Thomas Malthus and others! To cite two other examples, i

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Thomas Malthus and others!
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• English economist - 1766 to 1834
• Witnessed huge population increases in European
  cities (England) due to Industrial Revolution.
• Wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population
  (1798) in which he argued that populations grow
  geometrically (exponentially) 1,2,4,8,16,32
  but food supply only arithmetically
  -1,2,3,4,5,6,.
• Population would soon outstrip food supply.

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Stage Food supply Population A
1 1 B 2 2 C 3 4 D
4 8 E 5 16 etc.
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Population Momentum Over time growth occurs
exponentially 2 4 8 16...
As opposed to arithmetic growth 1 2 3
4... (we will find out later this is the way food
production grows Can this type of growth feed
the worlds population?)
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• Population and Food are in sync in stages A, B
  and even C.
• But in stage D and E you begin to have a large
  gap. People start to suffer and die of famine.
  Riots and war could break out, more people die.
  Diseases and plaques kill even more.
• The population is reduced back to stage C or
  even B.
• The above killers are called positive
  population checks.

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• Another way of looking at the above
• Today 1 person, 1 unit of food
• 25 years from now 2 persons, 2 units of food
• 50 years from now 4 persons, 3 units of food
• 75 years from now 8 persons, 4 units of food
• 100 years from now 16 persons, 5 units of food

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• Population checked - at least for awhile.
• Sometimes evened called Malthusian checks
  (Positive and Negative)
• Argued that moral restraint was only hope no
  premarital sex, later marriages. He called these
  Negative population checks.
• Very Victorian, very religious.

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Population is the red line. Food is the blue line
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Population is the red line. Food is the blue line
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• However, didnt happen as he forecast at least in
  Great Britain and other wealthy countries
• Birth rates declined soon after death rates did.
  Contraception became more widespread.
• Industrialization and urbanization meant less
  need for family labour.
• Child labour laws and mandatory schooling laws
  meant child had to be supported far longer.
  Therefore family sizes decreased.
• Better health (public and personal hygiene and
  better food) meant lower death rates.

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• More children survived people lived longer.
• Children became economic liabilities instead of
  assets.
• Family size shrank.
• Migration to North America reduced the
  Population pressure in Europe
• Since 1950 Food production has actually grown
  faster than population growth Chapter 10.
• Never reached stage D or E, BUT

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• In a developing world the population did not
  reduce itself, it remained high.
• Population checks did take effect and killed
  many people.
• But along came Emergency Aid, the Red Cross,
  CARE and the UN, etc.
• People that were, according to Malthus, slated
  to die survived into stages D and E. That is
  why we have areas of the world with massive
  famine.
• With aid Are we saving lives or prolonging
  death?

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• Neo-Malthusians
• Contemporary Geographers say that two
  characteristics of recent population growth make
  Malthus theory more realistic today.
• In Malthus time only a hand full of wealthy
  counties made it to Stage 2 of the DTM.
  Relatively poor countries (LDCs) would have the
  most rapid population growth, because of transfer
  of medical technology not wealth from MDCs.
  The gap between population growth and resources
  is wider than even Malthus could have imagined.

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Many LDCs have expanded their food production in
recent years, yet have more poor people than ever
before. Population growth and momentum has
outpaced all economic growth. What economic
growth there is was absorbed by the additional
population.
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1. Population growth is outstripping all kinds of
   resources not just food production. Robert Kaplan
   and Thomas Fraser Homer-Dixon paint a frightening
   picture of a world of billions of people in
   search of for and energy. Wars and civil violence
   will continue due to scarcities of food, clean
   air, fuel and suitable farmland.

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Malthus Critics Malthus believed that the
worlds food supply is fixed rather than
expanding. Many people believe that new
technology will find a way to produce more food.
People that believe that science will save the
day are called Cornucopians. The principles of
Possibilism mentioned in chapter 1 suggest that
humans have the ability to change courses of
action.
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Esther Boserup and Simon Kuznets said that a
larger population could stimulate economic growth
and therefore production of food. More people
more consumers more demand generate a
stronger economy. Boserup stated that as a
population found that they were approaching food
shortages they would identify ways of increasing
supply whether through new technology, better
seeds, new farming methods. Julian Simon More
people means more brains to invent good ideas for
improving life.
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One of the quotes that supported Boserups
theories was that necessity is the mother of
invention. This proves that people would not let
themselves starve to death, but they will invent
and find a way out of the problem. Boserup calls
this development agricultural intensification A
nother sentence quoted from one of her works says
that population growth causes agricultural
growth
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Esther Boserup will appear again when we do the
chapter on Agriculture. She argued that when
population density in LDCs is low enough to
allow it, land tends to be used intermittently,
with heavy reliance on fire to clear fields and
fallowing to restore fertility (often called
slash and burn farming).
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In Boserups theory, it is only when rising
population density curtails the use of fallowing
(and therefore the use of fire) that fields are
moved towards annual cultivation - she suggests
this happens in two ways First Way - change
fallow times or stages - Forest Fallow, Bush
Fallow, Short Fallow, Annual Cropping,
Multicropping. Also expand efforts at
fertilizing, field preparation, weed control, and
irrigation.
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Second Way - New Farming Methods. These changes
often induce agricultural innovation but in LDC's
these changes also increase marginal labour costs
to the farmer as well the higher the rural
population density, the more hours the farmer
must work for the same amount of produce.
Therefore workloads tend to rise while efficiency
drops. This process of raising production at the
cost of more work at lower efficiency is what
Boserup describes as "agricultural
intensification".
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• Examples of New Techniques to improve farming
  are
• Hydroponics
• Weather control
• Improve irrigation (ground water, canals)
• Use of fertilization, pesticides, herbicides
• Improved machines and techniques Green Houses
• Green Revolution (Hybrid seeds)
• GMO's
• Finding new food sources (Cultivation of the Sea,
  high protein cereal, soybean, krill
• Fish Farming - Aquaculture
• Desalination
• Sustainable Agriculture ridge tillage, stop
  Desertification.

