The following is an excerpt from Steve’s upcoming book, The War on People.
As the ’60s came to a close, the public arguments for population control moved from the national interest to global interests. Although in private practical men like Henry Kissinger would still make hard-nosed arguments about population control being in the U.S. national interest, in public the movement was recasting itself as a way of helping people not just in the U.S., but around the globe, not to mention the globe itself.
As early as 1948, an article in the American Mercury maintained that, “even allowing for spectacular advances in agriculture and industry, the earth simply could not support 4.4 billion people in the year 2048. There would be the constant threat of famine, pandemic disease and unthinkably vicious wars for survival.” Lester Brown, who later became head of the Worldwatch Institute, wrote in 1965 that “the food problem emerging in the less-developing regions may be one of the most nearly insoluble problems facing man over the next few decades.”
Hysteria
William and Paul Paddock did Brown one better in their hysterically named Famine — 1975!, which I had the misfortune of reading in college. For some years thereafter I believed their claims that food shortages in countries such as India, Egypt and Haiti were so acute that most of their population would one day soon perish. Under such dismal circumstances, the Paddock’s barbaric suggestion that a triage system be imposed on such countries, under which the least fit would be deliberately allowed to starve to death so that the more robust could be fed and survive, seemed almost civilized.
But no prophet of population doom attracted more attention, or gained a wider following, than Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” read the opening sentence of The Population Bomb. “In the course of the 1970s the world will experience starvation of tragic proportions — hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
The Green Revolution
Instead, the agricultural Green Revolution produced by the spread of technology in the Third World more than adequately compensated for population growth. And the abandonment of failed experiments in socialism in favor of economic liberty wrought enormous advances. For example, in China from 1979 to 1984, agriculture registered double-digit growth after Chinese peasants were liberated from Mao’s collectivization efforts — efforts which killed tens of millions through famine. It took only a little more than ten years for the value of farm production to double over commune days. With farm incomes rising at 15% a year, China’s 800 million villagers — after decades of political missteps — finally saw their economic prospects improving. Many of them left the fields altogether for factory jobs. Agriculture employed nearly four out of five Chinese in Mao’s day, but only about half at present.
Food Exporters
Much of the developing world beat China to food security. It was India, not China, that Ehrlich had in mind when he made his famous prediction of an impending mega-famine. But the Green Revolution had already arrived in India at the time he was writing The Population Bomb, and it wasn’t long thereafter that the subcontinent emerged as a significant food exporter. The numbers are simply astounding.
Once new varieties of wheat developed by the father of the Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug, arrived in India in the mid-sixties, wheat production in India shot up from 12.3 million tons in 1965 to 20 million tons in 1970. For Pakistan the figures were 4.6 million tons in 1965 and 8.4 million tons in 1970. In the years since, the production of wheat has continued to increase. In 1999 India harvested a record 73.5 million tons of wheat, up 11.5% from 1998. The Green Revolution has ended the scourge of famine in India, which is now self-sufficient in food, As Borl’ug himself noted in 1997, India’s population had doubled since 1968, but it produces three times as much wheat, and its overall economy is nine times larger.
