SES ee pee

fas long as living man can remember, that innocent
amiable old codger, Bruce Hutchison, has been
the world that Malthus was right in contending
Bore absence of restraint, population would outrun
. ugh Supply, and nature would reduce the population
A Starvation, disease and other calamities. |
Same time the actuary, Jeff Calvert, tells us that
ve the birth rate is too low, the average age of the
ation is going to rise rapidly and bankrupt our
On and social security systems. The average person
s, ‘pardoned for feeling that you can’t have it both
ae you had forgotten, the Reverend Thomas Rob- -
althus held that in the absence of restraint the
4 fro, between the sexes” would cause population to
Bessig om. generation to generation in geometric pro-
A n While, on the other hand, no matter how dili-
Y it might be tended, the produce of the soil could
8fow arithmetically. To make clear what that

a the following table illustrates the two progres-

Pply: 1 Qe Sor awarr i 5 sie 7.
lat the Malthus principle says, then, is that popula-
Will tend to double every generation and the food
if Only to increase by a constant amount at best, so
ino eulation were not limited in some way it would
%, e¥en generations from any given point by a factor
*, While food supply would rise only by a factor of
1: Thus people in the seventh generation would
9nly one ninth as much food as those in the first. Of
Md oth long before that point was reached, starvation

lr miseries would have taken their toll.

What of the Food Supply?

happens, seven generations have passed since
ls Wrote his famous essay. In that time, the popu-
ofthe world has increased from an estimated one
Souls to about 4.5 billion. That increase, so far
julfilling Malthus’ prediction for population

, has fallen far short of his predicted growth of the
eae 4.5 times instead of the arithmetic progres-

PPOse that a dedicated Malthusian would say that -
ation had increased so slowly because it had been
a) wed by the many wars that have taken place, as
8S by epidemics and famine.
Of these factors have indeed been present, but
ie their effects have been, they were nowhere
ticient to account for the difference between
S’ projections ‘and the facts. Even in countries
Ve been little affected by war or hunger, such as
the Norway and England the natural growth rate
'€ rate of growth of population, corrected for

‘times; or the geometric increase to 64 times.“

Economics
for you

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immigration and emigration) has been less than, or slight-
ly more than enough to account for a population increase
in accordance with Malthus’ arithmetical progression.
And what of the food supply? Has it increased arith-
metically, geometrically, or what? Available statistics

_ will not provide us with any precise answer with respect

to so long a period. However, a little reasoning can lead
us to some kind of approximation.
China as a Measurement

The present population of China is about one billion
people, and therefore roughly equal to the population of
the world in Malthus’ time. China occupies one sixteenth
of the earth’s land surface. In recent years few, if any,
foreign observers have reported hunger or malnutrition
among the Chinese people. They may not be well-fed by
American or European standards, but obviously they are
well enough fed to survive, and for the population to
grow somewhat faster than the rest of the world.

If the whole world was producing enough food to
support one billion people in Malthus’ day, and China,
with one-sixteenth of the world’s surface can today sus-
tain the same number of people, then, as a first approxi-
mation, we can say that the world as a whole should be
able to support 16 times the Malthus’ era population,
whereas it needs to support only 4.5 times the popula-
tion.

But that is not the whole story. China is not by any
means the most densely settled country, nor is its agri-
culture the most productive in the world. Consider the
countries along the north coast of continental Europe.
The German Democratic Republic, Denmark and the
Netherlands have a combined area equal to two per cent
of that of China, and a population equalling 3.56 per cent
that of China. Their people are incomparably better fed.’

Each square kilometer of their territory could therefore:

‘support at least twice as many people at China’s stan-
dard of nutrition.

Extend the agricultural technology of Europe to the
whole world (which, admittedly would require enor-
mous infusions of capital and education) and the poten-
tial food resource, by this measure, would be sufficient
for 32 billion people. This, then, is not far from reversing
Malthus’ principle: not far from saying that population
grows by somewhat less than an arithmetic progression

- while potential food supply grows by geometric progres-

sion.

The problem isn’t too many people chasing too little food,
rather it is the case of an unequal division of the world’s
resources which is atthe root of hunger. ns

Malthus misread both sides of the relation. Pious par-
son that he was, he could not conceive of birth control as
being anything other than vice. Thus the only remedy to
excessive population that he could prescribe was late
marriage and abstinence from sex. The world has un-
folded somewhat differently. On the other hand, while
he recognized that modern technology could somewhat
improve the productivity of agriculture, he went on to
say “yet the increased quantity of the necessaries of life
so obtained can never be such as to supersede, for any
length of time, the operation of the preventive and posi-
tive checks to population.”” He would be astonished to
see what farmers can produce today.

Capitalism Won't Solve It
By..constant’ repetition:of. such expressions. as.‘‘the

teeming multitudes” etc., people have been accustomed

to the notion that overpopulation is a feature of the third
world. If anything, the reverse is true. Europe is five
times as densely populated as either Africa or South
America. West Germany is three times as densely popu-
lated as China.

