Yes. Don't listen to them. The problem isn't population. It is distribution. We overproduce for the sake of capitalism to such an extent that we can cut it in half tomorrow and our quality of life would not change in the slightest.

We have alternatives available. We simply do not use them because those who control the world economies would not be able to make obscene profits from it and it necessitates them giving up their ownership over the means of production in order to facilitate these collectively beneficial alternatives.

My understanding is the food production excess is "thanks" to unsustainable, damaging methods that rely heavily on synthetic fertilizer and have massive downsides like agricultural runoff and topsoil erosion (in addition to the wide-scale habitat loss required for those acres upon acres of farmland).

we could also make our food production a gazillion times more efficient if we stopped raising livestock and growing things only to turn them into cattle feed and tractor fuel/corn syrup (granted corn syrup is food, but personally i'd prefer to subsist on the actual raw corn over bottles or syrup)

not disagreeing with your point but just wanted to bring attention to this..

the overproduction of food (beef, pork, alfalfa, tree nuts, mono cultures in general) is precisely what's driving multi-crises and mass extinction.

yes, there's a lot of food, which capitalists then commodify and export globally for their own enrichment. workers don't own the means of food production and food distribution, as you point out, is managed poorly (or not managed at all).

but at what cost? topsoil degradation. dependency on fertilizers. river and streams becoming irreversiblly polluted. overfishing the oceans. insects and birds going extinct at accelerated rates. loss of biodiversity. unfathomable levels of carbon emissions. worker exploitation. growing inequality.

the agricultural industry is pretty fucking evil. we shouldn't be talking about food production as some great untapped resource when it's literally contributing to ecocide and climate catastrophy.

we have to change how food is produced to actually be less productive because modern agricultural practices are killing the planet and contributing to the immiseration of the 99%.

reducing the production levels would reduce the amount of food, which in turn reduces the size of the population that can be supported.

to be clear; human lives are not a virus, people are not problematic. modern food production methods are problematic though and changing them should be a parallel goal to reducing world hunger.

And current levels of production are the very stressors that are eroding the planet’s carrying capacity. When you have so much land taken up for agriculture, which poisons with herbicides and kills anything that gets into the fields and pollutes the waters with fertilizers and eradicates any biodiversity with monocultures, where is the room for a healthy ecosystem?

Again - CONUS has less than 2% “untouched ecosystems”. This is largely to mostly thanks to agriculture. It should be 80% or more.