Eat Hearty

After more than a century of intermittent haunting, the ghost of a gloomy British clergyman, Thomas Robert Malthus, was on the rampage last week. Cresting a wave of postwar pessimism, it flashed through the air on the radio, rode through the mails in magazines. Publishers opened their arms and presses to "Neo-Malthusian" manuscripts prophesying worldwide overpopulation and hunger. Two "scarce books"--Our Plundered Planet, by Fairfield Osborn, and Road to Survival (a Book-of-the-Month selection), by William Vogt--were glowingly reviewed and selling like hot cakes. Their influence has already reached around the world.

Malthus, who died in 1834, predicted that the world's population would soon outgrow its food supply. Then war, pestilence and famine, caused by overpopulation, would slap down presumptuous man. This did not happen. The world's population had doubled since Malthus' time, from one billion to two, but new lands were cultivated and old lands made more productive. Better transportation brought surplus food from afar to feed the hungry industrial cities. There were local famines, as there had always been, but the world never ran out of food. The gloomy Malthus, who had underestimated both nature's resources and man's resourcefulness, had been wrong.

Played-Out Planet? The Neo-Malthusians admit that he was wrong. But they claim that new and frightening threats have developed recently. The present-day world, they say, has no fresh lands (or almost none) to cultivate. Its old lands, "plundered" by reckless exploitation, are losing fertility as their "irreplaceable topsoil" washes down the rivers. Farmlands cannot maintain their present production. The world's population is still increasing rapidly, and modern medicine, by cutting the death rate from infectious diseases, is sure to quicken this increase. The falling food-production curve, cry the Neo-Malthusians, will soon cross the rising population curve. Then--kaput!

The Neo-Malthusian propaganda has, on the face of it, a high and beneficent purpose: to favor good farming practices. A similar erosion scare in the 19305 did result in widespread adoption of erosion-control practices. Some of the clear implications of the present scare, however, give unintended comfort to political and social policies that are anything but beneficent. If even rich nations like the U.S. have, too little land to keep their people passably well fed (as some of the doom-criers try to prove), then what should they do? The answer, for any vigorous people, is obvious. Go out and grab more land, clearing it, if necessary, of its present population.

The Neo-Malthusians want to warn man of danger; but their alarm is so loud that it may have the effect of deafening the world to its opportunities. To the real agricultural scientists, close to the soil and its sciences, such pessimism sounds silly or worse. Every main article of the Neo-Malthusian creed, they say, is either false or distorted or unprovable. They are sure that the modern world has both the soil and the scientific knowledge to feed, and feed well, twice as many people as are living today. By the time population has increased that much, man may (and probably will) have discovered new ways of increasing his food supply.

Alas, the Eskimo Curlew. Most extreme of the Neo-Malthusian scare books is Vogt's Road to Survival. Vogt is an ornithologist, once editor of Bird Lore, who (to quote the book's jacket) "became interested in the relationship of man to his environment through his studies of bird behavior." Now chief of the Conservation Section of the Pan American Union, he still seems to care as much for "wildlife" (especially birds but including bighorn sheep) as he does for the .human species.

Again & again he yearns for the "lost song" of the extinct Eskimo curlew, "a Mozart of the prairies," and all through the book he develops the idea that men cannot live happily and permanently on the planet except in "ecological" balance with "the wildlife." In many cases, he thinks, this balance can be restored only by drastic reduction of human population (100 million Americans would be about right). According to Vogt, medical men who keep people from dying, upset nature's balance; if more people died there would be more room for mountain lions.

He regards wars and famine (among humans) with a friendly eye. Of China he says: "There is little hope that the world will escape the horror of extensive famines in China within the next few years. But from the world point of view, these may be not only desirable but indispensable. A Chinese population that continued to increase at a geometric rate could be a global calamity. The [peace] mission of General Marshall in this unhappy land was called a failure. Had it succeeded, it might well have been a disaster."*

The Elastic Soil. Real scientists take a dim view of Road to Survival. Here & there, they admit, among Vogt's errors, prejudices, mysticism and reckless appeals to emotion, they can find iotas of truth-but not many. From the verbiage of Vogt and his fellows, three central ideas about soil can be winnowed. All of these ideas are wrong, and the scientists knock them down easily.

