David Malakoff, a staff writer for Science Magazine and a former science editor and correspondent for NPR, thinks outside the box in a Science article titled “Are More People Necessarily a Problem?” (29 July, 2011, Vol. 333). Malakoff cites the transition of Machaco, Kenya, from poverty to prosperity, despite or even because of a dramatic increase in population over the last 75 years and counters Malthusian pessimism with the views of Ester Boserup who argued that population growth could intensify new technology and more labor, resulting in more productivity and leading to more sustainability. To conclude his article, Malakoff cites the research of Professor David López-Carr who found that areas in South and Central America with relatively low population densities can have much higher deforestation rates than those with higher densities.
Malakoff points out that Machaco was once considered “a parching desert of rocks, stones, and sand” with less than .25 million inhabitants, but that 1.5 million people live there now and are thriving, due to social and economic changes that have allowed them to “regreen once-barren hillsides, reinvigorate failing soils, reduce birth rates, and increase crop production and incomes,” supporting the counter-intuitive idea “that rapid human population growth, even in some of Earth’s driest, most challenging environments, is not necessarily a recipe for disaster—and can even bring benefits.” To bolster his argument, Malakoff cites the controversial work of Ester Boserup, a Danish economist whose most notable work was The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure. “This book presents a ‘dynamic analysis embracing all types of primitive agriculture.’ The work undoes the assumption dating back to Malthus’s time (and still held in many quarters) that agricultural methods determine population (via food supply). Instead, Boserup argued that population determines agricultural methods. A major point of her book is that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’” (source).
Malakoff concludes by referring to David López-Carr’s research: “In the forest frontiers of South and Central America, researchers have found both Malthusian and Boserupian forces at work in deforestation. Depending on local circumstances, families faced with growing population densities have responded by both migrating to clear new farms in forested areas, the agricultural ‘extensification’ predicted by Malthus, and intensified land use à la Boserup, a team led by David Carr of the University of California, Santa Barbara, reported in a 2009 study in Population and Development. Paradoxically, the result is that areas with relatively low population densities can have much higher deforestation rates than those with higher densities. What’s needed now, Carr’s team argues, are careful, Machakos-like studies that ‘tease out the effects’ of changing demographics in remote forest frontiers. Other research has found that a farmer’s age, gender, and land tenure, for instance, can affect his or her willingness to put capital and labor into the land, with older male farmers sometimes deciding to forgo improvements. Understanding such nuances could help forge better forest-protection and land-use policies, experts say. And Carr and his colleagues predict that new studies ‘will surely test’ what they say has become a Boserupian ‘orthodoxy of population density leading to agricultural intensification.’ If so, it will open a new chapter in the long and rich debate over how population growth affects the planet, and when and where more people are a problem.”
