AGRICULTURE: More to Eat

In 1834, there died in a West England village a clergyman named Thomas Robert Malthus, whose bequest to mankind was a somber prophecy that the human race faced strangulation by graphs and curves. The world’s population would threaten to outgrow its supply of food, said Malthus, whereupon pestilence, famine and war would follow. During the following century, the world’s population did increase, from one billion to more than two billion, but it was amply taken care of by the development of new foods from new lands, by more intensive cultivation of the old.

“The Scientific Revolution.” In the lean years after World War II, a new generation of Malthusians sprouted. Between 1938 and 1946, world food production declined by 5%, whereas the population increased by 10%, and it was upon these figures that William Vogt (Road to Survival, TIME, Nov. 8, 1948) and Fairfield Osborn (Our Plundered Planet) based predictions of mass starvation. Last week, however, the world learned that the neo-Malthusians were wrong: mankind, more numerous than ever before, had more to eat than ever before.* The rate of increase of the production of food now exceeds the rate of increase of the free world population.

The news came out of a 236-page report from the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization. The non-Communist world, reported FAO, is now producing 25% more food than it did in 1946-47. The non-Communist world is producing about 20% more rice, milk and cotton than it did before the war; it is catching 20% more fish; it is producing about 30% more wheat, meat and fats; about 59% more sugar. It has 2% more food available per capita, than it had before the war. FAO warned that there were many regions, e.g., back-country Latin America, where millions still did not get a square meal. On the other hand, some countries were now piling up surplus stocks of sugar, cotton and wheat. And it was in Western Europe, wrecked by war and brooded over by the neo-Malthusians, but solaced by its industry and by U.S. aid, that “the most spectacular advances were made.”

FAO ascribed the increase to three main causes: 1) development of land and water resources in backward countries and the provision of new incentives for peasants, such as land reform; 2) widespread adoption of price supports; 3) “the scientific revolution in agriculture.” This technical revolution led by the U.S. is the most important factor in the increase. FAO notes that world use of commercial fertilizer has almost doubled since 1939 and that the number of farm tractors has been tripled.

The Sensational Effects. In its report on the U.S., FAO details the higher levels of productivity that are the hope of the rest of the world. From 1939 to 1954, the number of U.S. farm workers declined from 11.5 to 8.5 million—yet productivity of U.S. acreage has increased by 47%. Corn yields have increased from the prewar 1.6 tons per hectare (2,471 acres) to an average 2.4 tons for 1949-53.

The scientific revolution is having sensational effects throughout the world. Since the war, the average height of Japanese children has increased four-fifths of an inch, their chest measurement 1¼ inches. In India, which was the neo-Malthusians’ prime example of calamity, food production is rising as the birth rate falls. Concluded an Indian in New Delhi last week: “There is still deep poverty, but there is no actual starvation, as there periodically used to be.”

*Less the people of the Communist empire, of whom reliable statistics are not available.