Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing
November 16/1999
Legislative Assembly of Ontario: Standing Committee on Estimates.
Lawrence Solomon
National Post
November 16, 1999
Privatizing resource sector is best way to protect wilderness
The World Wildlife Fund and other environmental elites — in a confused bargain with their government and industry counterparts — are selling out Canada’s environment to industrial interests.
Following the 1987 recommendations of the United Nations’ World Commission on Environment and Development, many Canadian environmentalists lobbied our federal and provincial governments to protect part of the wilderness — generally they demand 12% of a province’s territory, in line with the UN report — while tacitly agreeing to let industry loose on most of the rest. In Ontario’s Lands for Life pact last year among some environmentalists, loggers and the government, environmentalists signed off on a plan that gives forestry companies a moral claim to exploit most of the province’s Crown forests. Environmentalists, in their naivete, think they’re balancing the needs of industry with the needs of the environment, but their calculations are topsy-turvey. In any rational world, industry would get not even 12% of the land, and the overwhelming expanse of the country’s resources would be preserved for its natural beauty.
These environmentalists, along with most Canadians, are captive to the myth that Canada has a resource-based economy. Yes, our forests do cover much of this enormous country, which does have one of the world’s largest concentration of fresh water in lakes and rivers, and which, together with coastlines along three oceans, give us vast inland and offshore fisheries. We do have fertile farmland from coast to coast and we do have a wealth of oil, gold and other mineral resources. But despite these riches, ours is an urban economy. Canada’s entire resource sector amounts to less than 6% of our GDP, about the same size as the construction industry and one-third the size of the financial or manufacturing sector. Although the resource sector often dominates the news, with farmers, fishermen and foresters in seemingly endless disputes, this sector is off the macroeconomic radar screen at Statistics Canada, whose economists have not analyzed the resource sector in recent times. If Canada’s system of national accounts were to be designed from scratch, the line items that appear today — agriculture, forestry, fishing, and even mining, by far the largest of our resource industries — would be too small to warrant separate categories.
Far from being an economic heavyweight, the resource sector’s importance is overstated even at 6% of GDP. Without subsidies to the farm economy — which, as a whole, runs at an economic loss — agriculture’s share of GDP would shrink dramatically. Without government intervention in logging and forestry — which is designed to sacrifice our forests to stave off unemployment in remote communities — forestry’s share of GDP would likely shrink even more. If mining CEOs weren’t so skilled at mining governments for tax breaks, and weren’t so able at avoiding the responsibility of cleaning up after themselves, mining’s share of GDP would fall, too.
But most of all, the resource sector would shrink because our forests, mountains, lakes and rivers are usually worth far less as board-feet of timber and storage ponds for mine tailings than as objects of splendour. Though rural folk may think their most important exports to the cities are the raw commodities they produce, the rural economy is more highly valued as a natural playground, whether in the form of cottage land or tourist destination.
GDP — which counts all activity, whether productive or destructive — is a poor measure by which to judge a sector’s importance. A better measure is profits. Prince Edward Islanders think their economy depends on agriculture and tourism, in that order. In fact, the farm economy is run as an elaborate federal-provincial make-work project — for every dollar that a PEI farmer makes tilling the soil, governments contribute more than $4 in subsidies. Potatoes, PEI’s chief crop, provides 4,500 jobs while losing money; the tourism industry 20,000 while making money. The productive PEI economy — and the source of PEI’s wealth — is its natural beauty.
On the opposite coast, B.C. residents view their salmon fishery with great pride. But B.C.’s commercial salmon fishery has little value: $100-million a year, or about one-fifth the value of its salmon sports fishery, which doesn’t deplete fish stocks. In Ontario, large-scale logging would all but disappear if the government privatized its Crown forests — say by selling them to the loggers who now depend on them for their livelihood. As owners, loggers would soon understand that the best way to exploit the value of their holdings is in hunting and fishing lodges, in cottages and camping sites, in cross-country ski resorts and in selling private woodlots to urbanites who will simply set them aside for their conservation value.
Whenever environmentalists, industry and politicians — three of the most powerful special interest groups in society — sit down together to carve up provincial resources, the natural environment is the inevitable loser. Not understanding that the environment — with its countless ecological niches, each capable of arousing wonder in an individual destined to fall in love with its offerings — is often the ultimate value-added product, these special interests are only too willing to grind it down wholesale into near-worthless raw commodities or theme parks.
