posts: 26711

{
    "id": "wp-26711",
    "slug": "untitled-reusable-block-96",
    "content": {
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                "text": [
                    {
                        "text": "Modern Malthusians",
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                                "text": "It\u2019s no good blaming climate change or food shortages or political corruption. Sorry to be neo-Malthusian about it, but ",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            },
                            {
                                "children": [
                                    {
                                        "text": "continuing population growth in this region makes periodic famine unavoidable",
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                                    }
                                ],
                                "spanType": "span-bold"
                            },
                            {
                                "text": "... Many of the children saved by the money raised over the next few weeks will inevitably be back again in similar feeding\u00a0centres\u00a0with their own\u00a0children in a few years time.",
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                        "text": "- Blog entry from British environmentalist, Sir Jonathan Porrit, 11/07/2011{ref}",
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                        "url": "http://www.jonathonporritt.com/blog/who-would-have-thought-it-population-growth-and-famine-would-appear-be-linked",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "Who would have thought it? Population growth and famine would appear to be linked!",
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                            }
                        ],
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                    },
                    {
                        "text": " Blog entry from www.jonathanporritt.com, dated\u00a011/07/2011. Accessed 19 Jan 2018. Emphasis added{/ref}",
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                        "text": "It is not uncommon to see arguments along the lines of this quote from\u00a0Sir Jonathan Porritt, claiming that famines are ultimately caused by overpopulation.\u00a0Porritt \u2013 former director of 'Friends of the Earth' and also former chairman of the UK Government\u2019s Sustainable Development Commission\u00a0\u2013 was talking about the 2011 famine\u00a0in Somalia that went on to kill roughly 250,000 people.{ref}The excess mortality estimate is taken from the ",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "url": "https://sites.tufts.edu/wpf/famine/",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "World Peace Foundation",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
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                    },
                    {
                        "text": " list of famines.{/ref} He seems certain that the rapid population growth witnessed in East Africa had made famine there \u2018unavoidable\u2019.",
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                        "text": "There is something compelling about this logic: a finite land area, with a limited \u2018carrying capacity\u2019, cannot continue to feed a growing population indefinitely.\u00a0From such a perspective, the provision of humanitarian aid to famine-afflicted countries, however well intended, represents only a temporary fix. In this view it fails to address the fundamental issue: there simply being too many mouths to feed.",
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                        "text": "As mentioned in the quote, this suggestion is commonly associated with the name of Thomas Robert Malthus, the English political economist writing at the turn of the nineteenth century. Malthus is famous for the assertion that in the absence of \u2018preventative checks\u2019 to reduce ",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "birth",
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                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-italic"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": " rates, the natural tendency for populations to increase \u2013 being \u2018so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man\u2019 \u2013 ultimately results in \u2018positive checks\u2019 that increase the ",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "death",
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                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-italic"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": " rate. If all else fails to curb population, ",
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                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "\u2018gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world'",
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                            }
                        ],
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                    },
                    {
                        "text": ".{ref}Malthus T.R. 1798.\u00a0",
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                    },
                    {
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "An Essay on the Principle of Population",
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                            }
                        ],
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                    },
                    {
                        "text": ". Chapter VII, p 44.{/ref}",
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                        "text": "But does the evidence support this idea? Here we look into the relationship between population growth and famine, as well as that between population growth and hunger more generally.",
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                "text": [
                    {
                        "text": "Does population growth cause famine?",
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                "level": 2,
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                        "text": "This chart compares the number of famine deaths per decade \u2013 based on our ",
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                    {
                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/famines#the-our-world-in-data-dataset-of-famines",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "famine dataset",
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                        ],
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                    {
                        "text": " \u2013 with the world population over the same period.",
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                        "text": "Looking at the world as whole, it is very difficult to square Malthus' hypothesis with the simple but stark fact that, despite the world's population increasing from less than one billion in 1800 to more than seven billion today, the number of people dying due to famine in recent decades is only a tiny fraction of that in previous eras.",
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                "text": [
                    {
                        "text": "Famine victims by decade and world population, 1860s-2010s",
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                ],
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                "level": 5,
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                "alt": "",
                "size": "wide",
                "type": "image",
                "filename": "Famine-victims-and-world-population-since-1860.png",
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                        "text": "We might naturally think that the explanation for this trend lies in increasing agricultural production. Indeed,\u00a0",
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                    {
                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/food-per-person",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "food supply per person",
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                            }
                        ],
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                        "text": "\u00a0has consistently increased in recent decades, as we can see in the interactive line chart shown. The large increase in global population being met with an even greater increase in food supply (largely due to increases in ",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/yields-and-land-use-in-agriculture",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "yields per hectare",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
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                    },
                    {
                        "text": ").",
