. He found that inequality and poverty
were the key factors driving rapid growth as well.