With the price of oil breaking new records amid projections that oil could soon reach $200 a barrel, it’s not surprising that the national security community is concerned about the rising price of food and fuel and its impact on political stability. More surprising perhaps, the connection is also being drawn to population.
In the past year, riots over food and energy prices have broken out in more than a dozen countries, most recently in South Africa. Foreign policy experts are concerned that the rising cost of food and fuel could destabilize conditions in current-day hotspots like Somalia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and in potential hotspots like Egypt, Jordan, and the Philippines.
In the short-term, emergency food shipments by the U.N.’s World Food Programme can help defuse the food crisis, but there is a growing concern in the foreign policy community that population growth in countries already struggling to feed themselves could lead to chronic unrest as the food crisis worsens.
Earlier this year the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), listed 36 nations as “Countries in Crisis Requiring External Assistance.” The population of these 36 nations, currently 1.1 billion, is expected to rise to 1.5 billion by 2025 and 2.0 billion by 2050.
Three weeks ago, in a speech delivered at Kansas State University, CIA Director General Michael V. Hayden warned that:
Today, there are 6.7 billion people sharing the planet. By mid-century—by mid-century, the best estimates point to a world population of more than 9 billion. That’s a 40 to 45 percent increase—striking enough—but most of that growth is almost certain to occur in countries least able to sustain it, and that will create a situation that will likely fuel instability and extremism—not just in those areas, but beyond them as well.
There are many poor, fragile states where governance is actually difficult today, where populations will grow rapidly: Afghanistan, Liberia, Niger, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That group—the population is expected to triple by mid-century. The number of people in Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Yemen is likely to more than double. Furthermore—just beyond the raw numbers—all those countries will therefore have, as a result of this, a large concentration of young people. If their basic freedoms and basic needs—food, housing, education, employment—are not met, they could be easily attracted to violence, civil unrest, and extremism.
And through the fact of global migration, this impact of rapid population growth in Africa or Southeast Asia and elsewhere is not going to be confined to those places. It will be felt in the developed world as well. Millions of young people from fast-growing, poorly developed countries will emigrate—legally and illegally—in search of economic opportunity, security, or political freedom.
Last week, an article written by Lee Hudson Teslik at the Council on Foreign Relations also warned about the threat posed by population pressures:
"The wars of the twenty-first century will be fought over parking spaces." So writes Suketu Mehta in his recent portrait of Mumbai, a city pushing the limits of overpopulation, struggling with sewage overflows, and clawing for limited electricity, water, and gas supplies. The wars Mehta predicts in fact are well under way. Easily missed in the clamor over the spiking prices of oil, natural gas, coal, iron, aluminum, copper, and a long list of other commodities (WSJ)—not to mention shortages of wheat, rice, flour, and other basic foodstuffs—is that population pressures weigh on the availability of all these goods.
Like the CIA Director’s speech, Teslik’s article expresses concern about global population growth projections:
Currently, some 6.6 billion humans inhabit the Earth. By 2050, experts say that number will likely hit 9 billion. The rate of global population growth has abated in recent years, and some regions, mostly in the developed world, even fear population decline (Foreign Affairs). But global population growth remains a long-term dilemma for producers of food, energy, and raw materials. At current levels, there are almost two-and-a-half times as many people in the world as there were in 1950, when global population sat around 2.5 billion. The world has largely been able to make up for this growth through increased efficiency, and by finding new sources for materials. Substantial gains have been made against global hunger...though international targets for hunger reduction remain unmet….
….Projections from the International Food Policy Research Institute show the world's need for food rising significantly in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The prominent academic Jared Diamond says demand problems could be exacerbated as consumption rates rise in the developing world, as seems likely. Improvements in agricultural efficiency may continue, but at some point they will be limited by physical factors. One acre, however efficiently it is cultivated, can only grow so much food.
Emerging security concerns about population trends are not limited to population growth. As Gen. Hayden noted in his Kansas speech, in some areas of the world a shrinking population poses security concerns:
Another example of demographics: Russia, which faces a different kind of demographic stress. In the next four decades, we expect Russia—the population of Russia—to shrink by 32 million people. That means Russia will lose about a quarter of its population. To sustain its economy, Russia increasingly will have to look elsewhere for workers. Now some of them—some of them will be immigrant Russians coming from the former Soviet states, what the Russians call the near abroad. But there aren’t enough of them to make up that population loss. Others will be Chinese and non-Russians from the Caucasus, Central Asia and elsewhere, potentially aggravating Russia’s already uneasy racial and religious tensions.
Population trends, of course, have always played a role in world events, but as Gen. Hayden emphasized in his speech, they may take center stage in the 21st Century.
