Turning To Malthusian Predictions on Population and Environment Nexus: Testimonies from Ethiopian Food Crop Production

Humans have sought to understand the relationship between population dynamics and the environment since the earliest times. However, the relationship between rapid population growth and food production capacity of our earth has been a matter of controversies with varied interpretations in development thinking for a long time and would continue so in the future. Increasing population trends have fueled the debate that was began when Malthus expressed his concern about the ability of the finite resources of the earth to feed an exponentially growing population. The debate has become warm when Boserupians took a different position. This paper is crucial in providing theoretical discourses of both Multhusians and Boserupians with empirical evidences supporting the respective positions. Most importantly, the paper tried to show whether the current population growth and agricultural production are consistent with either Malthusians ’distrustful predictions or Boserupians ’optimistic aspirations by taking empirical evidences from Ethiopian population growth and food crop production. The result indicates that population is steadily increasing in the last century, while the agricultural production showed considerable fluctuations in the period. Consequently, there is considerable gap between food demand and total annual crop production although there is an increase in total production since 2004/05. Situations related to population growth and agricultural production mostly corresponds with the Malthusian and Neo-Malthusian arguments. However, in the Malthusian progression, food supply was much higher than food demand of the population in the early years. As time went on, the food demand rapidly outpaced food production. In the Ethiopian case, food demand has already outpaced food production throughout the period considered by this study. Some evidences indicate that 40 years ago Ethiopia had exported about 90, 000 tons of grain to neighboring countries of North Africa and Middle-East. Therefore, had the data been available for the earliest years, the model illustration for this study would have been similar to that of Malthus‘s progression. Recent increase in production is claimed to expansion of agricultural lands with partial application of new technology extension packages. Forecasting the problems and formulating appropriate policies will help to limit population growth and enhance agricultural production in particular and fast development of the nation‘s economy in general.