As it does in Third World countries, in Canada the World Wildlife Fund seeks to establish a network of “ecologically representative protected areas,” as if the environment can be reduced to a sterile scattering of museum pieces. Industry seeks a rich swath of subsidies, such as in Ontario, without which large-scale environmental destruction cannot happen. Throughout Canada government seeks to pacify these two agitators, and to boast to the public at large about what it has accomplished in our name.
by Patrick Reid
Lawrence Solomon does an absolutely wonderful job of balancing abysmal ignorance with unmitigated arrogance. In one short article, Mr. Solomon trashes all rural areas of Canada, farmers, miners, forestry people, fisherman and an entire province.
Mr. Solomon with unmitigated arrogance suggests that all of the rural and northern area of our country should be a playground for the supposed rich urbanites who would appreciate these areas as “objects of splendour.” Mr. Solomon’s knowledge of the economic contribution of the resource industries, their history and their importance to the Canadian economy is non-existent.
Nationally, the mining industry generates $26.5-billion in value and one in seven export dollars is from mining. Mining accounts for one-half of the rail revenues and two-thirds of the port volumes, supporting infrastructure we all benefit from. Mining employs one of every forty working Canadians, some of whom work in urban areas. One hundred and fifty communities depend on mining as the main engine of economic growth. Mining comprises approximately 20% by volume and value of the shares traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
More importantly, where does Mr. Solomon think that cars, computers, high-rises, food, trolleys and subways come from? Are they all manufactured in Japan and shipped here? Without the mineral industry, the agriculture industry and forestry industry, and their basic commodities, there would be no houses, apartment buildings, subway cars, computers or glass or stainless steel sinks in our homes.
With the wisdom of Solomon, Mr. Solomon consigns all of these rural and resource people to the economic slagheap in favour of some pristine utopia that only he can see.
In the interest of public dialogue and education I am sending Mr. Solomon a copy of the Ontario Mining Association’s report, “The Economic and Fiscal Contribution of the Mining Industry in Ontario” and our booklet, “Facts & Figures,” which outlines the positive impact of mining in Ontario and Canada.
Patrick Reid, President
Ontario Mining Association, Toronto.
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by Monte Hummel
There is a curious sense of unreality to Lawrence Solomon’s claim that those of us who are trying to protect wilderness in Canada are the ones who don’t appreciate the value of its natural splendour and beauty (Environmentalists Sell Out Environment, Nov. 16). He suggests that if Canadians just privatized all our forests, then these treasures would be rescued from the evils of exploitation and converted over night to “natural playgrounds” for our now largely urban society. No need to set aside representative protected areas such as our national parks (a “sterile scattering of museum pieces,” according to Mr. Solomon). And no need to treat rural or northern cultures with respect or dignity, because “ours is an urban economy.”
This may all sound great to Solomon’s Urban Renaissance Institute, but might I suggest a trip out of the city think-tank to round out his perspective just a tad?
Monte Hummel, president
World Wildlife Fund Canada, Toronto.
Lawrence Solomon
National Post
November 2, 1999
Ending farm subsidies would send marginal farmers to other jobs, let their land go wild again
Saskatchewan Premier Roy Romanow wants trade equity for Canada’s farmers to protect them from the high, trade-distorting subsidies that U.S. and European governments give their farmers. As his government explained in full-page national newspaper ads that ran last week — just before he and Manitoba Premier Gary Doer arrived in Ottawa to lobby Prime Minister Jean Chretien for $1.3-billion in farm aid — Prairie farmers want to compete and they want to earn their living off the public dole.
When Mr. Chretien refused, the premiers were deeply offended. “What farmers don’t need is doublespeak,” Mr. Doer said bitterly of his conversation with Mr. Chretien. “They need plain talk and realistic solutions to the farm crisis.”
Here is some plain talk. The U.S. farm sector, because of the huge subsidies that these premiers deplore, costs the U.S. economy more money than it earns. The same is true in the European Union. And the same is true in Canada. Add up all the profits made at all the farms in all these countries, subtract all the direct and indirect subsidies provided to the farm economies, and our countries’ vast farmlands — rather than being an inspiring source of economic strength — amount to a blight upon the economies of the United States, the European Union and Canada.
