Transcript Thomas Malthus - Crescent School

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:
Pop.
2 – 4 – 8 – 16...
Time
As opposed to arithmetic growth:
1 – 2 – 3 – 4...
Food
Time
(we will find out later this is the way
food production grows – Can this
type of growth feed the world’s
population?)
• 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 –
Boserupian Cornucopian -
Pessimistic
Realistic
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 Syndicate
May 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 Syndicate
May 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!