ABSTRACT
Population increases in a geometrical ratio whereas food production increases only in arithmetic ratio. This fact of unbalanced growth pattern between population and food production became a priority discussion point in late eighteen century when Malthus predicted that population growth would outstrip food supply, causing great human suffering. When population continues rapidly within the limited resources, it has several adverse implications on earth, agriculture, bio-diversity, environment and population itself [1, 2]. Hence the most focused aim of government population policy is population stabilization, either by expanding family planning services or improving socio economic status of women [3]. Bucharest conference in 1974 emphasized to reduce the population growth by focusing
both on fertility limitation and on related development aims. Immediate reduction in fertility do not guarantee the population stabilization, it is mostly depend on the age composition of the population. Population will be stabilized in a condition when numbers of women leaving the reproductive age group will equal to the numbers of women entering in the reproductive age group. Until this condition is achieved, population have tendency to increase which is called as ‘population momentum’. Population dynamic simply means the short-terms and long-terms changes in the size and age structure of the population. It deals with the way population is affected by birth and death rates and by immigration and emigration. The linkage between population dynamic, food production and nutrition security is complex to generalize [4, 5]. There is no steady relationship between population growth and food production [6]. There have been large fluctuations in agricultural production. Though after mid 1980s, India achieved self-sufficiency in food grain production but there is no surety that grains in productivity would be sustained (Parikh, 2007). One concern is that Indian agriculture is mostly affected by climatic or natural barriers like drought, flood etc. And another concern is the environmental effects of High Yield Variety (HYV) technology. Use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers in agriculture may increase the yield capacity in short-term but it has adverse affect on soil fertile which may reduce the yield per capita in the future. Indian agriculture always remains as a subsistence type in nature but not as a commercial. Roy and Pal (2002) [8] showed that public investment in agriculture has declined considerably which might affect adversely in agriculture. The concern might be true. Many of the authors urged that agricultural growth rates in India are slowing down [9, 10, 11]. When growth rate of food grain production turns down, but population is hardly declining, then sustainability of food grain availability is a big question mark to us.