Here is more plain talk. Although the two premiers act as if their problems stem from the current subsidy war, two years ago, before the United States and the EU ramped up the dollars they spent, U.S. and EU agricultural trade subsidies were at their lowest level in recent times. Yet Canada’s farm economy ran an even larger deficit than it does today.
And more plain talk. The type of aid Canadian farmers now receive, and the type Mr. Romanow and Mr. Doer demand, only encourages more farm production and lower commodity prices for farmers, ultimately spreading the blight and creating more misery, not just here but also in the Third World, whose farmers can least cope with the rich countries’ subsidy war. Third World farmers are forced to curtail production, or even shut down, and then we in the West, thinking ourselves generous, and ignorant of what we’ve done to them, send them food aid.
Now here is the realistic solution Mr. Doer wants. The Western farm world runs at a deplorable loss only because the current agricultural system encourages people to farm who otherwise wouldn’t, and only because poor, marginal lands that should have been left as wilderness were short-sightedly brought under production. The subsidy system bloats production to the point of being uneconomic. Putting a stop to the farm subsidies would separate the wheat from the chaff, return marginal farms to wilderness, encourage farmers to seek productive work elsewhere in the economy, and leave Canadians with a farm economy that is profitable, sustainable without subsidies, and a true contributor to the national welfare.
Saskatchewan and Manitoba, though they account for much of the country’s arable land, receive relatively little from our system of subsidies — if they didn’t take the subsidies, they would show a small farm loss. The farmers who reap the lion’s share of the spoils from Canada’s complex, subsidy-ridden system are those east of the Manitoba border. To keep the Ontario system in place, Canadians provide $844-million a year in subsidies, or $2.50 worth of government subsidies for every dollar of profit that Ontario farmers earn. In Quebec, the subsidies are greater — almost $4 in government subsidies to produce $1 in farm profit — and in New Brunswick, the country’s leading farm loser, $8 in government money per dollar in farm profit.
Mr. Romanow is doubtless sincere in his call for fairness in the international trade arena. But where was he at the beginning of this decade, when Canadian farmers received more in subsidies from the rest of the Canadian economy than either the Americans or the Europeans did from theirs? And if his goal is international fairness, why point to them and not to ourselves? Canadian farmers are twice as subsidized as those in Australia, and 16 times as much as those in New Zealand, the one Western country that can, without risk of seeming hypocritical, deplore the devastation that farm subsidies wreak. New Zealand — now beginning a farm-led export recovery — has almost entirely eliminated subsidies, both for export and within the country, while other countries only promise to some day do one or both.
Luckily, at the World Trade Organization talks later this month, Canada has powerful allies who can make both moral and economic arguments. Although Canadians would never know it from Mr. Romanow’s ads, the only major remaining forces for agricultural protectionism are Japan and the EU.
Lining up against them — and for increased free trade in agricultural policy — are Third World countries such as Brazil, which believes free trade in agricultural goods would boost its exports by 30%, the influential Cairns group of 15 countries, which includes Australia and New Zealand along with Canada, and the enormous muscle of the United States itself.
This is a battle that the free farm traders can win, if we aim our sites on the real enemy without, and show the countries of the world that we are not hypocrites when we say we want, as Mr. Romanow’s ad says, “fair competition.”
Lawrence Solomon
National Post
October 18, 1999
Despite the hoopla, farms are a drain on the economy
October marks the first-ever Canadian Agriculture and Food Celebration, and Canada’s agriculture ministers — when they aren’t begging Ottawa for farm relief — are busy touting the successes of Canadian agriculture. “New Brunswick has a strong agriculture and agri-food industry which supplies high-quality food products, not only here at home but also to 26 countries around the world,” Milt Sherwood, the N.B. Agriculture Minister, declared Friday in announcing that his province — also knee-deep in Agriculture Awareness Month — would join the celebration and tell Canadians just how successful their farm policies are.
What Canadians are unaware of — and what these ministers will not tell us — is that Canada’s farmers, on the whole, don’t make a positive contribution to the national economy. While agriculture ministers boast of “the importance of the sector [to] jobs and economic growth,” Statscan puts the profit produced by Canada’s entire agriculture sector — whether on family-owned farms or on mega-farms owned by major corporations — at less than $3-billion a year. That’s much less, for example, than Bell Canada Enterprises earned last year.