First is the notion that "soil cannot be stretched," that each acre has a certain production capacity (Vogt calls it "biotic potential") which cannot be boosted without dire peril. This is the same fallacy that expresses itself in the old saying, "There are only so many slices in the cake." Some businessmen say this when they decide that their markets cannot be expanded and, therefore, should be divided among them in quotas set by their cartel. Some labor unions decide that there are only so many jobs to be divided, and therefore oppose labor-saving devices.

The slice-of-cake philosophy gives great comfort to one type of state planner. Instead of encouraging initiative toward more production, he says there is only so much--we must strictly control what there is. Any group ruled by this static idea will turn its back on progress and become socially reactionary. The Germans have twice let it lead them into aggressive war, although they, of all people, should have known better. One of their great historic achievements was to "stretch" the sandy acres of the Prussian plain, by good farming. As a result of good farming practices and highly skilled industry, Germany had the highest living standard of Continental Europe. Yet, obsessed by slice-of-cake thinking, it set out to conquer more "biotic potential" by war.

The soil scientists say that it simply is not true that land is static. Virgin soils vary widely in fertility and character, but once under cultivation they are subject to the will of modern man.

Soils are made of mineral particles mixed with organic matter and crawling with living organisms, from bacteria to woodchucks. These living things, especially the plants, have more influence on the character of the soil than does the rock or other material out of which the soil was formed. Generally a soil on which a certain kind of vegetation has been growing for a long time develops characteristics which are specially favorable to that sort of plant.

Plant-Formed Soil. The prize virgin soils of temperate regions are the chernozems.* They develop in dryish regions like Iowa and the Ukraine, where the climate naturally favors the growth of tall grasses. The grasses deposit a great deal of organic material in the soil, forming a dark brown, almost black layer a foot or more deep. This (and the slight rainfall) keeps soluble nutrients from leaching away.

Such soil, formed by grasses, is favorable to grasses. When man plows a chernozem, his wheat or corn thrive mightily. They are grasses, too.

In a cool, temperate region with enough rainfall to support dense forest, an entirely different type of soil develops: a podsol./- Tree roots do not bring enough lime to keep the soil from being acid, and their dead leaves form a layer of loose mold on the surface. Just below is a light-colored, often almost white layer of soil from which most of the soluble minerals have been leached by the heavy rainfall. Such a tree-formed soil is favorable for trees, but when man clears the forest and plants his grasslike wheat or corn, he gets poor crops at first.

Man, the Master of Soil. The good farmer knows what to do. He adds lime and fertilizer and grows grass or clover or alfalfa. Gradually the thin, sour forest soil turns into something like chernozem. The well-kept farms of New York State, Pennsylvania and Ohio are now far more fertile than they were when the pioneers (who so vex Vogt) first felled the forest.

Other kinds of soil can be improved, some easily, others not. Sometimes all that a "sterile" soil needs is a trifle of boron or manganese. Such "trace elements" can make all the difference between big crops and failure.

The soil men laugh at the Neo-Malthusian doctrine that man must adapt himself to soil, and live with it as helplessly as wildlife. Man is not the servant of the soil, they say. He is its master.

Another thing they laugh at is the familiar phrase, "irreplaceable topsoil." Topsoil should certainly be cherished and protected, the soil men say, but it is not irreplaceable. In 1937, a U.S. Government experiment station skinned ten inches of soil off half an acre of virgin Ohio grassland, leaving nothing but the yellow subsoil. Corn planted on an untreated strip of this poor stuff produced no crop at all. But other strips were nursed along with fertilizer and crop rotations. During the sixth season, the best strip of man-made topsoil produced 86 bushels of corn an acre, more than twice the U.S. average. Pennsylvania farmers often sell the topsoil of whole fields to mushroom growers. Then, by proper measures, they create new topsoil.

