A new study by the International Water Management Institute found that India is drawing underground water at twice the rate of recharge. Worldwide, the amount of farmland per person is steadily declining. Global warming could interfere with food supplies in unpredictable ways. The Green Revolution, which enabled India and other countries to feed themselves, has slowed. Grain production per hectare has risen at only 1 percent since 1990 after rising at twice that rate for the previous 40 years.
Funding is stagnant for the international agriculture research that sparked the Green Revolution.
We say we need to worry. Eighty million people will be born each year well into the next century, mostly in developing countries. All this gloom and doom is anathema to those who believe that more people translates not into more misery, but into more ingenuity and more solutions to human problems. These so-called cornucopians were exemplified by the late University of Maryland professor of business administration Julian Simon. Not all cornucopians believe, as Simon did, that there's no practical limit to growth, but in general they feel that the limit is not in sight.