MARCH 6, 2013 Wednesday !
Whew! How We Dodged the Bullet on Global Starvation !
How did the world survive the 20th-century population explosion, which many had expected to lead to mass starvation?
(a ) Agricultural innovation contributed to a 10% rise in per-capita food production from 1961 to 1980,
(b) and greater global trade and
(c) a population shift to cities helped the world absorb billions more people, David Lam of the University of Michigan writes in Demography.
The population boom was triggered by rapidly falling death rates, but the subsequent global decline in birth rates means that the world's population, now at 7.5 billion, may soon stabilize and may never reach as high as 12 billion, Lam says.
Source: How the World Survived the Population Bomb: Lessons From 50 Years of Extraordinary Demographic Historyv
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