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                "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-supply?tab=chart&country=Asia~Europe~North+America~South+America~Africa",
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                        "text": "However, looking at the issue in this way is too simple. As we discuss in our entry on ",
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                    {
                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/famines",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "Famines",
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                        "text": ", insufficient aggregate food supply per person is just one factor that can bring about famine mortality. Contemporary famine scholarship tends to suggest that insufficient aggregate food supply is less important than one might think, and instead emphasises the role of public policy and violence: in most famines of the 20th and 21st centuries, conflict, political oppression, corruption, or gross economic mismanagement on the part of dictatorships or colonial regimes played a key role.{ref}See, for instance, de Waal, A. ",
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                    },
                    {
                        "url": "https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629817302871#!",
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                                "text": "The end of famine? Prospects for the elimination of mass starvation by political action",
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                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-link"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": ", ",
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                    },
                    {
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "Political Geography",
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                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-italic"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": ", 62:2008{/ref}",
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                        "text": " The same also applies for the most acutely food-insecure countries today.{ref}The threat of famine in Yemen, South Sudan and Nigeria are all the direct consequence of conflict, and the drought in Somalia arrives after decades of conflict and political instability. See ",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "url": "http://www.fews.net/",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "FEWS.net",
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                            }
                        ],
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                    },
                    {
                        "text": " for more details.{/ref}",
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                        "text": "It is also true of the 2011 famine in Somalia referred to above, in which food aid was greatly restricted, and in some cases diverted, by militant Islamist group al Shabaab\u00a0and other armed opposition groups in the country.{ref}Seal, A., & Bailey, R. (2013). The 2011 Famine in Somalia: lessons learnt from a failed response? ",
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                    {
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "Conflict and Health",
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                        "spanType": "span-italic"
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                    {
                        "text": ", ",
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                        "children": [
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                                "text": "7",
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                        "text": ", 22. http://doi.org/10.1186/1752-1505-7-22. As the authors note, this was in part due to concern on the part of humanitarian organisations that they would be contravening US government sanctions. Furthermore, both the US and the EU had significantly reduced humanitarian spending in the country in the run up to the famine.{/ref}",
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                        "text": "Famine scholar Stephen Devereux of the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, summarizes the trajectory of famines over the 20th century as follows:\u00a0",
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                    {
                        "children": [
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                                "text": "\"The achievement of a global capacity to guarantee food security was accompanied by a simultaneous expansion of the capacity of governments to inflict lethal policies, including genocidal policies often involving the extraction of food from the poor and denial of food to the starving.\"",
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                        "text": "{ref}Devereux, S.",
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                    },
                    {
                        "url": "https://www.ids.ac.uk/files/dmfile/wp105.pdf",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "children": [
                                    {
                                        "text": " Famine in the Twentieth Century. ",
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                                    }
                                ],
                                "spanType": "span-italic"
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                        ],
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                        "text": "IDS working paper 105, 2000.{/ref}",
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                        "text": "Thus, all in all, the recent history of famine mortality does not fit the Malthusian narrative particularly well. Firstly, contrary to what Malthus predicted for rapidly increasing populations, food supply per person has\u00a0\u2013 in all regions \u2013 increased as populations have grown. Secondly, famines have not become more, but less frequent. Thirdly, in the modern era the occurrence of major famine mortality, and its prevention, is something for which politics and policy seem the more salient triggers.",
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                "text": [
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                        "text": "Does population growth increase hunger?",
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                "type": "heading",
                "level": 2,
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                "text": [
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                        "text": "Global picture",
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                        "text": "Famines tend to be thought of as acute periods of crisis, and are in that sense to be distinguished from more chronic manifestations of ",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment",
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                                "text": "hunger",
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                        "text": " that may in some places represent 'normal' circumstances, despite being responsible for large numbers of deaths.{ref}de Waal, 2018 defines famine as '",
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                        "children": [
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                                "text": "a crisis of mass hunger that causes elevated mortality over a specific period of time'",
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                        "text": ". Note that the official ",
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                    {
                        "url": "http://www.ipcinfo.org/",
                        "children": [
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                                "text": "IPC classification system",
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                        "text": " used by the UN for famine declarations just looks at total (undernourishment-related) death rates in absolute terms, rather than relative to any non-crisis reference level. This contrasts somewhat to the typical ex-ante famine assessment in which ",
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                        "children": [
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                                "text": "excess",
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                        "text": " mortality is estimated by factoring out the counterfactual death rate\u00a0\u2013 however high.{/ref}",
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                        "text": "Given the typically political nature of outbreaks of such famine crises, it may make more sense to look for an effect of population growth on the longer-term trends of hunger and malnutrition.",
