That the demands made by an increasingly aggressive human population have begun to outstrip the capacity of the earth to sustain them is becoming more and more starkly visible. There are social conflicts such as fishing clashes between Canada and Spain over turbot near Canada’s eastern coast or between Asian nations such as Indonesia and the Philippines in the Celebes. Water shortages have led to riots in Delhi, as people revolted, suffering in the furnace-like heat of the summers; underground water levels are dropping swiftly in the major bread and grain baskets of the world—the Great Plains of the Midwest in the United States; the ‘Green Revolution’ states of Punjab and Haryana in India: farmers are overpumping these reserves.

In the hill regions of North India, women walk longer and longer distances every year to fetch firewood for cooking their meals—the forests are in retreat. The demands of lumber, energy and paper are spreading quickly, forcing the decline of the forests in South America, in Africa, and in Asia and consequently, of the wildlife and ecosystems that have sustained them and us for centuries.

Environmental degradation and population pressures are but two of the major reasons which fuel poverty around us. We have the capacity to feed ourselves. In 2000, for example, India had a glut of foodgrains in its reserves. But as rats and poor storage nibbled away at this cornucopia, there was another question: why was the food rotting in godowns when it should be reaching the poor through fair-price shops? The problem lies not in our numbers or other cited factors: the real crisis lies in a poor distribution mechanism, official lethargy and what farmers see as a lack of adequate support prices.

Disparaties within nations are also reflected starkly among nations as the gap between the rich and poor grow. Thus, the world economy is today seventeen times the size of what it was a century ago. Nations are industrializing faster than ever before. Billions live healthier lives and life expectancy in most countries has doubled in this period, thanks to a combination of better diets, health care and incomes. Yet, more than 800 million people go hungry every day, are malnourished and underweight, and over a billion—or one-sixth of the earth’s population—do not have access to safe drinking water.

The gap between rich and poor nations remains greater than ever, and more iniquitous. As a result, the ratio between incomes in the richest one-fifth of countries has widened from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 61 to 1 in 1991, ‘creating tensions between those on the upper rungs of the global economic ladder and those stuck on the bottom steps,’ says the World Watch Institute.2