Climate Chancing The Ghosts Of Malthus

The widespread epidemic of global warming has started rekindling interest in the pessimistic postulate of nearly two centuries ago, by Reverend and economist, Thomas Robert Malthus. In the face of the looming crises: heat waves, air pollution, rising sea levels, draught…among other climate change triggered troubles, the pessimistic prophesy about the future of increasing populations tosses our minds to relate the current dangers, what the US president Barrack Obama referred to as “the single biggest threat to humanity in the 21^st century”, to rising world populations as it becomes clearer that the next decades will see inevitable demand for more food from fewer land.

The 2011 mudslide calamity that buried over five villages around the slopes of mountain Elgon, in Uganda, is traceable to the increase in the population of the area that engaged the occupants in clearing off forests around the mountain’s steep slopes to give way to farming lands. The blessings of torrential rains, good for crops to blossom turned into a lamentable curse when Ugandans woke up to the heartbreaking news of the live-burial of an estimate of 3000 people by landslide.

Additional lucky 5000 people were displaced after their homes were swept away by floods. Visiting the tragedy’s scene, Ugandan president Yoweri Kaguta Museveni remarked: “I had never in my life seen this country experiencing such a horror”. Such horrors, indeed, have started nerve-racking global livelihoods.

Away from Uganda, scores of countries in the sub-Saharan Africa face endless cycles of calamities resulting from global warming. More than 10 million people are reported to have faced hunger and even death by starvation in Southern Africa between 2011 and 2014. The worst drought in more than 10 years, combined with the devastating impact of diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis, has caused incredible food shortages. While in East Africa, more than 14 million are at risk of starvation due to a prolonged drought that has seriously affected agricultural and livestock production. In both regions, a lack of rainfall has caused crops to wither and die in the fields.

But in the Horn of Africa (which includes the countries of Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Eritrea), the condition is even worse as drought has become a continual problem. Poor rainfall in last year's spring and fall rainy seasons resulted in countries producing a mere 20 percent of the previous year's output. In some areas, the situation is so severe that agricultural production has declined by more than half their normal levels.

World food programme and the celebrated savior of these regions recently issued a report estimating that 600,000 people are yet to face food shortage as a result of a long drought in northern Uganda alone. The Karamoja region in particular suffers from the highest levels of malnutrition in Africa and given the persistent poor harvests, “we are greatly concerned about the fate of the hundreds of thousands of people there who risk running out of food before the next harvest," the report concluded.

The contents of these reports clearly runs counter to the country’s development goal popularly known as the vision 2040 that affirms the dream to “transform the country from peasantry agriculture to modern farming”. One can wonder if this is attainable amidst the fogginess of the above milieu.

Because in Africa, tackling the jeopardy nurtured by climate change could sometimes be synonymous with breaking the vicious cycle of poverty, for these countries derive sundry hues of livelihoods from primarily agriculture that employs between 70% to 85% of labor, yet agriculture is a great deal dependent on the erratic weather and climate to feed the 1.1 billion mouths, better desired ‘in time’.

That’s why man of God, Malthus, made no secret in pointing out that if man doesn’t intervene in checking population rise, then nature will through what he called positive checks, in which he envisioned deaths, wars, land conflicts, diseases, and an assortment of calamities accelerating deaths, the dreadful hardships constipating more and more global political, economic and social tight spots.

It’s along this same line of reckoning that pope Francis early this year warned that “Catholics don't have to breed like rabbits” during his memorable visit to the Philippines. The pope’s observations, taken together with his defense of the Catholic Church’s ban on artificial contraception signal an obvious swelling agenda regarding global population crises, which has largely been ignored by public opinion or obscured by a media narrative that has tended to emphasize his populist personality. This is due to the increasing concerns about rising populations that strains natural resources among the Philippines… jobs alike.

Rapid population growth usually occurs when women are not able to exercise control on the timing and number of children they have. Many countries in Africa have made progress in reducing the proportion of people living in absolute poverty, but partly because the population has grown too fast compared to economic growth, the actual number of people living in poverty has increased in many countries.

Uganda, with one of the youngest and most swiftly growing populations in the world, with about half of the people aged 15 years and below, UNFPA representative, Janet Jackson, says will not achieve socio-economic revolution and realise its aspirations to become a middle-income country in a shorter period of time if it does not address the current high fertility which is driving the high population growth rate that is outpacing the pace of economic development as well as resource utilization speeding up the impacts of climate change. The Department of economic and social affairs, New York, predicts that the country will inevitably push to the top ten most populated countries by 2100, following its current 3.1% growth rate.

The manifestations of the anticipated predicaments are clear messages that a tradeoff between environment and productivity is necessary the world of unlimited human wants and limited resources, for progress.

For years, economists have argued that Malthus’s theory overlooked technological advancement expected to allow human beings to keep ahead of the population curve advancing arguments that food production can indeed boost because production depends not only on land but also on technology…And that humanity cannot therefore be tormented by changes in food security risks, however, the current trend shows that the trickling wealth hesitates not its direction in the unleveled playground.

The ever-increasing globalization that ensures the world share on the global grapevine and cake has an equal backfire effect, poisoning all living things in the world-pollution due rising need for global outputs, with limited efforts to retard climate change, the sturdy agenda for which the much anticipated United Nations Framework Convention Conference of Parties (UNFCCC COP 21) in December 2015, in France erects.

Notwithstanding that, however, low developing countries and the most vulnerable to wealth-health dilemma are bound to less cope with the double fears engineered by the skyrocketing populations and the speeding climate change, a nightmare enough worth awakening both developed and developing countries to exorcise the ‘ghosts’ of the fallen pundit from haunting the populations.

BOAZ OPIO

Kampala Uganda

Email: [email protected]

Tel: +256784947523