November 25, 2024
For almost all of human history, food was scarce for nearly everyone. The reason for this perpetual scarcity was that whenever food production increased, it did not lead to more food per capita but to more people.
Food production did not increase per capita. Population pressure ensured that living standards remained only barely above the subsistence level. Economic historians refer to this mechanism as the Malthusian Trap, and if you’d like to know more, you could read my article about it.
This changed in the last decades. More and more societies around the world broke out of the Malthusian Trap. We see this in the data as increasing food production in per capita terms. The chart shows that farmers have grown many fruits, vegetables, and nuts faster than the world population has increased.
The increase in global agricultural output was crucial for the reduction of hunger and famines that the world achieved in this period. Whether or not we will be able to end hunger globally will depend on whether this increase in food production will continue.
Explore global and country-specific data on a wide range of foods in our Food Data Explorer →
Yesterday
In recent decades, sub-Saharan Africa has been the world’s fastest-urbanizing region.
The region’s most populous country, Nigeria, shows the scale of that change. In 1950, only around 1 in 10 Nigerians lived in a city. Today, it is nearly 1 in 2.
As you can see in the chart, over the same period, the share living in rural areas fell, but so did the share living in towns and suburbs, which had been the largest group in 1950 by a substantial margin.
Nigeria’s population became much more concentrated in cities — both because people migrated into established cities, and because new ones emerged as towns and suburbs grew dense and large enough to be classified as cities.
In early-industrializing countries, rapid urbanization was often closely tied to industrialization. Today, in many lower-income countries, including across much of sub-Saharan Africa, it is happening under different conditions.
July 30
Since the agricultural revolution, the majority of the labor force in countries like France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and the Netherlands worked in farming.
But over the last few centuries, this share has plummeted. Today, less than 5% of the workforce is employed in agriculture, and in many cases, it’s just a few percent.
This trend is shown clearly in the chart, which is based on data from the International Labour Organization and historical reconstructions by Broadberry and Gardner (2013).
The chart also includes the even steeper decline in agricultural employment in China over the last 40 years, as people have shifted to manufacturing and services.
Many other middle-income countries are on a similar trajectory, moving through this transition faster than European countries did in the past.
July 28
Many cities across East Asia and Latin America have grown quickly over the last few decades. Since 1950, São Paulo’s population has grown sixfold. Shanghai’s nearly tenfold.
This rapid growth is now ending. São Paulo is near its population peak, and Shanghai is projected to peak around 2050.
The fastest-growing megacities are now emerging elsewhere. In the chart, you can see various examples: Karachi in South Asia, and Dar es Salaam, Addis Ababa, and Luanda in Africa.
Luanda, the capital of Angola, is an interesting case. It gets much less attention than well-established megacities, but as the chart shows, it's on track to overtake São Paulo in about 20 years and Shanghai in about 60.
In this dataset from the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, only 24 of today’s 100 largest cities are projected to still be growing by 2100; of those, 12 are in Africa, and 5 are in South Asia.
Of course, these rely on projections — often many decades ahead — and those come with a lot of uncertainty. Nonetheless, they provide a useful perspective on what the future of cities across the world might look like.
July 25
Growing up in the United Kingdom in the 1990s and early 2000s, almost all the eggs in our supermarket came from battery hens, those raised in small wire enclosures.
The living conditions in these cages are terrible. Birds get the space equivalent of an A4 sheet of paper. They don’t have the room to carry out their natural behaviors, such as nesting, perching, or dust bathing.
That has changed in recent decades. You can see this in the chart, which shows the conditions under which eggs are produced in the UK. Free-range eggs have increased from just 10% to 75%.
The use of caged hens has fallen, and the types of caged enclosures have also changed. Battery cages were banned in 2012, so legally, all cages since then have been “enriched” ones, which provide slightly more space.
Still, these do not give hens the freedom and room they’d have in barns or free-range farms. Studies suggest that moving hens from enriched cages to cage-free systems reduces the time they spend in pain by more than half.
And given that most eggs in the UK are now free-range, it’s possible to reduce this pain even further.
July 23
The increase in the world’s population is not exponential. The global population is growing, but the growth rate has declined since its peak six decades ago.
The chart shows the annual rate of global population growth according to historical estimates and projections from the UN World Population Prospects.
The growth rate peaked in 1963 at over 2% per year, and since then, it has more than halved, falling to less than 1% by 2020.
The UN demographers expect rates to continue falling until the end of the century, eventually leading to negative growth rates and a shrinking global population.
July 21
A person’s access to doctors depends heavily on the income level of the country they live in.
High-income countries have around ten times as many doctors per person as low-income ones. You can see this in the chart, which shows the number of medical doctors per 1,000 people.
The global average is around 1.9 doctors per 1,000. Low-income countries have around one-fifth of that figure.
These figures include generalist physicians and specialists.
July 18
Chronic malnutrition in early childhood can slow development and growth, leaving children shorter than expected for their age. That’s the focus of the chart: the share of children under five who are stunted, meaning they are much shorter than expected for healthy growth.
The consequences of stunting persist beyond childhood, affecting both physical health and cognitive development.
Guatemala has one of the highest stunting rates in the world: almost half of children younger than five are stunted according to survey estimates published by the World Health Organization.
Guatemala’s rate is the highest in its region, by far. In the chart, you can see it compared to a selection of other nearby countries – its rate is twice that of Haiti, the next-highest country and a much poorer one.
My colleagues Hannah Ritchie and Tuna Acisu recently wrote about what countries with high stunting today can learn from Japan. Over the 20th century, Japan reduced childhood stunting from over 70% to under 5%, and the decline from around Guatemala's current level to under 5% took place within a generation.
