The Agricultural Dilemma

How Not to Feed the World

Glenn Davis Stone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000609745
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze biologiche
• Subtopic: Ecologia

The Agricultural Dilemma questions everything we think we know about the current state of agriculture and how to, or perhaps more importantly how not to, feed a world with a growing population.

This book is about the three fundamental forms of agriculture: Malthusian (expansion), industrialization (external-input-dependent), and intensification (labor-based). The best way to understand the three agricultures, and how we tend to get it wrong, is to consider what drives their growth. The book provides a thoughtful, critical analysis that upends entrenched misconceptions such as that we are running out of land for food production and that our only hope is the development of new agricultural technologies. The book contains engaging and enlightening vignettes and short histories, with case studies drawn from across the globe to bring to life this important debate and dilemma. The book concludes by arguing there is a viable alternative to industrial agriculture which will allow us to meet the world's needs and it ponders why such alternatives have been downplayed, obscured, or hidden from view.

This important book is essential reading for all studying and researching food production and agriculture, and more broadly for all interested in ensuring we are able to feed our growing population.

1 Three Agricultures

DOI: 10.4324/9781003286257-1

One Stinking Hot Night in Delhi

One summer night in 1966, a young Stanford biology professor named Paul Ehrlich landed in Delhi. It was his first time in India, and he was accompanied by his wife and young daughter. The family soon found themselves on an unforgettable ride through the bustling Indian capital in an ancient taxi hopping with fleas. Two years later, Ehrlich described his experience on that “stinking hot night in Delhi” on the first page of his best-selling book The Population Bomb (1968):

As we crawled through the city, we entered a crowded slum area. The temperature was well over 100, and the air was a haze of dust and smoke. The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. As we moved slowly through the mob, hand horn squawking, the dust, noise, heat and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect…since that night I’ve known the feel of overpopulation.

Some would say that Ehrlich just had a bad reaction to his first brush with the grittiness and bustle of a Third World city; “a hot summer night on Broadway in New York or Piccadilly Circus in London would put Ehrlich in the midst of a far larger crowd,” noted Mahmood Mamdani (1972).¹ But Ehrlich was not alone in recoiling from India’s cities. A few years later Norman Borlaug, the “father of the Green Revolution” who had bred wheat seeds that would be credited with saving India from starvation, used his Nobel acceptance speech to rage against “the grotesque concentration of human beings into the poisoned and clangorous environment of pathologically hypertrophied megalopolis” (Borlaug 1970).

But Ehrlich (Figure 1.1) was intent on looking beyond the teeming Delhi streets to a larger problem reflected in the crowds. India was in the grip of a drought, had high birthrates, and was importing millions of tons of American wheat each year. It was time to look at things as they are – and as they would soon be. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” he wrote ominously in The Population Bomb. “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now” (Ehrlich 1968, 13). The next year he added that by 1985, “enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.” More chilling yet, “[m]ost of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born”; by 1975, “some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions” (Ehrlich 1969, 28).

FIGURE 1.1 Biologist Paul Ehrlich in 1970. Photo Credit: Chuck Painter/Stanford News Service.

Some argued that the planet was nowhere near its limits and that food production was growing rapidly, but Ehrlich was not having any of it, insisting instead that overpopulation “will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make;” soon 100–200 million would be starving yearly (Ehrlich 1970, 293). He sounded like a man with harsh inescapable facts; it was the optimists, with their blindness to the population explosion and naïve belief in technology, who seemed out of touch. The dreamers who refused to recognize the problem of “people, people, people, people” were the real threat to the poor.

Predictions of Third World famine, often citing India, were nothing new. Biologist William Vogt’s best-selling 1948 Road to Survival bemoaned Indians “breeding with the irresponsibility of codfish” and already being well over a number that could be fed. In the 1950s influential reports from both the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations warned of emergency conditions. Then the 1960s saw a crescendo of these claims. In 1965 predictions of looming Indian famine came from Georg Borgstrom’s doomsaying book The Hungry Planet and from the young USDA economist Lester Brown, who would go on to a career warning about famines that never came. In 1966 US President Lyndon Johnson repeatedly warned of starvation in India and even used his State of the Union speech to promise an attack on hunger and aid to countries trying to curb their population. Still the New York Times chastised him for not showing sufficient alarm about a world where a specter “more terrible than Malthus ever conceived” loomed, and where “famine stalks the great subcontinent of India” (New York Times 1966).²

Ehrlich’s bomb metaphor was not new either. The Hugh Moore Fund – founded by the Dixie Cup magnate – had been circulating a pamphlet entitled The Population Bomb since 1954 (Figure 1.2). The influential report of the Draper Commission on US aid policy was titled “The Population Explosion.” Philip Appleman’s (1965) Silent Explosion had predicted Calcutta’s streets would be lined with “ragged skeletons” when they ran out of food.

FIGURE 1.2 Left: The Hugh Moore Fund’s 1954 Population Bomb pamphlet. Just as Ehrlich’s book by the same name would later do, the pamphlet’s lurid predictions of an overrun world touched a nerve in readers. A newspaper editor back from a trip to Asia wrote Moore that “the only truly constructive and effective solution I can think of would be for the United Nations to send out a task force to poison village wells” (Merchant 2015, 441). Right: The cover of Environmental Action magazine from 1970, showing the human crowd now so large that people were starting to drop off into space.

