Ahead of the first United Nations environmental summit in Stockholm in 1972, a group of scientists prepared The Limits to Growth report for the Club of Rome. It showed planet Earth’s finite natural resources cannot support ever-growing human consumption.

Limits used integrated computer modelling to investigate twelve planetary scenarios of economic growth and their long-term consequences for the environment and natural resources.

Hezri A Adnan

Within limits
Limits considered population, food production, industrialization, pollution and non-renewable resource use trends from 1900 to 2100.

It conceded, “Any human activity that does not require a large flow of irreplaceable resources or produce severe environmental degradation might continue to grow indefinitely”.

Most projected scenarios saw growth ending this century. Ominously, Limits warned of likely ecological and societal collapses if anthropocene challenges are not adequately addressed soon enough.

Failure would mean less food and energy supplies, more pollution, and lower living standards, even triggering population collapses.

But Limits was never meant to be a definitive forecast, and should not be judged as such. Instead, it sought to highlight major resource threats due to growing human consumption.

Off-limits?
Gaya Herrington showed three of Limits’ four major scenarios anticipated subsequent trends. Two lead to major collapses by mid-century. She concluded, “humanity is on a path to having limits to growth imposed on itself rather than consciously choosing its own.”

Limits stressed the urgent need for radical transformation to achieve ‘sustainable development’. The ‘international community’ embraced this, in principle, at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, two decades after Stockholm.

With accelerating resource depletion – as current demographic, industrial, pollution and food trends continue – the planet’s growth limits will be reached within the next half-century. The Earth’s ‘carrying capacity’ is unavoidably shrinking.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

The report maintained it was still possible to create conditions for a much more sustainable future while meeting everyone’s basic material needs. As Gandhi said, “The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.”

No other environmental work then, or since, has so directly challenged mainstream growth beliefs. Unsurprisingly, it attracted strong opposition.

The 1972 study was long dismissed by many as neo-Malthusian prophecy of doom, underestimating the potential for human adaptation through technological progress.

Many other criticisms have been made. Limits was faulted for focusing too much on resource limits, but not enough on environmental damage. Economists have criticized it for not explicitly incorporating either prices or socioeconomic dynamics.

Beyond limits
In Beyond the Limits (1993), the two Meadows and Randers argued that resource use had exceeded the world environment’s carrying capacity.

Using climate change data, they highlighted the likelihood of collapse, going well beyond the earlier focus on the rapid carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere.

In another sequel, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (2004), they elaborated their original argument with new data, calling for stronger actions to avoid unsustainable excess.

Dennis Meadows stresses other studies confirm and elaborate Limits’ concerns. Various growth trends peak around 2020, suggesting likely slowdowns thereafter, culminating in environmental and economic collapse by mid-century.

Limits’ early 1970s’ computer modelling has been overtaken by enhanced simulation capabilities. Many earlier recommendations need revision, but the main fears have been reaffirmed.

Limitless?
Two key Limits’ arguments deserve reiteration. First, its critique of technological hubris, which has deterred more serious concern about the threats, thus undermining environmental, economic and other mitigation efforts.

As Limits argued, environmental crisis and collapse are due to socioeconomic, technological and environmental transformations for wealth accumulation, now threatening Earth’s resources and ecology.

Conventional profit-prioritizing systems and technologies have changed, e.g., with resource efficiency innovation. Such efforts help postpone the inevitable, but cannot extend the planet’s natural limits.

Of course, innovative new technologies are needed to address old and new problems. But these have to be deployed to enhance sustainability, rather than profit.

The Limits’ critique is ultimately of ‘growth’ in contemporary society. It goes much further than recent debates over measuring growth, recognizing greater output typically involves more resource use.

While not necessarily increasing exponentially, growth cannot be unlimited, due to its inherent resource and ecological requirements, even with materials-saving innovations.

This Earth for all
Thankfully, Limits’ fourth scenario – involving significant, but realistic transformations – allows widespread increases in human wellbeing within the planet’s resource boundaries.

This scenario has inspired Earth for All – the Club of Rome’s Transformational Economics Commission’s 2022 report – which more than updates Limits after half a century. Its subtitle – A Survival Guide for Humanity – emphasizes the threat’s urgency, scale and scope.

It argues that ensuring the wellbeing of all is still possible, but requires urgent fundamental changes. Major efforts are needed to eradicate poverty, reduce inequality, empower women, and transform food and energy systems.

