Word: malthus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...mobilize technological and financial aid from the wealthy industrial and oil-exporting states to help the 100 poorest nations increase their own food output. Also certain to be discussed is the critical problem of curtailing births. This is urgently needed to avoid fulfilling the nightmare of Parson Thomas Malthus, the English economist who predicted nearly two centuries ago that population would outrun man's capacity to produce food...
This grim prognosis has led to apocalyptic warnings from some of the world's top food experts. "We will see increasing troubles, not declining troubles," predicts Dr. John Knowles, president of the Rockefeller Foundation. "We will see increasing famine, pestilence, the extermination of large numbers of people. Malthus has already been proved correct." The most vulnerable to such disasters: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Sahel nations, Ethiopia, northeast Brazil, the high regions of the Andes and the poor parts of Mexico and Central America...
...stage is set for such a situation right now." Indeed, in parts of Central America, in ten sub-Saharan nations and in some rural areas of India, the 20-year trend of declining death rates and infant mortality is being reversed. Death rates are rising. This, according to Malthus, is nature's brutal way of redressing the balance when population exceeds food supply-if man himself does not first redress it voluntarily...
Between 1750 and 1850, the population of Europe doubled. The population might have increased by considerably more had certain checks on its growth been absent. Of course the major checks were a variety of natural human phenomena: famine, disease and war. And when Malthus warned that population growth would proceed at a much greater pace than the means of subsistence, he cited these as the otherwise absent limiting forces...
Meadows is no latter-day Malthus prophesying doom on the basis of intuition; instead he has produced the first vision of the apocalypse ever prepared by computer. His team built a computer model of the world, fed the machine masses of data on population and industrial growth rates, farm yields and the like, and constructed "feedback loops" to gauge the effects of changes in one variable, like food production, on another, like birth rates. In restrained, nonhysterical, at times almost apologetic language, the team insists that unchecked growth can have only one outcome: "A rather sudden and uncontrollable decline...