Arable Land per Person

Let us consider what the minimum amount of fertile land would be to support one person. Below is a square representing one full acre.

ONE FULL ACRE

Below is a graphical representation of what it takes to support one person if fertile and has sufficient water
(illustrated in dark brown):

6.4 BILLION PEOPLE ON EARTH IN 2004 AND
0.625 ARABLE ACRES PER PERSON
(in dark brown color)

It is difficult to imabine that a plot of land only 165 feet square could support all the needs of one person for an entire year. Remember, there are NO supermarkets because every inch of land surface of the earth the is suitable for agriculture would be used for providing people food at the lowest level of subsistance. Furthermore, there would be no means of transport of foods to any supermarket because we could no longer support vehicles that used fossil fuels and caused global warming.

Some claim that we can double the amount of arable land (from 4 billion acres to 8 billion acres). But in 40 years at the present doubling rate for the world's population, we would use all that "new" arable land up and would STILL be faced with an exploding population, and a much more crowded world. Could we double the amount of recreational land in the same time?? Just think of how much resistance the Republicans put up when a new expansive Mojave Desert Park was proposed. After it passed, the Republicans refused to finance a staff and park facilities for that park.

The United States population has doubled since 1930 but has the amount of recreational land doubled in that amount of time?? Not if the Republicans can help it! They need that land for greedy corporations (oil, lumber, construction and mining interests) who give huge sums of money to those Republicans in order that they will be voted into major governmental positions of power (congress, president and gubinatorial positions).

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Some claim that we could double the yield for each unit area of land. However, in only 40 years at the present population growth rate there would only be half that much arable land per person, or 13, 612 square feet, as shown below:

12.8 BILLION PEOPLE ON EARTH IN 2044 AND
0.3125 ARABLE ACRES PER PERSON
(in dark brown color)

Julian Simon would say that with all those new genuses and creative people, we would simply double the yield per unit area because all that we need would be more fertilizer! But the so called "Green Revolution" failed in this respect in India. More and more fertilizer did not make crop yields go up indefitely. There was a limit to its success, and the program reached those limits and India barely hangs on to an unfulfilled set of unrealistic promises for unlimited development.

There is a limit to how many crop plants can occupy a given amount of land and an absolute limit of how much photosynthesis can produce. Only 1% of all sunlight reaching plants can be converted into food energy, and NO one has improved on that.