Corn for Dixie. Man is master not only of the soil, but of the plants that grow in it, molding them plastically to suit human purposes. Until recently, the U.S. Southeast had never been good corn country. A few years ago the U.S. Department of Agriculture began breeding special hybrid corns to suit Southern conditions. In North Carolina, whose corn yields ran around 22 bushels an acre, the new "Dixie" hybrids, lavishly fertilized and planted thicker than ordinary corn, made 125 bushels.

Farmers heard about it, and a wave of corn enthusiasm swept over North Carolina. This fall 645 farmers reported crops of over 100 bushels an acre. Top honors went to 77-year-old J. R. Simpson of Union County, who, with his daughters Eula and Cora, raised 136.24 bushels on a single acre. He planted his hybrid seed (Dixie 17) 12-15 inches apart in the rows instead of the usual 2-3 feet. He used plenty of fertilizer, which kept the leaves brilliant green until picking time. Most stalks had two big ears instead of the usual one. Farmer Simpson's net profit, after allowing for seed, fertilizer and labor: $125 on a single acre.

Tortillas for 17. In Tennessee (average corn yield 25 bushels an acre), hybrid corn has produced 157.2 bushels an acre. The produce of one such bountiful acre would keep 17 corn-eating Mexican peas ants in tortillas for a year. Such results reduce to gibberish Vogt's theory of "biotic potential."

Output per farm worker in the U.S. has been multiplied 2 1/2 times in the past 50 years. In 1787 it took 19 American farm people to support one other person, in addition to feeding themselves. Nowadays 19 farm people can support themselves, 56 other Americans and ten persons in other countries.

The second main dogma of the Neo-Malthusians is their belief that the productivity of the world's cultivated land is falling now and is sure to fall even more because of erosion and exhaustion. The enormous crops that the U.S. raised this year, they say, are a cruel illusion; they were achieved by "soil mining," and will be paid for inexorably in future crop failures.

This is not true everywhere, say the soil men, and it need not be true anywhere. And the situation is not as bad as Vogt & Co. say it is. Soil mining and erosion are still causing inestimable damage, but not so much as before. The U.S. Soil Conservation Service believes that U.S. soils are now getting better, on the whole; the downward trend has been reversed.

In many parts of the country, such as the Northeast, there was never much erosion, and most of this has been checked. The cotton-growing South, notorious for its stripped and deserted farms, has had a real agricultural rebirth. There are still obstinate farmers who cling to land-wrecking practices (and will surely pay for it), but the face of the South has changed. If Jeeter Lester were to shamble back to Tobacco Road, he'd never know the place.

The doctrine of soil conservation has taken deep root in the South. Farmers plant less land to cotton, more to grass and legumes. They terrace their steeper fields skillfully, plow on the contour instead of up & down hill. On thousands of once sterile slopes, the miraculous vine, kudzu, clambers like Jack's beanstalk. It chokes devouring gullies with entangled soil. It buries fences, leaps into trees. Its big leaves, which stay green until Christmas, are as nourishing to cattle as excellent alfalfa. When plowed under, kudzu enriches the soil.

In progressive North Carolina, farmers are delighted with their new agriculture. Once abandoned farms have been turned into terraced grain fields. Said Farmer L. O. Page, who goes in for strip cropping: ''Every time it rained, I used to lie awake nights wondering what part of the farm would be washed away in the morning. These nights I sleep like a kitten. I know those meadow strips will catch and hold the water."

Plenty of Planet. About soil conservation in the rest of the world, U.S. soil men have little conclusive information. They know that many once fertile regions are in terrible shape, but they also know that a constant stream of admiring foreign visitors, from Latin America, India, China, the Near East, has come to learn U.S. methods. Last week even Soviet Russia paid the U.S. an unadmitted compliment. Crying loudly (in five pages of Pravda and five of Izvestia) that heedless and greedy capitalism cannot protect its soil, the Russians announced a conservation program (hardly started yet) that is almost an exact copy of what U.S. conservation has already achieved.

