The 7 billionth baby is born

A first cry heralding the arrival of a new baby today (October 31) brings the global population to seven billion. The birth of this so-called "7 Billionth Baby" is significant in many aspects. For an average man it may sound like just another birth, but for those who care about our resource-strapped planet it's a matter of grave concern.
This day, as we rejoice at Homo Sapiens hitting a historic high of seven billion, we cannot forget about the physical resources -- habitation, food, education and jobs -- they would be requiring to live and thrive on this earth.
The "7 Billionth Baby" takes birth just 12 years after the world had welcomed its hypothetical "6 Billionth Baby" on October 12, 1999. 24 years after July 11, 1987 the United Nations had first decided to designate a child born on that date as the "5 Billionth Baby."
Global population is quadrupling in 100 years, a rate of increase unknown in previous history. The world's population reached 7 billion today whereas there were only 3 billion people in 1960, 2 billion in 1927 and just a billion in 1804. Thanks to better life expectancies in most countries, a child born today has a better chance than ever before of surviving infancy and living a long, healthy life. All the projections by different UN agencies show that world population will continue to rise up to the 10 billion-mark before it stabilises by the turn of the century.
Unfortunately, this historic moment of the global population's reaching 7 billion comes at a time when there is serious concern about food security. We have recently witnessed two back-to-back food price spikes with greater price volatility that has affected millions of poor people across the world.
There may be scores of economic explanations and different schools of thought to clarify the reasons behind such spikes in global food markets. But a simple arithmetic is so very mind-boggling that it explains a lot to any layman ignorant about macro-micro economy, inflation, climate change or oil price factors.
I am referring to the arithmetic of diverging progressions of population and cultivable land in the world as demonstrated by two clocks set by the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) on its website. IRRI is the world's premier rice research institution and one of the 15 such agro-research institutions run by the Washington-based Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
IRRI, instrumental in the "Green Revolution" that helped the world keep pace with its food output with that of a rising population since the '60s, operates a "World Population Clock" on its website. This clock is forever ticking upward, while, at the same time, the "Global Productive Land clock" just beneath it in the same IRRI website is forever ticking downward.
This demonstrates how more and more people have to depend on less and less arable land for their future food needs. If someone notices these two clocks s/he will observe that they are diverging at a current rate of around 2.4 persons per second and 1 hectare every 7.67 seconds, respectively!
Nothing could possibly be a better example than the challenging case of Bangladesh, an overpopulated small delta, to demonstrate the gravity of the food security concerns that the whole world is grappling with, particularly after the 2007-08 and 2010-11 price spikes.
While we've more than doubled our grain output over the last four decades, at least a quarter of Bangladeshi population is still far from being food secure. And the driving force behind the growth -- the tools and techniques of the Green Revolution -- has reached a plateau. The challenge of growing more food gets bigger every day -- we're losing 82,900 hectares of cropland each year while adding 1.8 million new mouths.
In the early 1970s, the population was 70 million and population growth rate was over 3%, resulting in annual rise in population of 2 million. Now the population growth rate has subsided to 1.39%, thanks to a vigorous birth-control campaign, yet 1.8 million people are still being added each year due to the large population base -- over 150 million in most conservative estimate.
With most productive tillable lands falling prey each day to industrialisation, urbanisation and habitation, Bangladesh struggles to grow over a half a million tonnes of more foodgrains from less land each year to feed the additional people that are added to an already huge population base.
I quote here Dr. Shenggen Fan, who heads the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI): "The surges in food prices in 2007-08 and 2010-11 and the rapid depletion of global food stocks reveal that the world is increasingly vulnerable to food shortages or crises. As the populations of rice-producing and consuming regions expand rapidly, concrete actions must be taken to boost production and secure rice supplies." Dr. Fan laid emphasis on new technologies to increase food output.
We must not forget that the days of developed nations doling out food aids to poorer nations have gone with the end of bipolar world. Now investment is the key for all nations -- rice or poor -- to boost farm productivity so that the increasing world population is well-fed. Then they can think of better habitation and better education, and help create a better future for the generations to come.
But overall investment scenario in the agriculture sector is not all that great. I quote David Dawe, a senior economist working with the FAO: "The widening imbalance between population growth and yield growth points to the need for more agricultural research. The funding of the International Rice Research Institute, for example, after adjusting for inflation, has declined nearly 50% since its peak in 1993."
Fortunately, Dawe notes, agricultural research funding has not declined everywhere. In fact, agricultural research intensity (the ratio of agricultural research expenditures to agricultural gross domestic product) increased in most Asian countries but, he suggested, more spending on agricultural research at both national and international levels can reduce poverty and increase economic growth.
At home, our food security challenge is enormous if we correspond our dwindling cropland figure with that of rising population. Besides, there are issues of high level of groundwater exploitation, increasing problem of salinity and lacks in farm-research incentives. Our "7 Billionth Baby" Day motto should be about investing more on enhancing farm productivity.

The writer is News Editor, The Daily Star.
Email: [email protected]