What is true is that third world countries have a much
higher ration of population to economically developed
resources. But this is a question of imperialist exploita-
tion, maldistribution of capital and of social systems.
The problem will not be solved under capitalism.

*Sident Reagan’s recent exercise in dive-bomber
acy has apparently succeeded in at least one
" Intent: polls show that fully 80 per cent of Ameri-
“port their President’s action against Libya. The
a fe ting a wave of chauvinism and war-fever that
ay he aptly labelled ‘‘Rambomania’’. —
0 €Vver Reagan’s plans for Libya, he is clearly hop-
_ Use this new political capital to support his much
n Nous war against Nicaragua. It cannot be a coin-
ce that each of the two U.S. attacks in the past
one cAinst Libyan targets came on the very eve of
ant House votes on Contra aid — both of which
‘Sident, significantly, lost.
Month’s disinformation special — staged, conve-
>On the eve-of the Senate Contra aid vote, which
Narrowly won— in which Nicaragua was alleged

1 oops”, backfired badly on the White House.
: S case, the Reagan administration’s mealy-
he fe ‘concern’’ over international law was explod-
‘ le a refreshing change — by an establishment
Dh a Writing in the Christian Science Monitor,
titer Ho Harsch noted that even if the Sandinistas did
5 en territory in order to knock-out Contra
orey were entirely justified in doing so under the
ntsc Ot pursuit’’. There are legal precedents for this,
ing (XPlained, one of which must be acutely embar-
Or the champions of international justice in

on:

March, 1916,” wrote Harsch, “‘Pancho Villa, a

C irregular leader, sortied in the United States,
Olumbus, New Mexico, set fire to the town and

Ve <6 3 f ee
© ‘invaded’’ neighboring Honduras with ‘‘at least _

killed 16 of its citizens. President Woodrow Wilson re-

sponded by sending a U.S. army of 6,000 men into—

Mexico, under General John J. Pershing, in pursuit of
Pancho Villa. They went 300 miles into Mexico, but they
never caught up with him. The American action was in
so-called hot pursuit of a brigand force that the govern-
ment of Mexico could not control. The action was deem-
ed proper under international law’’. -

Given this, Harsch quite properly asks, why should
Nicaragua not be ‘‘entitled to respond in like manner to
multiple incursions into its own territory from Hon-
duras, which Honduras was unable or unwilling to
prevent”’?

The Reagan administration has had even more dif-
ficulty in its efforts to sell the Contras to the American
public as a band of heroic ‘freedom fighters’, or, in the
President’s inimitable turn of phrase, ‘‘the moral equiva-
lent of (American’s) founding fathers’. Knowing
Americans must have squirmed in humiliation when
Reagan declared, ‘‘I am aContra,”’ although viewed with
appropriate irony, the statement was more than ac-
curate.

Book-reading Americans have been shocked by the

. revelations contained in a newly released study of the

Contras by long-time Washington Post correspondent
Christopher Dickey. Dickey’s book, With the Contras, isa
firsthand account of the unremitting savagery, nauseat-

__ ing brutality, torture, corruption and chicanery of these

ex-Somoza Guardsmen and their mercenary recruits.
The book has hit the bestseller lists, a sure sign that a
growing number of Americans are becoming aware of
the swamp their President is trying to lead them into.

_ Offensive against Nicaragua via Tripoli

President Reagan, who fancies himself as the God-
father of an anticommunist ‘‘national liberation strug-
gle’, must despair when he compares his Contras to a
genuine liberation movement such as El Salvador’s
FMLN.  .

The Contras, after almost five years, have been unable
to take and hold a single square inch of Nicaraguan
territory, or to enunciate a political program that has the
slightest appeal for the masses of that country. They
remain dangerous, but isolated in their Honduran sanc-
tuaries; an ersatz guerrilla army, a creature of American
money and power. .

The FMLN, on the other hand, has fought for more
than six hard years against a U.S.-backed government
military machine, and appears more firmly entrenched
than ever. The Salvadoran rebels have no rich sponsors,
nor foreign bases, yet they continue to control 15-20 per
cent of the territory of El Salvador, including many
sizable towns. :

There is a fundamental truth here, which no amount of
rhetoric or money can ever change. A genuine revolu-
tionary movement, such as FMLN, is rooted in the
people; the Contras’ only natural constituency is in
Washington. .

In the final analysis, the Reagan administration under-
stands this, and that is why they have moved to escalate
the level of violence in the world. Their aim is to condi-
tion the American public into an acceptance of major

’ force as a routine tool of U.S. foreign policy. The bombs

that rained down on Tripoli two weeks ago were part of a.
much larger shipment that has “‘Managua”’ written all

over it.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE, MAY 7, 19865