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                        "text": "But again, at the global level, we know that population growth has been accompanied by a downward trend in hunger. As we discuss in our entry on ",
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                    {
                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "Hunger and Undernourishment",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-link"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": ", in recent decades the ",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prevalence-of-undernourishment?tab=chart",
                        "children": [
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                                "text": "proportion of undernourished people in the world has fallen",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-link"
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                    {
                        "text": ", and, although more muted, this fall is also seen in the ",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-population-defined-as-undernourished",
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                                "text": "absolute number",
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                        ],
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                        "text": ". The number of people dying globally due to insufficient calorie or protein intake has also fallen, from almost half a million in the 1990s to roughly 300,000 in the most recent data,\u00a0as shown in the visualisation.",
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                "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/malnutrition-deaths-by-age",
                "type": "chart",
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                "text": [
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                        "text": "Within countries",
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                                "text": "We can also look at the experiences of individual countries, rather than just at the global level. Do those countries with particularly high population growth rates find it harder to adequately feed its population?",
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                                "text": "In order to get some idea\u00a0about this, we can compare countries'\u00a0",
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                            },
                            {
                                "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment#the-global-hunger-index-ghi",
                                "children": [
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                                        "text": "Global Hunger Index",
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                                "text": "\u00a0(GHI) score with their population growth rates. GHI is a composite measure, out of 100, that combines four indicators: ",
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                            },
                            {
                                "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment",
                                "children": [
                                    {
                                        "text": "undernourishment",
                                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                                    }
                                ],
                                "spanType": "span-link"
                            },
                            {
                                "text": ", ",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            },
                            {
                                "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment#too-little-weight-for-height-wasting",
                                "children": [
                                    {
                                        "text": "child wasting",
                                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                                    }
                                ],
                                "spanType": "span-link"
                            },
                            {
                                "text": ", ",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            },
                            {
                                "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment#undernourishment-of-children",
                                "children": [
                                    {
                                        "text": "child stunting",
                                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
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                                ],
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                            {
                                "text": ", and ",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
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                            {
                                "url": "https://owid.cloud/child-mortality/",
                                "children": [
                                    {
                                        "text": "child mortality",
                                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
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                                "text": ".{ref}More information on these individual indicators, including their definitions, can be found on our entry on ",
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                            },
                            {
                                "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment",
                                "children": [
                                    {
                                        "text": "Hunger and Undernourishment",
                                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                                    }
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                            },
                            {
                                "text": ".{/ref}",
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                                "text": "The first scoring was conducted in 1992, and was then repeated every eight years with the most recent being in carried out in 2017. The score is based on data collected in the years leading up to the scoring year, and as such reflect the hunger levels in this period rather than solely capturing conditions in the year itself. All the countries for which there was GHI data available between 1992 and 2017 are shown in the three charts.{ref}Population data was taken from the World Bank for 1992 to 2016. Note that GHI is typically not collected for wealthy countries. Below a score of 5, GHI gets bottom coded as '<5'. Of the 95 countries for which we have data in both years, none of them began bottom coded but five moved into this range by 2017. In the analysis that follows we replaced these bottom-coded observations with a GHI of 2.5. However the key results are robust to omitting these countries altogether. As a robustness check, we also conducted the analysis on the prevalence of undernourishment separately (one of the four components of GHI). The key results remained unchanged.{/ref} Crucially, ",
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                                "children": [
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                                        "text": "this excludes a number of very food-insecure countries",
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                                "text": "\u00a0including the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and\u00a0Somalia, which have also seen high levels of population growth.{ref}These three countries would be situated in the top quarter of our sample in terms of population growth, with DRC and South Sudan roughly in the top decile.{/ref} This should be borne in mind when interpreting the following results.",
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                                "text": "Of the countries for which we do have GHI data, it is clear that those with higher levels of hunger have also tended to have had higher population growth over the last 25 years (first chart).{ref}Statistically significant at the 1% level, even when controlling for GDP per capita in 2016 (using World Bank PPP data){/ref}",
