Whether it is news of natural disasters, man-made atrocities or economic upheaval, it’s hard to avoid feeling our world is heading for disaster.
But take heart. While only Dr Pangloss at his most upbeat could deny we’re going through hard times, we can expect that, over the coming decades, the doom-mongers will be wrong again.
The reason can be found at an international meeting being held at Adnec this week.
Abu Dhabi’s conference centre is hosting the Global Forum for Innovations in Agriculture.
It’s there that researchers will be unveiling the latest evidence that we humans are far smarter than the doomsters give us credit for.
The backdrop to the gathering is a stunning achievement that nay-sayers are rarely keen to talk about.
According to the latest figures from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the prevalence of the age-old scourge of hunger has plummeted.
Since the early 1990s, more than half the 129 nations monitored by the FAO have succeeded in cutting the proportion of their population deemed undernourished by at least 50 per cent.
Indeed, so great has been the rate of progress that the FAO now thinks it can achieve eradication of hunger within a generation.
That’s a far cry from the apocalypse predicted 18th century English economist Thomas Malthus.
In 1789, he argued with seeming mathematical rigour that the world was heading for mass starvation.
His claim was based on the fact that human populations tends to grow exponentially over time - that is, like 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 etcetera – while food supplies struggle to increase even linearly – like 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and so on. As the resulting gap between supply and demand can thus only widen, hunger, starvation and death are inevitable.
Yet, like any mathematical argument, this stands or falls according to the soundness of the premise.
And Malthus made two key mistakes. First, he assumed humans would never tire of – or be able to avoid – having lots of offspring. In that, he reckoned without the emergence of reliable contraception – or the host of economic considerations that weigh on the minds of modern prospective parents.
But his biggest blunder was to underestimate that most telling of human traits: ingenuity.
After hearing a distinguished Victorian scientist spell out the grim implications of Malthus’s argument, a young German chemist named Fritz Haber set about challenging it.
In 1918, Haber won a Nobel Prize for finding a way of extracting nitrogen from the virtually limitless supplies in the Earth’s atmosphere.
The resulting nitrogen-based fertilisers boosted food productivity to levels unimaginable in the time of Malthus.
As the global population soared in the 1960s, the ghost of Malthus was resurrected by activist-academics like Paul Ehrlich. But again, their arguments were undermined by human ingenuity - notably the Nobel Prize-winning work of biologist Norman Borlaug and colleagues.
Their research into high-yielding strains of wheat and rice during the 1960s has been credited with saving a billion people from starvation.
Now, their 21st century counterparts are continuing their efforts to prove Malthus and his fellows wrong.
At this week’s conference, scientists will hear of research into growing crops on land once deemed barren.
In studies backed by the UAE’s Ministry of Climate Change and Environment and the Farmer Service Centre, Dr Nanduri Rao and colleagues of the International Centre for Biosaline Agriculture have identified varieties of the grain crop quinoa that thrive in marginal sandy soils common in the Arabian Peninsula.
Traditionally cultivated in South America, quinoa is a “superfood” rated as among the most nutritious of all food crops – outstripping wheat, rice and corn.
In experiments, Dr Rao and his colleagues succeed in getting yields of more than 10 tonnes per hectare, even in farmland abandoned as too saline for conventional crops.
And according to the team, this is just the start. They report that there are more than 15,000 varieties of quinoa whose hardiness and nutritional value still require investigation.
While agro-scientists continue to debunk one half of the Malthusian argument, demographers are undermining the rest.
Far from being devastated by what Ehrlich called The Population Bomb (the name of his 1968 best-seller), many nations’ populations are stagnating or declining.
According to the latest United Nations statistics, birth rates are declining – even in Africa.
The critical figure is 2.1 births per female – a rate just enough to hold the population steady, with newborns exactly compensating for the dying. Advanced industrial nations are now well below that key figure, and even nations like Bangladesh are heading in the same direction.
The principal driver is the move from the land to the cities. Bluntly, children are an asset if you’re working the land but a risky, long-term investment if you’re living in a metropolis.
As a result, urbanites just aren’t having so many – or even any at all. Japan’s birth rate has collapsed to the point where the population is predicted to fall by a third by 2060. All this is now being turned into the basis of a whole new doomsday scenario, which one might call Malthus 2.0: a world heading for catastrophe not because there are too many people, but because there aren’t enough.
Once again, the reasoning seems pretty unimpeachable. As populations grows old, the massed ranks of the elderly need increasing support – but there just aren’t enough young people to pay for it through taxes.
So, could the pessimists be right this time? Don’t bank on it.
It’s already clear that demographic prediction isn’t an exact science, and there’s no reason to think it can capture the myriad reasons people have a specific number of kids, including none at all.
And those are - as Donald Rumsfeld would put it - just the “known unknowns”.
The real jokers in the pack are the unknown unknowns, notably the unimaginable fruits of human ingenuity that wrecked Malthus’s original argument.
Doom-mongers do have their uses. They are useful foils against complacency, and sometimes – as with urban air pollution – they can be right.
But history shows we should never let them undermine our hope in the future – least of all when their dire warnings seem based on ineluctable logic.
Robert Matthews is visiting professor of science at Aston University, Birmingham
