228 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
of living. People in less developed countries will continue to seek more land to raise the
crops needed to feed themselves unless major increases in food production per hectare occur.
Developed countries may have to choose between helping the less developed countries while
maintaining their friendship, or isolating themselves from the problems of the less developed
nations.
Even if the industrialized countries continue to get a disproportionate share of the
world’s resources, the amount of resource per person will decline as population rises. It
seems that, as world population increases, the less developed areas will maintain their low
standard of living.
Table 7.3: Twelve most populous countries in 2025 (population in millions)S.No. Country 1950 1992 2025- China 554.8 1,165.8 1,590.8
- India 357.6 882.8 1,383.1
- United States 152.3 255.6 295.5
- Indonesia 49.5 184.5 285.9
- Pakistan 79.5 121.7 281.4
- Brazil 39.5 150.8 237.2
- Nigeria 53.4 90.1 216.2
- Bangladesh 32.9 114.4 211.6
- Russia 41.8 149.3 170.7
- Iran 16.9 59.7 159.2
- Mexico 28.0 87.7 143.3
- Japan 83.6 124.4 124.1
Source: Data from the Population Reference Bureau, Inc., 1993.
Environmental Implications of Food Production
The human population can increase only at the expense of the populations of other
animals and plants. Each ecosystem has a finite carrying capacity and, therefore, has a
maximum biomass that can exist within that ecosystem. There can be shifts within ecosystems
to allow an increase in the population of one species, but this always adversely affects
certain other populations because they are competing’ for the same basic resources. When
the population of farmers increased in the prairie regions of North America, the population
of buffalo declined.
When humans need food, they turn to agricultural practices and convert natural
ecosystems to artificially maintained agricultural ecosystems. Mismanaged agricultural
resources are often irreversibly destroyed. In most cases, if the plants were fed to animals,
many people would starve to death. In contrast, in most of the developed world, meat and
other animal protein sources are important parts of the diet. Many suffer from over nutrition
(they eat too much); they are “malnourished” in a different sense. The ecological impact of
one person eating at the carnivore level is about ten times that of a person feeding at the