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Why would Ridge-Till be a better method Look at
these images!
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• There is also
• Create New Organizations - Co-operatives,
  Agribusiness, Vertical Integration, Communes,
  Kibbutz etc.
• Land Reforms - Gavelkind laws (absentee
  landlords), Plantations
• Development of Marginal Lands - Greenhouses,
  fertilization, irrigation, Global Warming may
  help, etc.
• Synthetic Foods
• We will come back to these few slides when we do
  the chapter on Agriculture.

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Malthusian Pessimistic Boserupian
- Realistic Cornucopian - Optimistic
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Marxists say that there is no cause and effect
relationship between population growth and
economic development. Poverty, hunger and other
social welfare problems associated with lack of
economic development are a result of unjust
social and economic institutions, not population
growth. Friedrich Engels (a Marxist) maintained
that there has always been enough food for
everyone, it is the unequal distribution of food
between the rich and the poor that is the real
problem.
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Some even argue that the more the people the
stronger (Military) the country. And some
countries see the reduction of population as a
political ploy of the rich countries to stop the
poor countries from expanding further. Was
Malthus right or was he wrong?
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"Malthus may have been wrong on specifics, but in
general principle he was right," Robert Kaplan
says. "All the countries with violent upheavals
in the 1980s and '90s were the ones that showed
the highest growth rate in the '60s! Every
country where bloody internecine civil wars have
occurred in recent years had a huge population
preceding the conflict."
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• Could he be right? This is from the U.N.
  population data
• Rwanda, from 2.1 million in 1950 to 8 million
  today
• Haiti, from 3.3 million then to 7.5 million
  today Algeria, from 8.8 million to 30.2 million
• Afghanistan, 9 million to 24.8 million
• Zaire or Congo, 12.2 to 49 million
• Nicaragua, 1.1 million to 4.8 million
• Tajikistan, 1.5 million to 6.1 million
• El Salvador, 2 million to 5.8 million
• Ethiopia, 18.4 million to 58.4 million today.

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Take the civil war in Algeria. Kaplan writes.
It all started with the '92 elections (when the
military rescinded them because the Islamic
fundamentalists were winning.) But actually that
'beginning' was the end of a long culmination of
events in the '60s when Algeria began to show one
of the highest population growth rates in the
world. That brought hordes of children into the
cities where infrastructures were collapsing, and
soon unemployed young men were roaming around
with nothing to do. 1992 was merely the spark."
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To cite two other examples, it is no accident
that before the Rwandan genocide of 1995-96,
Rwandan women were giving birth an average of
eight times. It is also no accident that, in
Haiti during these last years of implosion and
civil war, Haitian women were giving birth an
average of six times. These high population rates
do not actually cause the slaughters, of course,
but they exacerbate all the other problems and
remove the possibilities of easier or quicker
solutions. They also throw people too closely
together and swiftly involve them in a fight for
food and water and make genocide an acceptable
alternative. (Georgie Anne Geyer Universal
Features SyndicateMay 22, 1998 )
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In my own 34 years in the foreign field, I have
seen how the sheer crowdedness of increasingly
dingy and untenable urban centers (33 million in
the valley of Mexico City alone now, and it's
getting harder and harder even to breathe, much
less move) causes frustration and then conflict
on every possible level. I find myself writing
more and more about the environmental scarcity
that is upon us everywhere -- the sobering
disappearance of water in China, for
instance. (Georgie Anne Geyer Universal
Features SyndicateMay 22, 1998 )
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There are some countries that are making it
because they are smart and disciplined, and
because they care about the quality and evolution
of life. One of these is little Tunisia on the
north coast of Africa, which in those same '60s,
when all these other countries were confounding
their fates with overpopulation, introduced birth
control. That is one major reason given by
Tunisians for a thriving populace, which is
bettering itself today.
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The Green Revolution and the fact that food
supplies have been increasing faster than
population in countries like Mexico, India the
Philippines, and not to mention Canada and the
USA, give weight to Boserup and her theories.
So who is right? It Depends!
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The End!