The comprehensive report proposes specific strategies. All five need significant investments, including much public spending. This requires more progressive taxation, especially of wealth. Curbing wasteful consumption is also necessary.

More liquidity – e.g., via ‘monetary financing’ and International Monetary Fund issue of more special drawing rights – and addressing government debt burdens can ensure more policy and fiscal space for developing country governments.

Many food systems are broken. They currently involve unhealthy and unsustainable production and consumption, generating much waste. All this must be reformed accordingly.

Market regulation for the public good is crucial. Better regulation – of markets for goods (especially food) and services, even technology, finance, labour and land – is necessary to better conserve the environment.

Limited choice
The report includes a modeling exercise for two scenarios. ‘Too Little Too Late’ is the current trajectory, offering too few needed changes.

With growing inequalities, social trust erodes, as people and countries compete more intensely for resources. Without sufficient ‘collective action’, planetary boundaries will be crossed. For the most vulnerable, prospects are grim.

In the second ‘Giant Leap’ scenario, the five needed shifts are achieved, improving wellbeing all around. Everybody can live with dignity, health and security. Ecological deterioration is sufficiently reversed, as institutions serve the common good and ensure justice for all.

Broad-based sustainable gains in wellbeing need pro-active governance reshaping societies and markets. This needs sufficient political will and popular pressure for needed reforms.

But as the world moves ever closer to many limits, the scenario looming is terrifying: ecosystem destruction, gross inequalities and vulnerabilities, social and political tensions.

While regimes tend to bend to public pressure, if only to survive, existing discourses and mobilization are not conducive to generating the popular political demands needed for the changes.

Adnan A Hezri is an environmental policy analyst and Fellow of the Academy of Sciences, Malaysia. He is author of The Sustainability Shift: Reshaping Malaysia’s Future.

IPS UN Bureau

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By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
ROME, Sep 19 2014 (IPS)

At the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS), heads of government and the international community committed themselves to reducing the number of hungry people in the world by half. Five years later, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) lowered this level of ambition by only seeking to halve the proportion of the hungry.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

The latest State of World Food Insecurity (SOFI) report for 2014 by the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization, World Food Programme and International Fund for Agricultural Development estimates that 805 million people – one in nine people worldwide – remain chronically hungry: 789 million are in developing countries where this share has declined from 23.4 to 13.5 percent.

By 2012-14, 63 developing countries had reached the MDG target – to either reduce the share of hungry people by half, or keep the share of the hungry under five percent – with several more on track to do so by 2015.

Some 25 countries have made more impressive progress, achieving the more ambitious WFS target of halving the number of hungry. However, the number of hungry people in the world has only declined by one-fifth from the billion estimated for 1990-92.

Major effort needed

The proportion of undernourished people – those regularly not able to consume enough food for an active and healthy life – has decreased from 23.4 percent in 1990–1992 to 13.5 percent in 2012–2014. This is significant because a large and growing number of countries show that achieving and sustaining rapid progress in reducing hunger is feasible.

However, the MDG target of halving the chronically undernourished people’s share of the world’s population by the end of 2015 cannot be met at the current rate of progress. Meeting the target is still possible, however, with a sufficient, immediate additional effort to accelerate progress, especially in countries which have showed little progress so far.

Progress uneven

“By 2012-14, 63 developing countries had reached the MDG target – to either reduce the share of hungry people by half, or keep the share of the hungry under five percent – with several more on track to do so by 2015”
Overall progress has been highly uneven. All but 14 million of the world’s hungry live in developing countries. Some countries and regions have seen only slow progress in reducing hunger, while the absolute number of hungry has even increased in several cases. While sub-Saharan Africa has the highest share of the chronically hungry, almost one in four, South Asia has the highest number, with over half a billion undernourished.

Marked differences in reducing undernourishment have persisted across regions. There have been significant reductions in both the estimated share and number of undernourished in most countries in Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean – where the MDG target of halving the hunger rate has been reached, or nearly reached.

West Asia has seen a rise in the share of the hungry compared with 1990–1992, while progress in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Oceania has not been sufficient to meet the MDG hunger target by 2015.

In several countries, underweight and stunting persist in children, even when undernourishment is low and most people have access to sufficient food. Such nutrition failures are due not only to insufficient food access, but also to poor health conditions and the high incidence of diseases such as diarrhoea, malaria, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.