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                                "text": "It is important to see though that among the countries for which we have GHI scores in both 1992 and 2017, the level of hunger went down in all but one \u2013 Iraq (second chart). Over the same period population went up in almost every case. Moreover, those countries that experienced higher levels of population growth in fact saw a\u00a0",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            },
                            {
                                "children": [
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                                        "text": "bigger",
                                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
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                                ],
                                "spanType": "span-italic"
                            },
                            {
                                "text": "\u00a0drop in their GHI score over this period.{ref}This relationship is significant at the 1% level. The relationship is stronger (both in magnitude and significance) controlling for GDP per capita (using World Bank PPP data){/ref}",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
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                        "value": [
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                                "text": "The countries that saw high population growth over this period started with higher levels of hunger in 1992. So what we are seeing here is that countries are\u00a0",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            },
                            {
                                "children": [
                                    {
                                        "text": "converging ",
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                                    }
                                ],
                                "spanType": "span-italic"
                            },
                            {
                                "text": "towards lower levels of hunger: it fell quickest in countries with the highest levels of hunger (third chart).",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
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                        ],
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                    {
                        "type": "text",
                        "value": [
                            {
                                "text": "So whilst countries that experience hunger do tend to have high levels of population growth, the idea that population growth necessarily leads to\u00a0",
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                            },
                            {
                                "children": [
                                    {
                                        "text": "increased",
                                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                                    }
                                ],
                                "spanType": "span-italic"
                            },
                            {
                                "text": "\u00a0hunger is clearly mistaken: many countries with high population growth have recently managed to decrease levels of hunger substantially.",
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                            }
                        ],
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                ],
                "type": "sticky-right",
                "right": [
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-hunger-index-in-2017-vs-population-growth-1992-2015-un-population-division",
                        "type": "chart",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/change-global-hunger-index-pop-growth",
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            {
                "text": [
                    {
                        "text": "Population growth does not make famine inevitable",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    }
                ],
                "type": "heading",
                "level": 2,
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            },
            {
                "type": "text",
                "value": [
                    {
                        "text": "Environmental degradation, including climate change,\u00a0",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "url": "http://www.fao.org/3/a-i6030e.pdf",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "does pose a threat to food security",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-link"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": ", and the growth of human populations has undoubtedly exacerbated many environmental pressures. However, this represents only one aspect of the complex explanation of why so many people suffer and die from undernourishment today, despite their being adequate food available for consumption globally.{ref}World food supply per person is higher than the Average Dietary Energy Requirements of all countries. See our entry on ",
                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                    },
                    {
                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/food-per-person",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "Food per Person",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
                        "spanType": "span-link"
                    },
                    {
                        "text": " for more details.{/ref}",
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                    }
                ],
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            {
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                "value": [
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                        "text": "'Malthusian' explanations of famine and hunger thus fall short for the following reasons, the evidence for which we reviewed above:",
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                    }
                ],
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                "type": "list",
                "items": [
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                        "type": "text",
                        "value": [
                            {
                                "text": "Per capita food supply has increased as populations have grown, largely due to increasing yields.",
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                            }
                        ],
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                    },
                    {
                        "type": "text",
                        "value": [
                            {
                                "text": "Famine deaths have decreased, not increased, with population growth.",
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                            }
                        ],
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                    {
                        "type": "text",
                        "value": [
                            {
                                "text": "Food scarcity has played a smaller role in famines than suggested by the Malthusian narrative.\u00a0It ignores other factors like conflict, poverty, access to markets,\u00a0healthcare systems, and political institutions.",
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                            }
                        ],
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                    {
                        "type": "text",
                        "value": [
                            {
                                "text": "Population growth is high where hunger is high, but that does not mean that population growth makes hunger inevitable. On the contrary, we see that hunger has fallen fastest in countries with high population growth.",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            }
                        ],
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                        "text": "If we want to put an end to hunger, we need to understand the diverse causes that bring it about. Oversimplifications that mistakenly see hunger and famine as an inevitable consequence of population growth do not contribute to this end.",
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                    }
                ],
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        ],
        "type": "article",
        "title": "Does population growth lead to hunger and famine?",
        "authors": [
            null
        ],
        "dateline": "October 31, 2019",
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        "featured-image": ""
    },
    "createdAt": "2019-10-31T19:47:41.000Z",
    "published": false,
    "updatedAt": "2022-02-19T09:41:11.000Z",
    "revisionId": null,
    "publishedAt": "2019-10-31T19:47:26.000Z",
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