I’m afraid that folks preparing a report on the relationship between climate change and agriculture will have zero interest in considering the relationship between population change and agriculture. This is implicit in this statement in chapter six: “Increased innovation will be needed to ensure [that] the rate of adaptation of agriculture . . . can keep pace with future climate change.”
If the words in bold were “population growth” instead of “climate change,” they might possibly be interested, but they’re not examining the commonly imagined “need to increase food production to feed our growing population” and would view as irrelevant a statement that our population would STOP growing if we STOPPED increasing food production; that would be viewed as changing the subject, and they wouldn’t stop to ask if the statement was true; if they did, they’d have to rethink the whole thing and write an entirely different report (and they’re not about to do that).
They belong to the general population, which just doesn’t know that there is a causal relation between food production and population. They think that food availability has NOTHING TO DO with population growth. They think that our population will grow whether we increase food production or not. AND THEY WILL NOT LISTEN TO ANYONE WHO DISAGREES.
Not greed, just willful blindness.
NOTE: http://ncadac.globalchange.gov still provides information about the three-month public draft version this study and a downloadable version of the final document. (2019)
ID: 762
posted:
updated: 20 Jan 2013
