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“This editorial concerns the joint issue of human numbers and failure of food supply, and focuses on the fact that coral reefs, if fished less intensively and destructively, can support much more biomass (food) than they do now. It starts with Raf pathway correcting some misconceptions about the supply of food globally, before focussing on some reasons why reefs cannot do what they are being asked to do. It also tries to show

that failing to admit to some clear points is leading to a worsening situation. It has become fashionable to claim that Malthus’ predictions of mass famine have been wrong. After all, it has been argued, the world population today is 7 billion, and is likely to rise to least 9 billion within a human generation. Two examples: at one end of the spectrum we have a journalist best left unnamed who said: “…Malthus was wrong as he failed to foresee the great boom in agriculture and technology.” At the other end we

read in the President’s Foreword to a Royal Society report (no less!) which says: “But despite devastating regional famines, prognostications of mass starvation have not been fulfilled, even though the population has risen around sixfold since Malthus’s time” (Rees, 2009). It is not clear why the President of such an august body (which must contain an ecologist or two who could have been consulted) thinks ‘devastating regional famines’ are not ‘mass starvation’, and nor does it say why the two things are different anyway – they would be identical for the people in an affected region. Therefore, when is famine GPCR & G Protein inhibitor not a famine? What is mass starvation, if different? Table 1 grimly lists several defined famines, detailing Urease locations, dates and estimated numbers of those who died. This simply tries to illustrate what numbers of deaths constitute ‘famine’ in conventional terms. It does not enumerate

those who had lives blighted by food shortages and which resulted in devastating consequences for human health and society, and it does not attribute any one particular cause to each case. Such situations persist in many countries today, with chronic undernourishment affecting almost one billion people worldwide (FAO, 2012), and many political wars are underlain by resources shortages too. Coastal people in the tropics are amongst the vulnerable. Present day data on food shortages and on deaths that arise from this are available, though difficult to measure. A decade ago, Black et al., (2003) asked in The Lancet: “Why and where are 10 million children dying each year?” Two years later in the same journal these co-authors report on World Health Organisation estimates of the causes of death in children (Bryce et al., 2005), stating: “Under-nutrition is an underlying cause of 53% of all deaths in children younger than age 5 years” (Fig. 1).