Population crash: prospects for famine in the twenty-first centuryAbstractFamine: past, present and futureLandIrrigated landWaterOilClimate changeConclusionAcknowledgmentsReferencesPopulation crash: prospects for famine in the twenty-firstcenturyCarleton Schade Æ David PimentelReceived: 1 October 2008 / Accepted: 7 April 2009 / Published online: 6 May 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009Abstract For centuries famine arose as a seemingly endless series of acute, regional andunanticipated events; it has transformed into a phenomenon, global in scale and continuousin nature. Half the world’s human population perpetually suffers some form of malnour-ishment, from either a scarcity of calories, protein or micronutrients or from a combinationof these. Sheer population size has rendered the scale of suffering unprecedented. Perpetualfamine has emerged during an era of abundant and relatively inexpensive soil, water andenergy resources, improving crop yields, and a benign climate. However, the twentiethcentury trends of resource degradation, diminishing growth in crop yields and a warmingatmosphere will likely continue, latently and perhaps synergistically impacting agriculturalproduction, and therefore, threatening food security in the twenty-first century. Assumingsome proportional relationship between food security and these resources, famine is hereprojected to greatly increase in the coming decades, severely impacting billions of people.Keywords Perpetual famine  Population crash  Food security  Agriculture Global warming1 Famine: past, present and futureUnlikely as the chances for global famine may appear from our present perspective, hungerand famine have plagued humanity since agriculture’s beginnings (Cohen 1989; Larsen2006). Famine is featured in the book of Genesis of the Hebrew Bible and it has beenrecorded in the texts of the great civilizations of Egypt, China, Greece, India, and RomeReaders should send their comments on this paper to: [email protected] within 3 months of publicationof this issue.C. Schade (&)P.O. Box 2888, Sag Harbor, NY 11963, USAe-mail: [email protected]. PimentelCornell University, 5126 Comstock Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA123Environ Dev Sustain (2010) 12:245–262DOI 10.1007/s10668-009-9192-5(Sen 1982; Golkin 1987; Arnold 1988). Its evidence has been found in the bones andarcheological remains of the Mayan, Aztec, Anasazi, Indus, Mesopotamian, Andean,Polynesian, and Easter Island societies (Hole 1966; Sabloff and Willey 1967;deMontellano 1978; Manzanilla 1997; Yoffee 1997; Taylor and Davies 2004; Diamond 2005;Aimers 2007; Alum et al. 2007). Western Europe suffered mightily for 1,000 yearsbetween 500 and 1,500; then Eastern Europe for the following 200 years; India and Chinafor the next 200 years after that (Arnold 1988; Smil 2001; O Grada 2007). As the world’spopulation steadily rose through the centuries, so did the number of deaths due to famine.During the twentieth century more people died in famines than from the two World Warscombined (Devereux 2000; Meng and Qian 2006). Holland, Japan, the Ukraine, the SovietUnion, Kazakhstan, the Caribbean, China, Ethiopia, Sudan, North Korea, Bangladesh,Burma, India, and some 40 other countries experienced famines (Sen 1982; Golkin 1987;Arnold 1988; Devereux 2000; O Grada 2007).Famine has been defined in terms of both extreme food scarcity and as widespread life-threatening hunger, irrespective of food’s availability (Ravallion 1996). Using the latterdefinition, we find ourselves in a time of unprecedented food abundance as well as in an eraof perpetual famine. More people have suffered in the past decades from protein andcalorie malnutrition than ever before. Until 1800, there had never even been 850 millionpeople on the planet at any one time, but now that many go to bed hungry every day(Sanchez and Swaminathan 2005; FAO 2006). Of these, about 85 million people world-wide suffer acute hunger, starving slowly, wasting away, victims of war, famines, andnatural disasters (Sanchez and Swaminathan 2005). More than nine million actually starveto death each year or die of diseases their malnourished bodies cannot fight (Serageldin2002; WWPA 2003; FAO 2006). In a given year, a billion feel the pangs of chronic hunger(Darwin et al. 2005). Somewhere between 2.2 and 4.5 billion people are deficient in proteinand calorie intake and in the micronutrients iron, iodine, vitamin A, folate, and zinc (FAO1993; Underwood 2003; WHO 2004). Stunted physically and mentally, they suffer fromconsiderable brain damage, cretinism, goiter, blindness, anemia, and die early of cancer,malaria, measles, and other diseases (FAO 1997; Marx 1997; Ames 1999, 2001; Black, M2003; Black, R 2003; Pimentel 2003; Underwood 2003; Sanchez and Swaminathan 2005).At the same time, over a billion people are considered overfed, overweight and obese(Kopelman 2000; O’Brien and Dixon 2002), and billions of the world’s newly affluent areeating higher on the food chain, eating more meat, and taking in more calories, a phe-nomenon referred to as ‘‘diet globalization’’ and the ‘‘nutrition transition’’ (Bender 1994;Myers 1997; Harris 2001; Tilman et al. 2002; Naylor et al. 2005; FAO 2006). Assumingthe continued rise in food consumption per capita and the 2.5 billion additional peopleprojected by 2050 (UNPD 2007), global food demand is expected to double—perhaps eventriple—by mid-century (Bongaarts 1996; Crosson 1997; Matson et al. 1997; Daily et al.1998; Doos and Shaw 1999; Harris 2001; Vance 2001; Ruttan 2002; Tilman et al. 2002;Green et al. 2005; Lal 2007).In order to support a far smaller 20th century population—with a mean of about fourbillion people between 1950 and 2000—humanity overwhelmed a majority of the planet’secosystem services (MEA 2005), destroyed much of its life, both in number and diversity,and have taken control of a significant portion of the Earth’s biological, geological, andchemical cycles (Wilson 1989, 2006; Blaustein et al. 1994; Leaky and Lewin 1996;Vitousek et al. 1997; Ricciardi and Rasmussen 1999; Jackson et al. 2001b; Collins andStorfer 2003; Burney and Flannery 2005; Ceballos et al. 2005; Lotze et al. 2006; Beckeret al. 2007; Kareiva et al. 2007). Every environmental indicator of global proportions hassteadily worsened. Not one, not even the ozone damage—humanity’s one ecologic246 C. Schade, D. Pimentel123victory—has actually improved (IPCC 2007: 145). Some