But none of these earlier warnings caught fire in the public imagination like Ehrlich’s did. He was a bold writer, a charismatic speaker, and a Stanford scientist – although many would later suggest that his analysis far exceeded his actual expertise (Merchant 2015, 442). He caught the attention of Tonight Show host Johnny Carson, who invited him on as a guest over 20 times where he delivered compelling accounts of overpopulation and famine in his confident baritone. Ehrlich emerged as the most prolific writer on the population debate in the US (Wilmoth and Ball 1992, 637).

To Ehrlich, the solutions to overpopulation might be disturbing, but the lack of solution was unthinkably worse. He floated the idea of adding “temporary sterilants” to the water with government officials rationing an antidote to let selected people reproduce (1968, 130–131); for India he advocated forced sterilization, but even then it could be a country “we must allow to slip down the drain” (Chase 1977, 398). Ehrlich held that the world should triage the available food when the shortages hit, leading to a massive “die back” and emergence of a world government with strict controls on agriculture and population.

Growing Fears

How these dire predictions could quickly become mainstream is an interesting question.³ It is true that by the 1960s the baby boom was on and population was growing faster than it had in the past: world population topped 1 billion in the early 1800s, 2 billion by 1930, and 3 billion by 1960. But claims of catastrophic overpopulation had been bandied about when population growth was much lower, as in 1923 when Edward Murray East (who we will meet in Chapter 5) wrote that mankind was threatened by population “advancing in a tidal wave the like of which has never before been seen” (East 1923, 20). Now again we were being told we were overpopulated; but over what? Certainly not over the number that can be fed, as agricultural production had been outgrowing population for over a century and it was growing faster than ever. (As we will see, overproduction levels were reaching new heights in the 1960s.) Ehrlich may have felt that India was running out of food, but actually the country was taking land out of food production to grow fiber crops, and its agricultural exports were booming (Cullather 2010, 180).

Dread of overpopulation spread anyway. The year 1970 saw the dawn of the modern environmental movement, which was joined at the hip to overpopulation fears. By 1970, Moore’s image of landmasses being overrun with people would be updated to show the whole planet being overrun (Figure 1.2). “Few nations,” wrote an environmental historian recently, “have been more aware of – and anxious about – population growth than Americans in the late 1960s and 1970s” (Robertson 2012, 1). And not just in the US; the Club of Rome was formed in 1968 by an international group worried about the future of the world, and its 1972 book Limits to Growth insisted that population was growing “exponentially” (Meadows et al. 1972). Ehrlich’s warnings played perfectly into a social movement then gathering steam.

His warnings were also buoyed by the excitable nature of youth. Ehrlich taught undergraduates at Stanford and he had a knack for captivating their attention. His juggernaut as a public intellectual began with his course on human evolution, to which he added a wildly popular lecture on “where we are going” stressing the impending disaster of overpopulation. This touched a nerve with the baby boomer students of the late 1960s for whom apocalyptic scenarios had been made real by nuclear shelter signs and “duck and cover” drills in grade school. The year after Population Bomb appeared, the class valedictorian at Mills College cited Ehrlich in her commencement speech entitled “The Future is a Cruel Hoax”:

Within the next ten years, we will witness widespread famines, and possible global plagues raging through famine-weakened populations. Soon we may have to ask ourselves grisly questions like ‘Will I be willing to shoot my neighbor if he tries to steal my last loaf of bread? Will I be forced to become a cannibal?’

(Mills Quarterly 1969)⁴

I was one of those baby boomers, a teen-ager living in an Ohio college town in 1968, and I remember being riveted by Ehrlich pontificating on the Tonight Show. Here was a charismatic scientist who seemed to be pulling back the curtain on an unfolding cataclysm. I remember discussions with similarly alarmed friends. It was as if the apocalyptic fears of a generation taught to run to the fallout shelter had transferred focus from the nuclear bomb to the population bomb.

But the concerns were just as real among adults, indeed among leaders. In 1974, the US House of Representatives issued a report that spoke of “a potentially devastating crisis is on the horizon,” asking

Will America allow a food shortage to surprise us … and only then react after we find people standing in line from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. on Tuesday and Thursday mornings waiting to get into their local grocery store to buy a limited quantity of food?

(US House of Representatives 1974)

Dissent

There were dissenting voices at the time, even if they were fewer in number and less riveting than Ehrlich. Some contested whether world population was anywhere near the limit that could be well fed on the planet, a theoretical number that scientists had a long history of estimating. In How Many People Can the Earth Support? (1998) demographer Joel Cohen pointed to over 60 independent estimates, ranging from under 1 billion to more than a trillion. The year before Population Bomb appeared, there had been two scientific estimates of the number of mouths the earth could feed: one was 157 billion, the other 38–48 billion. At the time, world population was just under 3.5 billion.

Some physical scientists took issue with Ehrlich’s predictions. John Maddox, physicist and editor of Nature, produced a 1972 book entitled The Doomsday Syndrome that disparaged the “prophets of doom.” Maddox insisted that famine was receding rather than growing, and that the problems of the 1970s and 1980s could be “how best to dispose of food surpluses in countries where famine has until recently been epidemic.”

The challengers to Ehrlich who attracted most media attention were conservative pundits, cornucopians who thought that capitalism and science would feed the world. One was commentator Ben Wattenberg who rebutted Ehrlich with a New Republic essay entitled “The Nonsense Explosion”;⁵ economist Julian Simon, originally a population alarmist who had morphed into a free-market capitalist cornucopian, engaged in heated arguments in print with Ehrlich, who repeatedly called him an imbecile. Imbecilic Simon would later have the last laugh in winning a very public bet with Ehrlich on resources running out (Sabin 2013), but for the most part Simon held forth on limited venues like William F. Bu...