How quickly the practice of conservation will spread throughout the world, U.S. soil men cannot say. But they do say that the obstacles are economic and social, not technical. Science can stop most kinds of soil deterioration and will surely lick the rest. For the Neo-Malthusian scare-dogma that the world's soil must inevitably lose its productiveness, the soil men have a one-word answer: bunkum.

Bunkum, too, say the soil men, is the notion that the world has little new soil to cultivate. There is plenty of new soil. Some can be worked by old familiar methods; some will require the methods recently developed. Enormous areas, especially in the tropics, will almost certainly yield, sooner or later, to scientific agriculture.

What the World Can Do. The chernozems and other temperate grassland soils are mostly in use already; all they ever needed was simple plowing & planting. But there are still large areas of unused forest soils (podsols) which can be made productive by up-to-date methods as soon as transportation makes them accessible and a market appears for their produce.

In a modest article (which never reached a large public), Dr. Robert M. Salter, chief of the U.S. Agricultural Research Administration, figured how much food the world could produce if it really tried. As a mark to shoot at, he took an estimate by the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) of how much food it would take to give every person living in 1960 an "adequate diet" (about what Americans get). By 1960, FAO believes, there will be 2,250 million people on the planet (other experts consider this estimate high). They will need 21% more cereals than the 1936-39 average, 46% more meat, twice as much milk, etc.

Food for New Billions. Dr. Salter figures that if the world's present croplands were cultivated at the efficiency levels considered attainable in the U.S. by 1950 (this is conceivable), in 1960 they would produce nearly enough food to meet FAO's very generous requirements. Then Dr. Salter looked around the world for new soil to conquer, not by war but by intelligent change. Forty-eight percent of the land area, he said (ice, tundra, mountains or deserts), is hopeless for agriculture. In the remaining 52% there is plenty of room for expansion, for only 7-10% of the total is cultivated at present. Dr. Salter believes that virtually all of the 52% could be made productive if there were good reason to make it so.

Setting his sights lower, he estimated the potential food production from 10% of the podsols (300 million acres) and 20% of the tropical red soils (one billion acres). If the podsols were cultivated by methods now used in Finland, and the tropical soils by methods used in the Philippines (neither of them tops in farming techniques), their production, added to that of present croplands efficiently cultivated, would jump the world's total food to more than twice the 1960 target set by FAO.

Such an expansion would require new railroads, factories, cities, and vast amounts of capital. Hundreds of millions of people, would have to move to new areas. But if the world wants to make the great effort, it can, by applying present-day techniques, provide food for more than twice its present population.

Fruit Flies Do It. An essential part of the Neo-Malthusian creed is the conviction that people will multiply blindly (like fruit flies) as long as they get enough food. Biologists can put a few fruit flies in an air-conditioned bottle, give them the same amount of food each day, and predict pretty accurately how fast they will breed. The fly population grows until there are just enough flies to eat up the daily food. Only then does the colony stop growing.

Human beings, however, are not fruit flies. Human increase, either among families or among nations, has no simple connection with the available food. High-income families, which get all the food they want, usually have fewer children than the poorest of the poor. The same is often (though not always) true of nations. Sweden, probably the best-fed nation in the world, has one of the lowest birth rates, only 15 per 1,000. Argentina, a notably well-fed nation, has a lower birth rate (21 per 1,000) than hungry Chile next door (33 per 1,000).

Up with Industry. The most spectacular rises in population have come with industrialization. The "laws" which govern it are not yet well understood, but the early stages of industrialization, in any country, seem to be associated with a moderate rise in the birth rate, a sharp fall in the death rate and a consequent jump in population.

