According to the World Bank, over a billion people around the world are now chronically hungry.From Hungry World: A Silent Crisis Calls for Urgent Action
and also:
Fresh population projections put the number of humans over seven billion in 2011, just 12 years after humanity passed the six billion mark.
From A Billion Teenagers, for Better or Worse
Now, there is good reason to think that the world is at peak oil. There is also good reason to think the world is at peak food right now. [I'm not going to go find the quotes, I shall just assert it for the purposes of this thought experiment.]
Given peak food, that implies that food to feed the 200 million or so new people to be born in the next 2 years will come from that being eaten by those already here. Most likely, it will come from those who are already poor, so that people who are now getting by barely will move into the category of hunger. [The world population now is about 6.8 billion.]
Just for the heck of it, let me assume that each new person represents two new hungry person -- the person just born & someone else who moves from having just enough food to not eating enough.
This would mean that the 200 million new people added in the next two years means 400 million more hungry people -- or 200 million more each year.
Thus, in 2011, we would expect to have 1.4 billion hungry, or about 20% of the world population. In 2016, another 5 years, there would be 7.5 billion people, of which 1.9 billion would be hungry, or about 25%. By 2018, we would be looking at something on the order of 30%.
People who are hungry tend to be angry, quarrelsome, scared and all sorts of unpleasant things like that, and arguably for good reason. I think that when the percent of hunger gets into the 30% and climbing range we are going to see widespread conflict.
