Question: How would overpoloulation affect shortages of essential items? For example food.

George Foden answered on 3 Mar 2023:

Overpopulation could have a big impact on food security if there were too many people and not enough food being made to feed them all, but at the moment that is not the case. There is enough food to feed everybody in the world at the moment, but that food is not distributed fairly, and so some people have too much food and others have not enough.

A good example of that is a thing called “food deserts”, which I first came across in the US city of Chicago. Chicago is a very big city, with lots of people living in it. America’s food supply is one of the most robust in the world, because a lot of food is grown in the country so they are less reliant on getting food from other countries, and it is a very rich country so they have plenty of resources to source food and sell it to consumers. There should be no food shortages in America at all, because there is more than enough food for all the people.

However, in Chicago, many of the poorer neighbourhoods do not have a grocery store that would let them buy fresh fruit and vegetables. Public transport also doesn’t serve the community very well, so for a poor person in a poor neighbourhood in Chicago who doesn’t own a car, it can be nearly impossible to get to a supermarket to buy fresh food. They might have to walk for up to an hour each way to get to somewhere that they can buy healthy food. Fresh, healthy food, is also more expensive, so people often end up eating less healthy fast food because it is cheaper and more available, and this leads to health problems.

So the key issue is not size of the population, but the way that we distribute food and provide access to food supplies. If you can get that right, the impact of overpopulation doesn’t need to be too severe.