HOW MANY PEOPLE CAN THE EARTH FEED?

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXI, Issue 304, 8 December 1931, Page 9

HOW MANY PEOPLE CAN THE EARTH FEED?

DANGER OF WORLD EATING ITSELF OUT OF EXISTENCE. SCIENTIST’S CALCULATIONS. Will the population of the earth eventually eat itself out of existence by way of starvation? Will it so increase that there will not be enough food? How many people can the earth feed, and how soon —if ever — will the earth’s population reach the fatal maximum figure? It may be agreeable to know, however, that the white races are increasing more rapidly than any other. But it may perhaps be thought that on this account they are more in danger of eating themselves off the earth! These are some of the “problems of population,” considered by Sir Arthur Thomson, the famous professor of natural history, and Professor Patrick Geddes, the zoologist, in a chapter of “Life: Outlines of General Biology,” an illuminating and instructive workpublished recently, states the “Daily Express.” The world’s population is taken as 1750 millions, and it is said to be increasing at the rate of 12,000,000 a year, an astonishing fact when one remembers that Malthus, who lived about the time of the French Revolution, stated that the population of the world was then 85.0.000.000. Thus the population of the world has doubled since his date. “Suppose that mankind has been in progress for half a million years! Millions were born and millions passed away; yet the portentious fact is that the living population was doubled in the last hundred years.” Great Britain’s population trebled in the hundred years between Napoleon and the recent war, but 20 years’ statistics in France, up to 1926, show that it would take France 436 years to double her population. England has doubled her population in 67 years, Germany hers in 51, and Canada may double hers in 24 years. Here are the yearly increases of the races, according to colours: — Yearly Per Race. inc. 1000 Whites of European crigin (total 650,000,000) 7,800,000 12 Whites non European (total 60,000,000) i 480,000 8 Browns (total 420,000,000) 1,050,000 2.5 Yellows (total 510,000,000) 1,530,000 3 Blacks (total 110,000,000) 500,000 5 The professors state that there are 13,000,000,000 acres of arable land in the world, out of a total of 33,000,000,000 acres of world surface. They estimate that every person requires, on an average, a minimum of two acres and a-half to provide him with food. This shows that the total possible population that could be fed, at the present scale of production and consumption, is 5,200,000,000. This is given as the “maximum” comfortable population” of the earth, or saturation point, and it is observed that, at the present rate of increase, “this figure will be reached in a little over a century.”