The Balance of Population and Food Mankind's Final Choice
Toshio Kuroda
Director Emeritus, Nihon University
Population Research Institute
Remarkable historical changes concerning the population have occurred during the last decade of the 20th century. Firstly, there was the problem of food which would directly effect our lives. The second problem was to control the increasing numbers of people needing food. A policy of 'Female Employment' was adopted at the Cairo Conference in 1994 (a United Nations conference on population and development) with the express purpose of raising and improving the lot of women. This policy was adopted as a comprehensive strategy aimed at resolving the population crisis by radically improving the position of women in society, the economy and health. I consider these measures for women as a comprehensive and progressive idea i.e. 'the development of women'.
As an analogy, you could consider both of these problems as the wheels on either side of a car; if the balance is not maintained, the car is likely to go out of control.
The third issue is the United Nations projections that the global population will reach ten billion by 2050, an unprecedented level, which is causing concern internationally as well as amongst the experts, as this figure is nearly double the 5.3 billion total in 1990.
When it was said that the global population will reach ten billion, what we were first concerned about is whether the earth can tolerate such a huge number of people. In other words, would it be possible to produce sufficient food? These problems have already been covered by experts as follows:
1. "Can the growing human population feed itself?", John Bongaarts (1994)
2. "Full House - Reassessing the earth's population carrying capacity", Lester Brown (1994)
3. "How many people can the earth support?", Joel Cohen (1995)
4. "Surpopulation - Mythe ou Menace", Klatzmann [France] (1996)
All of the above are typical recent works about the intertwined problems of population and food.