The steep rise does not continue long. The death rate goes on dropping, as better medical services become available; but the birth rate drops too, and the curve of population increase levels off. In some cases the population actually declines. Nearly every industrialized nation has passed through these stages. Industrial Britain's population rate curve resembles strikingly the curve of industrial Japan (see map). Britain has reached, and Japan has almost reached, a stable population level.*

Some nations and religious groups make vigorous efforts to increase the numbers of their people. They are seldom if ever successful. Thoroughly Roman Catholic Eire has one of the lowest birth rates in the world and its population is stable. Eire is behaving more or less as the Neo-Malthusians want all countries to behave. It is not industrializing (Vogt hates industrialization), it is not greatly increasing food production. But 79% of Irishmen under 30 and 60% under 40 are not married. Thirty-five percent of Irishwomen do not marry at all. "Ecologists" might call this balance; few sociologists would call it healthy.

The Neo-Malthusians point to India and China and warn that if the world helps them increase their food supply, they will respond by overwhelming the world with a billion more Asiatics. Vogt is especially loud in crying this warning. He even wants the U.S. to stop sending food to Greece, lest the Greeks process each ton of wheat into more Greek mouths to be fed.

Sterilization Bonus. Vogt suggests that the U.S. should help no country with food or anything else unless it first agrees to limit its birth rate. One method he favors: a bonus to males who allow themselves to be sterilized.

Such super-isolationism, with hints of the old "yellow peril," is one of the ugliest Implications of Neo-Malthusianism. The world is already overpopulated, the argument goes. Some areas, like the U.S., are luckier than others, but even the U.S. will soon run out of food. Therefore it should not help foreigners. Let them starve now, before they increase their numbers (with our help) and overwhelm us.

Are any countries really overpopulated? It depends on what is meant. A handful of primitive savages, who live by hunting, can "overpopulate" an enormous area of fertile country. They eat up all the food available to them, though the land over which they roam could support, if turned to farming, many hundred thousand people.

A country is overpopulated when its people cannot get enough food. This is seldom because they have too little land. Usually it is because their social organization and farming methods are ineffective. India is a hungry country, but it is not permanently overpopulated. It has much potentially good land whose present yields are pathetically low. India averages only ten bushels of wheat an acre while Denmark gets 50. India's rice yield is only 750 Ibs. an acre, one-quarter as good as Japan's. A little fertilizer and some simple improvements in agricultural technique would make a huge difference to India's food supply. If Indians liked corn and produced 136.24 bushels an acre, like

Farmer Simpson of North Carolina, they could fill their thin bellies to bursting and have enough left over for all the Hindus' sacred cows.

China's Hillsides. Even the Chinese, who are among the best farmers in the world, do not use their land to full advantage. Chinese farmers make the most of the plains and valley bottoms, but only in a few parts of the country do they farm the hillsides. These grow grass and brush, which are desperately needed for fuel. If the Chinese could mine and distribute their coal, they could turn the hillsides into productive pastures and orchards. This single item, according to one estimate, would add 10% to China's food supply.

The wide spread between present food production and potential production, even in China and India, is vitally significant (and hopeful). Both great nations, in spite of civil disturbances, are beginning to industrialize. When their populations rise, following the classic curve, they can probably raise enough food to keep their people supplied until the curve begins to flatten out normally.

The conclusion is that world starvation is not around the corner. Man can make a mess of his food supply, as he can of anything else. He does not have to, however. The land is there, the hands to work it are there, the brains are there. If he uses his head he can eat hearty--indefinitely. He might even produce enough to help out Dr. Vogt's friends, the woodland caribou, the Florida manatee, the wolverine and the bighorn sheep. Unfortunately nothing can be done for the extinct Eskimo curlew.

*Chinese population has probably not increased at all during the last decade of disruption.

*Russian for "black soil." The Russians, pioneer soil scientists, named many soil types.

/- Russian for "under the ashes," as when a forest is cleared by burning.

*The Neo-Malthusians are not the only ones who have been wildly wrong about population growth. Abraham Lincoln, assuming that U.S. population would continue to grow as fast as it did in his day, predicted that the U.S. would have 250 million people by 1930. According to his forecasts, the 1948 population would be 430 million instead of 140 million.

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