WORLD’S POPULATION

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 35, 5 November 1928, Page 13

WORLD’S POPULATION

PROBLEM OF FOOD . SUPPLIES The increase in the world's population during the last hundred years lias given a vital significance to the question of pressure on food supplies and of consequent possibilities of national and racial conflict. It was in response to the growing conviction of the need for organised study of these questions that an International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems was constituted in Paris last July, at a meeting of scientific r presentatives of most of the leading countries of the world. Professor Raymond Pearl, Director of the Institute for Biological Research at Baltimore, was elected the first president of the union, which hopes to begin practical work with the appointment of a general secretary and the opening of an office in Paris early in the coming year. ’ Its objects are to organise and encourage research and to hold a general assembly every three years The union is bound to “confine itself strictly to scientific investigation” and to “refuse to enter upon religious, moral, or political discussions, or to support a policy regarding population of any sort whatever, particularly in the direction either of increased or of diminished population.” Meanwhile he union has made a start bv appointing three commissions to deal with certain fundamental aspects of the population question: the first, on population and food supply, with Professor E. M. East (U.S.A.) as chairman; the second, on differential fertility, fecundity and sterility, with Dr. F. A. E. Urew, of Edinburgh, as chairman; and the third, on vital statistics of primitive races, with Professor Corrado Gim, of Home, as chairman. The work of the union will be based on and supported by naHonal committees in each of the counX represented in it It « Propos'd that the committee to be formed in . 1 tain should promote similar committees in the Dominions.