HUNGER?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 932, 21 June 1957, Page 13

HUNGER?

MUST MEN STARVE? the Malthusian Controversy; by Jacob Oser; Jonathan Cape, English price 25/-. \ HAT is there about this topic that brings out the worst in authors? Men like Fairfield Osborne in Our Plundered Planet or William Vogt in Road to Survival become almost hys‘terical as they re-state the central theme of Malthus that population tends to out-run food supply, a theme which fell into disrepute when the New World and Australasia were pouring their new food into the maw of hungry Europe. Now men are asking anew "Will there be food for man’s population increase," as people in these lands of supply begin to consume their surplus. The gross overstatement of the position by Osborne and Vogt does not necessarily mean that there is no case to answer. Oser in this book has some of the answers. But not all. He, frankly avows his trouble in his preface-he is prejudiced. It is easy to pick holes in authors like the two cited above, or to go back to what Malthus originally said and dissect ity Oser discusses known methods of increasing food production as they might feed hungry mouths. But what can one say of a man who writes: "There are 80 rivers in the world each of which discharges at least 10,000,000 acre-feet

annually into the oceans; altogether they discharge 12.000,000,000 acre-feet. If only half of this water were _- spread evenly over all the 2,300,000,000 acres of cultivated land of the world, it would provide 31 inches of water. But this might turn out to be quite difficult to accomplish . . ." Well, really! And later he points out that if cattle power were to be replaced by tractors in India, the food supply would be increased by 50 per cent. How long

would it take and where is the capital coming from? Oser doesn’t answer. When he comes to potential methods he is in the fascinating field of the future-the heat pump, the solar cooker, distilling sea water, soil-less farming, and so on. Even to a dam at Gibraltar which would lower the level of the Mediterranean 330 feet in 100 years and lay bare 90,000 square miles of new land. A lot of sound sense is mixed up with statements such as "trees will force the winds upward, and by cooling them will cause rain to fall," which is nonsense. All this is an indication that the real core of the problem has escaped Oser completely. It is one purely of tempo. Can the changes in production methods be brought in rapidly enough to offset the growing-pains of population until higher living standards bring falling rates of increase? The author simply does not face it, lost in a flood of unsorted statisties. There are answers to most of the arguments of the Neo-Malthusians. I’m afraid Must Men Starve? doesn’t vive

them;

D. W.

McKenzie