Thomas Malthus and others!

• 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.

Stage Food supply Population

A 1 1

B 2 2

C 3 4

D 4 8

E 5 16

etc.

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 world’s population?)

Pop.

Time

Food

Time

• 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.

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

• 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.

Population is the red line. Food is the blue line

Population is the red line. Food is the blue line

However, didn’t 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.

• 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…

• 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?”

Neo-Malthusians

Contemporary Geographers say that two characteristics of recent population growth make Malthus’ theory more realistic today.

1. 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.

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.

2. 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.

Malthus’ Critics

Malthus believed that the world’s 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.

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.

One of the quotes that supported Boserup’s 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”

Another sentence quoted from one of her works says that “population growth causes agricultural growth”

Esther Boserup will appear again when we do the chapter on Agriculture.

She argued that when population density in LDC’s 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).

In Boserup’s 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.

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".

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.

Why would Ridge-Till be a better method – Look at these images!

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.

Malthusian – PessimisticBoserupian - RealisticCornucopian - Optimistic

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.

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?

"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."

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.

“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."

“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 )

“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 )

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.

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!

The End!