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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).