So, our reading for tomorrow’s was about the prediction that the world population will reach 9 billion by 2050, and what the consequences to this population increase would be.
There are some things in this essay that I agreed with, and some that I was not so fond of. Obviously, if the world’s population ended up being 9 billion in just 39 years, that would be terrible for the obvious reasons… like where are we going to put all of these people?
As far as I am concerned, I’m not terribly worried about feeding a population of 9 billion. The question will not be can we get enough calories to energize people, but will they be getting the nutrition that they should be getting? The food industry has clearly shown that they are fully capable of mass-producing items. However, as we have discussed in class, the things that are easily mass-produced are not exactly the healthiest things on the planet to eat, but also that they are meant for people to eat and buy more and more, which could end up possibly posing a problem.
One thing I had a problem with inside the article was the author’s prediction that the population would reach 9 billion in just 39 years, and that it would level off at that point. For one, there is no guarantee that statistics are accurate and the population will be so atrociously large by then. No matter how good our life may be, there are still mass tragedies all the time. Take the nuclear disaster that has happened in Japan. In just 5 days, it killed over 20,000 people. That’s an insane decrease in our world’s population in such a short amount of time. And, not to be a pessimist or anything, but I predict that things on our planet are going to get worse before they get better. If you map the world’s population throughout history, there was never really a leveling off, and there are clear dips in the graph during disaster where the population suddenly dropped. I guess I just have a hard time responding to the thing as a whole, since I suspect that the author’s predictions might be a bit errored.
Food Studies, Spring 2011 
While there is of course no way to be entirely certain what the world’s population will look like in 40 years (in fact, we’re already well behind the projected figures from back in the 80’s), current trends do suggest that it will continue to grow, but more slowly, and possibly even level off eventually. While it is true that there has never been a leveling off of world population in history before, that is no reason why it couldn’t happen now. The world no is very different from the way it was even a century ago. Stranger things have happened.
Also, though the disaster in Japan is by no means a small thing, and I don’t want to detract from the scale of the devastation in any way, consider this: for every 1 person who died in Japan last week, there are 350,000 people still living on Earth. That hardly constitutes an ‘insane decrease.’