Albino Prada
The population engaged in food activities (here I will handle the rural population estimated by World Bank statistics) has registered a spectacular decline on a global scale between the years 1960 and 2022: going from 66% to 43% of the total population. A decline that in Spain meant going from 43% in 1960 to 19% in 2022. In both cases it is twenty percentage points compared to the initial level, which for Spain translates into falling by half. This is true in both cases, the increase in agricultural production during those sixty years cannot be understood except with a substitution of human and animal forces for machinery and fossil fuels. A metamorphosis accelerated by the logic of capital and finance applied to food markets.
Thus it is understood that the indicators of Farm Equipment (tractors per 100 km2 of arable land) doubled on a global scale (from 100 to 200), while in Spain we have already reached no less than 831. Although in this indicator the World Bank does not weight tractor units by their power, it is obvious that the Hydrocarbon consumption skyrocketed with such intensity and, as a result, the environmental impacts derived from their use (both local and global). The World Bank also offers increasing data on fertilizer consumption (kg per cultivated hectare, see here) that on many occasions also lead to the consumption of hydrocarbons.
For large key economies – on a global scale – I summarize the previous data on the mutation of human work into mechanical power and fertilizers associated with this metamorphosis of the rural world in a box below.
Source: own elaboration with data from the World Bank
Among the major world economies, the US and the European Union already started from a rural population below 50% of the total in 1960, reducing their weight1 to around 20% in 2020, but we can see the counterpart of this saving in human labor in a mechanization index that, if it already doubled the world average in 1960, will triple it in 2022 in the EU. Something similar happens with the use of fertilizers.2.
We are faced with two backrooms or hidden faces that allow, with a much lower share of the rural population, to expand the scale of food production. For its part, China, and especially India, reveal themselves to us as two gigantic societies in which we see that the high share of the rural population (both in 1960 and in 2022 compared to the world average) still coexists with less agricultural mechanization.
The data from energy consumption (tonnes of oil equivalent -TEP- per capita) on a global scale translate this mutation and agricultural mechanization – with the participation of many other industrial and manufacturing activities – with an increase from 1.3 TOE to 1.9 TOE. in those sixty years.
Source: own elaboration with data from the World Bank
But, again, the low share of the rural population in the United States or the European Union both in 1960 and, even more so, in 2022 compared to the world average is only possible with energy consumption (in TEP per inhabitant) well above of the average (in the US it is triple) and, therefore, with polluting emissions that during those sixty years will explain our current problems of climate collapse. An energetic backroom of our capitalist food miracle (for decades and in a privileged part of the world) that makes it clearly unsustainable.
China and, above all, India show us that avoiding this hydrocarbon energy bulimia (and its associated climate collapse) is only possible in a rural world and with a food model where direct human labor and plant proteins are more determinants than petroleum derivatives and livestock orientations. Because if China and India were to match our miraculous food model, the global energy requirements – and their resulting environmental consequences – would be enormous.
At this point it is worth taking note that between the years 1975-2021 (in just over forty years) the total world population went from 3,500 to 7,800 million inhabitants. Which means that it doubled in just forty years, according to the rate of doubling that Malthus considered.3 in the now distant year of 1793. Something that in itself disqualifies Colin Clark who in 1975 categorically stated4: “Malthus was wrong in all his statements.”.
Another thing is whether such a demographic explosion may or may not be classified as overpopulation in relation to the agricultural and energy resources of the planet. At the moment we do know two things: that this explosion coexists with growing undernourished human groups on the one hand and, on the other (as we have seen here), with unsustainable environmental impacts associated with the nutritional bulimia of the most privileged part of humanity. Impacts that, to further shame, are already causing millions of climate refugees in societies that had little or nothing to do with such a food model.
1 Between 1913 and 1950 Colin Clark estimated that in the United States agricultural labor had gone from 30% to barely 10%, although at the same time the agricultural product per hour of labor would have tripled (on p. 99, 289 and 532 from his “The conditions of economic progress“, I quote from the edition of Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 1980)
2 In the aforementioned work, Colin Clark (p. 297) between 1934 and 1951 already recorded that fertilizer consumption in the United States (per employee and year) had quadrupled.
3 T.R. Malthus (1793:60), “First essay on population I quote from the edition of Alianza Editorial, Barcelona, 1993
4 Colin Clark (1975: 94), “The myth of overpopulation“, Monte Ávila, Caracas
Sin Permiso Contributor. Doctor in Economic Sciences from the University of Santiago de Compostela, professor of Applied Economics at the University of Vigo, he was a member of the Galician Statistics Council, the Economic and Social Council of Galicia and the Galician Culture Council. He currently collaborates, in addition to Sin Permiso, in media such as Tempos Novos, Luzes or Nós Diario. He is a member of ECOBAS and the Scientific Council of Attac Spain. Fountain:
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