A few weeks ago the UN released its latest estimate, 7.3 billion. The UN also predicts that within twenty five years populations throughout Europe will begin to decrease, and that by 2050 eastern and southern European nations will be around 20 per cent smaller than they are today. After all, even now hundreds of millions of people are not getting enough to eat. But hunger cannot be blamed on overpopulation. World food production has greatly outpaced population growth since the 1950s.
Food is now more abundant and affordable than at any other time in history.
Where people go hungry today it is because of corruption, mismanagement, trade barriers, and poverty resulting from inequalities in political power. The massive gains in food production have come about through improved agricultural yields, rather than through big increases in the amount of land planted with crops. And advances in biotechnology promise to raise yields even further in the future, allowing the return of large areas of farmland to wildlife habitat, even while feeding billions more people. Of course, the environmental and population activists denounce all this as a 'technological fix'. They favour 'social engineering fixes', despite this century's sorry history of attempts to remodel human beings along the lines the activists would like.