But even that meagre profit is illusory. Federal and provincial governments ponied up more than $3.5-billion in direct and indirect subsidies, according to Agriculture Canada’s Data Book, making the farm sector a net drain on the Canadian economy of some $650-million annually. Data Book notes that its $3.5-billion tally is on the low side: It excludes, among others, subsidies to manufacturers of farm inputs, such as fertilizer and farm equipment. Data Book doesn’t note, but could have, that it also excludes employment insurance and other welfare payments to farmers. All that effort — 387,000 farmers working 276,000 farms — and at the end of the day, the country is the worse for it.
The losers include Canada’s urban residents, who provide the lion’s share of the subsidies through taxes and overpayments for milk and other marketing board-controlled farm products. They include Canada’s wilderness, which was needlessly cleared to make way for uneconomic farms. They include Third World farmers, who in a free farm market would have far larger markets for their produce. But most of all, the losers in Canada’s politically modified agriculture sector are found among the farmers themselves.
Without the host of subsidies and other interventions governments have devised over the years, many of today’s farmers — perhaps most — would long ago have followed their instincts and found their fortunes elsewhere. Once farm folk have seen the big city, the cliche goes, “you can’t keep them down on the farm.” But by providing farmers with cash and credit to stay put, governments persuaded many who would otherwise have left to remain. In the process, they have sown a harvest of suffering.
Governments justify farm marketing boards and other interventions by a need to protect the farm family from the ups and downs of the farm business, and the desire to create and maintain good jobs in the agriculture sector. But these measures yielded neither stability nor good jobs. Because farming is capable of fully supporting precious few Canadians, farmers have turned to a more dependable safety net than government programs can provide — second jobs. Of Canada’s 217,000 farm families — now just 3% of the Canadian population — only 8% earn 75% or more of their total family income from farming, and 65% earn less than 25% of their income from farming. Farm families earn three times as much by moonlighting in jobs off the farm than from their farming activities. As a whole, only 19% of the farm families’ average net income of $53,000 — about $10,000 — comes from farm work, while society spends more than $10,000 subsidizing the average farm.
While it is tragic for all concerned that governments have so seriously mismanaged the agriculture sector, its decline in size stems more from progress than bad policies. In the developing countries, agriculture is six times, and in the least-developed countries 16 times, larger than in industrial countries, where it has steadily declined to just 2% of GDP. In Canada, agriculture commands a mere 1.6%.
In all likelihood, this share will become smaller still. Thankfully, our federal and provincial governments are year by year decreasing their subsidies. Year by year, agriculture’s share of GDP shrinks. And year by year, the farm population contracts as farms ill-suited for a modern economy — those on poor soils, for example, or far from their markets — transform themselves to residential or recreational uses, or to wilderness.
Although the farm economy now costs the country more on balance than it brings in, many types of farming, and many, many farmers, are enormously productive and profitable. As inefficient operators leave the field, and as deregulation and globalization let productive ones show their stuff, Canada’s agriculture sector will become smaller but profitable.
Today, we have too many farms and too many farmers, but someday — in an open, entrepreneurial farm market — that may well change. In British Columbia, where immigrants are now 27% of the farm population, the farm economy is actually growing, thanks largely to Chinese and Punjabi farmers bringing the new skills and new vitality that our dispirited, cap-in-hand agriculture sector badly needs.
Agriculture “is not only about feeding Canadians’ appetites,” said Lyle Vanclief, federal Agriculture Minister, in launching his celebration, “it’s also about feeding the Canadian spirit.”
Winnipeg Free Press, Jan. 24, 2000
– Peter Schroedter, Interlake sheep rancher and agriculture commentator
“Interlake sheep rancher and agriculture commentator Peter Schroedter writes that before the farm income debate can be settled, it might first be wise to determine “Who is subsidizing whom?”
By Peter Schroedter
PUBLIC COMMENTS by the federal agriculture minister make it clear the federal government is ready to abandon more than half the country’s farmers in the next few years.
The federal politicians believe they have the public support to do it without suffering political damage. They keep looking at the fact that 40 per cent of the farmers are producing 60 per cent of the farm commodities. In an era when production efficiency is next to godliness, Agriculture Minister Lyle Vanclief is left wondering what to do with all the farmers who aren’t as productive as the top 40 per cent. With the less productive farmers gone, the way is clear for the productive farmers to expand.