Food security and nutrition

Hunger is conventionally measured in terms of the prevalence of undernourishment, the FAO estimate of chronic inadequacy of dietary energy. While such a measure is useful for estimating hunger, it needs to be complemented by more measures to capture other dimensions of food security.

SOFI’s suite of indicators measures different dimensions of food security. Information thus generated can guide priority policy actions. For example, in countries where low undernourishment coexists with high malnutrition, specially-designed nutrition-enhancing interventions may be crucial to address early childhood stunting.

With the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals likely to seek to overcome hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition, FAO has recently developed and tested a new Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) in over 150 countries to measure the severity of reported food insecurity.

Lessons

Improvements in nutrition generally require complementary policies, including improving health conditions, hygiene, water supply and education. More sophisticated and creative approaches to coordination and governance are needed, with more, and more effective, resources to end hunger and malnutrition in our lifetimes.

With high levels of deprivation, unemployment and underemployment continuing and likely to prevail in the world in the foreseeable future, poverty and hunger are unlikely to be overcome without universalising social protection to all in need, but also to provide the means for future livelihoods and resilience.

The forthcoming Second International Conference of Nutrition in Rome on November 19-21 is expected to articulate coherent bases for accelerated progress to overcome undernutrition as well as for greater international cooperation and support for enhanced and more integrated national nutrition efforts.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

Eight decades ago, during the Great Depression, newly elected U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced the New Deal consisting of a number of mutually supporting initiatives of which the most prominent were:

• A public works programme financed by deficit financing
• A new social contract to improve living standards for working families, and
• Regulation of financial markets to protect assets of ordinary citizens and to channel financial resources into productive investment.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram. UN Photo/Mark Garten

Today, we are in the midst of another protracted economic slowdown. The world needs a New Deal, which is both global and sustainable. The current system and crisis are global in nature, requiring a corresponding response.

It also has to be sustainable. We are in the midst of economic, social and environmental crises, with global warming looming larger. We are also threatened by pollution, natural resource degradation, loss of forests and biodiversity, as well as socio-political instability due to growing disparities.

The Global Green New Deal (GGND) should move all to a different, sustainable developmental pathway – in the spirit of Rio. The GGND should have ingredients similar to the original New Deal – namely public works employment, social protection, and increased productive investments for output and job recovery.

After half a decade of economic contraction and stagnation, with even developing countries slowing down recently, it is urgent to prioritise economic recovery measures, and not to expect recovery at the expense of others. The GGND should be part of a broader counter-cyclical response with three main elements.

First, national stimulus packages in developed and developing countries aiming to revive and green national economies. Second, international policy coordination to ensure that developed countries’ stimulus packages generate jobs in the North and strong developmental impacts in developing countries. Third, greater financial support for developing countries, as with the Marshall Plan.

Such investments should lead to the revival of growth that is both ecologically sustainable and socially inclusive. Support for agriculture should be an important feature of national stimulus packages in developing countries, with special attention to promote climate smart and ecologically sustainable agriculture.

After a half century of decline, except in the mid-1970s, real agricultural commodity prices were rising from about a decade ago. The recent price trend reflects yield growth slowing in recent years, while demand continued to grow rapidly. Rising incomes have increased food demand for humans and animal husbandry, while demand for biofuels has expanded rapidly in the last decade.

Higher and more volatile food prices threaten the food security and nutrition of billions. Prices were increasingly volatile for over half a decade, with successively higher peaks in 2007-08, 2010-11 and 2012. “Financialisation” – linking markets for commodity derivatives with other financial assets – also worsened price volatility.

Coordination and collaboration

Creating jobs in developed countries with strong developmental impacts should be part of developed countries’ stimulus packages. Over the longer term, reforms of the international financial and multilateral trading systems should support sustainable development.

Until recently, official development assistance for agricultural development in developing countries had declined for decades. Meanwhile, rich countries have continued to subsidise and protect their farmers, undermining food production in developing countries.

Food security should be treated as a global public good since the political and social consequences of food insecurity has global ramifications. Hence, there should be a multilateral response to ensure food security.

The Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s – with considerable government and international not-for-profit support – greatly increased crop yields and food production, reducing hunger, starvation and poverty. However, efforts for wheat, maize and rice were not extended to other food crops.

