”I heard a spokesman for the Foundation for Economic Education, one of the oldest free-market organizations in the United States.(29) It was founded to study and advance the freedom philosophy. Its mission is to offer the most consistent case for the ‘first principles’ of freedom: the sanctity of private property, individual liberty, the rule of law, the free market, and the moral superiority of individual choice and responsibility over coercion.
“Its spokesman said that these ideals have been ignored for far too long. We need to go back to the thinking of the Founding Fathers. In arguing that overpopulation is a myth he said that the prefix ‘over’ implies a standard. What is the optimum or ideal number of people of the world. ‘For overpopulation to be real, there must be conditions that are undesirable and unmistakably caused by the presence of a certain number of people. If such indications cannot be found, we are entitled to dismiss the claim of overpopulation.’ Maybe there are too few people in the world today. What are the requirements for the world to be overpopulated?
”Well I would come back with the question of what is either the maximum or the
optional population. There certainly is famine, deepening poverty, disease,
environmental degradation and depletion of natural resources. There is certainly a great deal of illegal immigration from countries that don’t have enough work for their population. Central America, Southern Africa, the Mideast and other areas had people
fleeing to the US, Europe and other areas. We might ask if people in their native country should have the freedom to work there at livable wages. I wonder what he would say to that?
“If you would look at each of these things that he just mentioned he could answer his own question. But we have here a person holding freedom above survival. If we don’t survive what good is freedom, we’ll all be dead!”
“He said that the television pictures of starving, emaciated Africans are heartbreaking, but they are not evidence of overpopulation. Since 1985, we have witnessed famine in Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia. Those nations have one thing in
common: They are among the least populated areas on Earth. Although their populations
are growing, the people there are not hungry because the world can't produce enough
food; they are hungry because civil war keeps food from getting to them. Moreover, the very sparseness of their populations makes them vulnerable to famine because there aren't enough people to support sophisticated roads and transportation systems that would
facilitate the movement of food.”
”Let me check my laptop. . . . . . . . Here under WorldAtlas.com is a list of the population densities 192 countries. The most dense is Monaco with 42,000 people per square mile. Next comes Singapore and Malta. Somalia has about 35 people per square
mile, they are number 169 of the 192 countries in the world. Sudan has 42 people per square mile so that makes them number 159. Ethiopia has 127 people per square mile and they are about midway in the list at 102.
“Ray, your source doesn’t seem to recognize that food costs money and these are pretty poor countries. A good part of what they eat is donated to them. So somebody else is paying for it. He also seems to assume that all land is arable. It is not. I want to get into that in a few minutes so let’s leave that for awhile.”
”Then he said that in the 20th century there has been no famine that has not been
caused by civil war, irrational economic policies, deliberate retribution or natural disasters. In addition, the number of people affected by famine has fallen compared with the late 19th century --not just as a percentage of the world's population but in absolute numbers.
“ He has a point when he says that natural disasters, wars and poor economic policies are the causes of most famines. Maybe he forgot to leave out ‘acts of God.’ I don’t know what percentage of famines are caused by each of the factors he listed. Some of course are caused by drought, but this would be a natural disaster.
“In the last century it was estimated that 70 million people died from famine.
Some of these were natural disasters, by that I mean lack of water, freezing or too much heat-- such as in Bangladesh, Russia and the Sahel drought in Africa that killed 1 million people. There is no question that wars caused famines in many cases. But whatever the cause, the people are still dead. So famines do cause deaths when there are more people
than there is food to feed them.”
“He went on to say that food is abundant. Since 1948, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, annual world food production has outpaced the increase in population by about 1 percent. Today, per capita production and per-acre yields are at all-time highs. Prices of agricultural products have been falling for more than 100 years. The average inflation-adjusted price of those products, indexed to wages, fell by more than 74% between 1950 and 1990. While Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute and the noted butterfly expert Paul Ehrlich predicted higher food prices and increasing scarcity, food is becoming cheaper and more plentiful. Anyway that’s what he said. What is your answer to that Wreck?”
”There are famines today that are not even classed as famines because they are not so different from many countries’ normal states of malnutrition. A recent situation in Malawi is such a situation, where many called it a famine. Let me give you some thoughts based on a book I read by Cormac Ó Gráda (30) First, he wrote that we need to define what a famine is. An accepted definition is that it is having one death per 10,000 people per day. A severe famine is twice that number. But some scholars would include a broader definition which
would include endemic malnutrition. If we were to use that definition we have many famines across the world today. We can look at your informant’s use of the term ‘famine’ without defining it is a semantic problem. Anyway most famines through history have been the result of poor harvests.
”While it is partially true that the worst 20th century famines were related to wars and revolutions, like those perpetrated by Mao and Stalin--that was not the whole story. In fact as far back as 2500 years ago there are records of Jewish and Roman famines related to war. But poor harvests like those in Niger and Southern Africa in the early part of this century were due primarily to crop failure. The Bengal famine of 1943–44, which killed well over two million, seems to have been a result of several possible causes, none directly attributable to war. A cyclone hit the area destroying many rice fields. There seems to have been an influx of a plant disease that may have destroyed many of the crops. There was also a large export of rice to British troops in other parts of the world. The North Korean famine of the 1990s has been estimated to have killed from a quarter million to over 3 million people. It was caused by a number of floods and by the fact that the Soviet Union could no longer supplement the food needs of North Korea. Then there was the drought and the economic incompetence of the Zimbabwean government in 2002 that resulted in another major famine.
“Famines in the past have been related to crop failures, violent actions, and economic factors like when a controlling country takes the food produced in one country away from the farmers and sells it to the highest bidders. But in any case famines are due to a lack of food in an area because of natural or social causes. The point is people are still starving, there wasn’t enough food produced to feed them--too many people for the food available.
“Violent social actions, like wars, may not necessarily be the cause of the famine, but they can increase the negative effects from a very poor harvest. This happened in the Soviet Union in 1932 and 33 and in China from 1959 to 1961. Just as ancient Egyptian famines were usually the result of the slower flow of the Nile, famines in the Indian subculture are often related to light monsoons. Throughout history droughts have generally been related to poor rainfall or too low river flows. Sometimes pests, like locusts or grasshoppers, are the cause.
In temperate zones, cold and rain are more likely to be the problem
“In the late 1800s El Niño conditions in the Pacific led to a great deal of rainfall in Southeast Asia and Australasia, when the low pressure area shifted again it caused droughts in these areas. Even volcanic eruptions can cause growing problems for the countries affected by the clouds of ashes. And of course when armies burn the crops or salt the fields, or politicians implement poor economic plans, famine can be made more of a possibility. But the major cause is generally weather. So Ray, the protestations of the spokesman you are quoting are flawed. There may be contributing causes that increase the effects of a famine, but weather and pestilence are generally the fundamental causes. The point is that there were too many people for the food available.
“You said he was writing in 1993. So more than a few years have passed us by since then. You remember in 2008 there was a huge global food crisis. World prices for food nearly doubled in the previous two years. The poor, who usually spend 50 to 70% of their incomes on food, were hit extremely hard. There were food riots in 15 countries from Brazil to Bangladesh.
“In 2010 the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization, in its report on the Agricultural Outlook for 2010-2019, predicted that there will be still higher farm prices in the future. You can certainly understand this. With oil so important in agriculture and with its price reaching all-time highs, with fresh water being reduced, and with less arable land to grow food on, along with the growth in population, food prices obviously will continue to go higher. If you don’t grow your own food you are going to have problems feeding yourself.”