The politicians are pretty sure no one who matters cares about the small-farm farmer. So much so that Vanclief is telling farmers that if they don’t like the pay they should look for another line of work. He points out that he quit the farm and made out all right.
An opinion piece by Lawrence Solomon in the Oct. 19 National Post took a bottom-line look at the farm crisis and concluded that we have too many farmers and too many farms in Canada. Solomon does a very good job in his corporate-minded analysis of the situation, but completely disregards the social, economic and long-term political aspects.
There is an argument to be made that as a nation we can buy imported food cheaper than we can produce it. It can also be said that much of the land used for agriculture could easily revert to its natural state to improve the ecology.
As distasteful as they seem to farmers, all these comments do have validity, but there’s a problem with this bottom-line, corporate-minded businesslike approach to financial support for agriculture.
What will we do as a nation when the countries that produce the cheap food use food to make us toe their policy line? Most nations already know how important food is. Maybe it’s because we’re a very young country that we produce such naive leaders who have no sense of where food production fits into history. It’s been used as a weapon to win wars and is the foundation on which great nations are built. The Americans don’t support agriculture because there is a shortage of food in the land of “all you can eat for $1.99.” They support agriculture because their leaders and policy advisers realize that unless a nation can feed itself, it cannot be truly sovereign. The Europeans, especially the British, learned this hard lesson through two world wars when cheap food from the colonies was no longer available.
That’s why these two great economic and political powers support their farmers with hard cash while our leaders talk about levelling the playing field at international trade talks. In Canada we’ve never suffered food shortages. In fact, our only food-related problem is the increased costs to the health-care system caused by too much cheap food and over-consumption.
Canada is getting ready to sacrifice its “family farm” culture on the altar of economic efficiency. The irony is that it is through the farmer’s own efficiency and over-production of almost every agricultural commodity that they have been marginalized almost out of existence.
Not many decades ago, people on the land made up 30 per cent of the nation’s population. It was a voting block politicians respected. Now farmers represent three per cent with continuing decline projected.
Not many decades ago consumers paid close to 25 per cent of their total income for food. Today they spend 10 per cent on food and 24 per cent on entertainment and recreation.
Back then a farm family could make a decent living farming 320 acres. There was even enough to put some money aside to carry them through floods, droughts and crop failures. They had a life as good, and in many cases better, than the urban wage earner.
Today, those 320 acres fall into the hobby farm and lifestyle category. A grain and oil seed growing enterprise in today’s economy starts at 1,500 to 2,000 acres. An operation of this size is still run by a husband and wife team. They manage land and equipment assets close to $1 million in a high-risk, capital-intensive business. The return on this investment and labour is surprisingly low. There is little hope today of farm incomes even close to the average urban wage earner. In many cases farmers earn less than Mike Harris pays people on “workfare” in Toronto.
THE URBAN PERCEPTION of the farm income crisis is often skewed by media. They report that farm incomes are whatever they are that day. What they fail to understand is that the gross farm income has little to do with net income per family. Based on the last census, Statistics Canada reports that out of every $100 declared farm family income $69 is earned from off-farm jobs.
The farm income problem has its roots in the cost of producing a given commodity compared to what it will yield in terms of net profit. Many mid-size farms have commodity sales exceeding $100,000. The taxable income from these sales is often well below the poverty line.
The question many farmers are asking is: “Who is subsidizing who?”
Is it the farm woman working 12-hour shifts nursing to hold the place together? Is it the farmer working in a mine while his wife does the chores back home? Is it the trucker rolling up the miles far from home for weeks at a time while his wife teaches and with the help of their kids they keep the farm together? All in the hope that next year will be better.
Farming is as much a culture as it is an occupation and as part of the cultural mosaic it has contributed its share. That culture is changing because of hard economic times. More and more, simple economic survival at all costs is the motivation in adopting new farming practices. More sustainable farming skills are being lost. Most farmers are born into the agrarian society, picking up the fundamental farming skills particular to their region and production system from their parents. It’s from their elders and their community that young farm people learn what it takes to survive on the land. Understanding the local subtleties of land and livestock is not something you can teach people in a three-year degree course. It’s passed from one generation of economic survivors to the next. Once that chain is broken, it will be very difficult to repair.