We need a second generation Green Revolution to promote sustainable, including ‘climate smart’ agriculture, especially for water-stressed, arid areas. Public investments – with international assistance – must provide the incentives and other support needed to increase family farm investments.

Many other complementary interventions are urgently needed. Food security cannot be achieved without much better social protection. Resources are needed to strengthen social protection for billions in developing countries to ensure decent employment, food security and more sustainable development.

But sustainable social protection requires major improvements in public finances. While revenue generation requires greater national incomes, tax collection can still be greatly enhanced through improved international cooperation on tax and other international financial matters.

Clearly, the agenda for a Global Green New Deal requires not only bold new national developmental initiatives, but also far better and more equitable multilateral cooperation offered by a strong revival of the inclusive multilateralism of the United Nations system.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram is Assistant Director General and Coordinator for Economic and Social Development at the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations.

The growing consensus, momentum and commitment to eradicate world hunger may seem overly ambitious in view of the slow progress in reducing the number of hungry people in the world in recent decades.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Assistant-Director General for Economic and Social Development, FAO. Credit: ©FAO/Alessia Pierdomenico

After all, declining food prices in the second half of the 20th century, thanks to increasing production, were not enough to eliminate poverty and hunger in the world.

In the 1960s and 1970s, many governments invested a great deal to increase agricultural, especially food production. In the second half of the 20th century, agricultural productivity rose rapidly. But intense price competition reduced food prices, with consumers benefitting more from productivity gains – thus helping to reduce poverty.

Meanwhile, transnational agri-business has profited greatly from innovations in agricultural production, credit, processing and marketing value chains in recent decades.

More recently, food prices have gone up again as productivity and production have risen more slowly than before, partly due to reduced public investments in recent decades, slower productivity increases in the last decade, as well as recent increases in demand for food crops.

Recent food price increases have been associated not only with significant supply and demand changes, but also with biofuel mandates and subsidies as well as much greater commodity speculation.

In the unlikely event that food prices go down again after the recent increases since 2006, food would become more affordable, while reducing farmer incomes and the incentive to produce more food, which could eventually cause food prices to rise once again.

Fiscal redistribution?

Poor countries are doubly handicapped by their limited tax capacities, resulting in low tax rates on low incomes. While there is little excessive taxation of small farmers these days, there are also modest urban-to-rural resource transfers through the fiscal system or other transfer arrangements.

Government spending to raise agricultural output, productivity and incomes has also been shaped by political considerations, especially the desire to secure rural political support. However, with a few notable exceptions, government spending on agriculture is rarely biased to the poor.

While agricultural taxation is generally proportional to land owned or to output, such public expenditure tends to benefit the relatively better-off in agriculture with much rural spending benefiting plantations and larger farmers more than smaller smallholders, tenants or sharecroppers.

This is generally also true of improved rural infrastructure or social services, including health and schooling, as well as agricultural support in the form of subsidised fertiliser or other inputs – typically distributed according to the amount of land owned. Nevertheless, the poor may have benefited in so far as the rising tide of greater output lifts all boats.

Social protection necessary

There is currently enough food being produced to feed everyone in the world. The problem is that most of the hungry cannot afford to adequately feed themselves, lacking the means to do so. Hence, the only way to reduce hunger in the near term is to enhance the incomes of the poor.

More than three quarters of the over 1.2 billion “dollar a day” poor in the world live in the countryside. Reducing poverty will therefore require significantly higher rural incomes, especially for the poor. Since most rural incomes are related to agriculture, raising agricultural productivity can help raise rural incomes all round.

However, to realise the commitment to “no one left behind” in the face of the likely protracted global economic slowdown as well as higher underemployment and unemployment for years to come, the only way to eradicate hunger soon will be by establishing the social protection floor. The 2011 U.N. General Assembly endorsement of the recommendation to establish a social protection floor implies that the means to do so are available.

Historically, social protection has developed in relation to urban formal sector wage employment. But in developing countries, rural social provisioning has often involved “workfare” rather than state welfare as with India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.

FAO’s distinctive approach to cash transfers — which accelerates the transition ‘from protection to production’ — helps ensure more sustainable means to overcome hunger and poverty, thus pointing the way forward to achieving the Zero Hunger Challenge.

*Jomo Kwame Sundaram is Assistant Director-General, Economic and Social Development Department, UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome.