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units today there will have to be four in
20 years. A road with a certain capacity
today will have to have double the
capacíty in 20 years.
It
will be necessary
to double farro production, double
imports, double exports, and so forth.
The job of doubling everything in 20
years would be a colossal one for a
nation like the United States. The very
thought of a country like Honduras
doubling everything in 20 years is sim–
ply preposterous.
As Professor Georg Borgstrom of
Michigan State University wrote, the
world is basically a worldwide network
of slums with a few islands of
affiuence. Roughly only 15% of the
people in the world have anything sim–
ilar
to
the quality of life that we have.
Starvation NOW!
One thing people often say to me is,
"When is this population-food crisis
going to
be
upon us?" For about ten to
twenty million people in the world last
year, it has beeo upon them, stomped
them into the ground, and moved on.
Last year between ten and twenty mil–
lion people starved to death.
But sorne dogmatically assert,
"Nobody starved in India last year."
It's quite true if you check Indian vital
statistics you will find no column that
says "starved to death." No country in
the world will
admit
that its citizens are
dying of starvation. People get weaker
and weaker from hunger or malnutri–
tion and then die of a common cold or a
festering hangnail and are chalked up
in the mortality columns under "com–
mon cold" or "festering hangnail." But
there is only one rational standard of
death by starvation: anyone has starved
to death who would have lived if he
' had had an adequate diet.
How many people in the world have
an adequate diet today? It's very diffi–
cult to say. But somewhere between one
and two billion of the total 3.6 billion
do not. An inadequate diet mcans one
or both of two things: either under–
nourishment - that is, the individual
receives
too few
calories - or what is
perhaps more serious in the world,
malnourishment, usually inadequate
access to animal protein, or other
high-quality protein.
Protein malnourishment may be the
The
PLAIN TRUTH
most pressing nutritional problem in
the world today.
lf
pregnant women
and very young children do not receive
adequate protein in their diets, the chil–
dren grow up mentally retarded.
So there is a very serious food prob–
lem right now. Right now we are not
managing to feed adequately more than
half of the population of the earth.
Environmental Deterioration
I wish I could tell you that the only
problem we face is an imbalance
between food and people. But it's not
that simple. Overlying the whole situ–
ation is the general problem of envi–
ronmental deterioration.
We are utterly dependent on the
ecological systems of this planet for al!
of our food. We are also dependent on
them for our waste disposal, and, of
course, for our oxygen supply. Our very
lives depend on this complex of systems
- and what are we doing to them? Just
about everything you can think of.
We are dosing the environment with
materials that poison virtually every–
thing. Sorne of these poisons are
extremely persistent and are absolutely
everywhere !
Changing Climate
One of the main things that we are
doing is changing the dimate of the
planet. We are accelerating dimatic
changes in all sorts of ways. The di–
mate of the planet depends primarily on
the heat balance, the balance between
incoming and outgoing solar radiation.
Adding carbon dioxide to the atmo–
sphere, which we have been doing at a
merey cate since about 1870 by burning
fossil fuels, tends to warm the entire
planet. The average temperature rose
considerably until about 1940, and then
the trend reversed. We now have a
cooling trend which most meteorologists
blame on the amount of particulate pol–
lution that has been added to the
atmosphere.
Pollution is now absolutely world–
wide. There has been a 35% increase in
the particulate pollution over Mauna
Loa, on the Island of Hawaii. There is
a veil of pollution that covers the entire
planet. A receot UNESCO conference
estimated we have about 20 years before
the atmosphere shall have become so
June-July, 1970
polluted that the whole planet will start
to die.
Sorne meteorologists think the SST
( supersonic transports) will make 100
percent doud cover over certain areas of
the planet. There already is an increase
in cirrus doud cover from the contrails
from jet aircraft. Moreover, the carbon
in jet aircraft exhaust catalyzes the
destruction of ozone in the upper atmo–
sphere. The presence of ozone is our
protection against being fried by ultra–
violet light coming in from the sun.
All these things affect humanity in
various ways. But the major effect they
will have is to change the dimate in
relation to agriculture. Agriculture in
most parts of the world is utterly
dependent on the local dimate. People
are extremely conservative in their agri–
cultura! practices. Very often their
entire lives are interwoven with their
ideas about agriculture and these ideas
do not change rapidly. So even in areas
where the dimatic change is for the bet–
ter, there will almost certaioly be a
reduction in agt:icultural production
accompanying a dimatic change. One of
the more ominous things we are doing
to the environment is changing the di–
mate of earth at a time when we are
already ultra-marginal oo our food pro–
duction as far as the world as a whole is
concerned.
The "Green Revolution"
Another example is the green revolu–
tion. What does the picture really look
like?
There have been sorne spectacular
yield increases in a few areas. These
have been partly due to the high-yield
grains and partly due to good luck with
the weather in most areas. 1968 was a
spectacular year in Asia for rice produc–
tion. However, there was a 2% absolute
drop in food production during the
same period in South America, where
the growth rate of the population is
almost 3% ayear. But the increase from
these grains cannot be depended on to
save humanity. It is impossible that it
will buy us more than 20 years of con–
tinued population growth.
Why ?
First, there are all kinds of economic
problems. The high-yield grains do not
produce high yields unless they are