As a people, farmers are no charity case. Most of them are highly skilled and very employable in the urban sector. They prefer living on the land and hold close a dream that includes a family and a farm. For many a farm is much more than a land base to make a living. It’s a legacy for the next generation.
Many farmers will do everything in their power to hold on to the farm but if things don’t change economically, they will have to leave the land. When that happens, the rural landscape will change in a dramatic way. In one way or another the land will be farmed. Who will farm it and how is another question. Will it be the corporations or the descendants of the pioneer families who developed the land.
It’s time to look at economic support for farm families for what it is — a social question. The question is simple. Do Canadians want the traditional family farm to survive or not?
Lawrence Solomon
National Post
October 5, 1999
NEXT TUESDAY, WE, THE CITIZENS OF THE WORLD, will be six billion strong, up from five billion a dozen years ago and from four billion in 1974. Thanks in large part to this population boon — and in even larger part to the Third World citizenry’s good sense in moving to the world’s burgeoning cities — people are better fed, better clothed, better housed, in better health and in almost every way better off than at any previous time in history.
Despite this one-time, 50% advance in population in a mere quarter-century, the best is yet to come. Although the end to robust population growth may be drawing nigh — global population will peak below eight billion, if the United Nations’ “low” projection proves accurate — past momentum should still give us two or three more fertile decades. This would be a blessing for the West’s beleaguered farmers, who have seen farm commodity prices collapse as their granaries overflow, and for the world’s shopkeepers, manufacturers and other producers, who will now have almost two billion more mouths to feed and bodies to clothe and house.
More importantly, the world continues to urbanize. Within five years, we will reach a milestone more fateful to the global economy and more profound for human relations than the six billion population mark: For the first time, the majority of the world’s population will be living in cities.
People are drawn to cities for economic opportunities, for social mobility and — despite crime, pollution and the other very real problems that plague urban areas — for a vastly superior quality of life. As wretched as Third World cities can be, especially for the poor, they nevertheless represent progress for those who decide the countryside offers less.
Poverty “tends to be at its worst in rural areas,” explained the World Bank in a 1990 study, something “not always understood because the urban poor are more visible and vocal.” In cities, people have more political rights, cleaner water, better sanitation and immeasurably superior access to health care. In Brazil’s sparsely populated Northeast, for example, the mortality rate is higher, and the infant mortality rate three times higher, than in the densely populated South.
Away from stifling rural customs, women especially benefit from newfound freedoms. In the city they may seek work for themselves, and an education for their daughters, without suffering a stigma. According to the World Fertility Survey, 500 million women without access to family planning said they did not want their last child, that they wanted their children spaced out more, or that they did not want another child. Because women more often practise birth control in cities, city women tend to have smaller families and more control over their lives.
In modern times, no nation has maintained high per-capita increases in income without having urbanized. Cities consume far less resources to get work done, and generate far more wealth in the process. Although we tend to divide the world into developed and underdeveloped, North and South, and First and Third, a more revealing divide is between high- and low-density. In the rich West, more than three-quarters of us live in cities — twice the proportion of the developing world as a whole, and three times the proportion of the poorest countries. In the Western countries, 30% of citizens live in large urban centres of 750,000 or more. In the developing world, that proportion is halved, and in the very poorest countries it is reduced by two-thirds.
As the Third World urbanizes — for example, Asia and Latin America — its lot has improved spectacularly. Where urban growth has been stunted or artificially inflated by wars and other calamities — as is the case for Africa, particularly many countries of black Africa — it is human despair that thrives. Of the 100 largest cities in the world, Africa has but eight, and black Africa but four.
Although most people fear the long-term consequences of population growth, when population growth in fact is a driving force for democracy and prosperity, the true long-term threat comes from declining population. In the UN’s low-population-growth scenario, after world population peaks at 7.75 billion in 2040, populations would soon plummet by 25% with each successive generation as Third World fertility rates drop. Such a loss in world markets would be unprecedented, and would likely lead to serious dislocations and demands for protectionism that could trigger or exacerbate a worldwide depression.
Whether the world’s population peters out at eight billion, or builds up to 10 billion or 12 billion, the health, and the carrying capacity, of the global environment need not suffer. At the population density of highly desirable places such as Manhattan, 12 billion would fit into an area the size of Cameroon. If our global resources are used intelligently in resource-efficient cities, this Earth gives us far more of everything than we’d ever need or want.
Urban Renaissance Institute 