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But the only safe generalization about long-range population predictions is that they have always proved wrong. When Malthus foresaw mass starvation in Europe unless its people stopped breeding, he failed to reckon with the industrial revolution and the agricultural potential of the Americas. Latter-day players of the Malthusian numbers game, who foresee global economic ruin in one, two or six centuries, usually fail to reckon sufficiently on the unknowable potentialities of science and the unpredictable turn of events. Says the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs: "With the present rate of increase, it can be calculated that in 600 years the number of human beings on earth will be such that there will be only one square meter for each to live on. It goes without saying that this can never take place; something will happen to prevent it."
Sunlight & Sea Water. Today, as in Malthus' time, the world has vast amounts of empty space left—particularly in Australia, Africa and Latin America (where the rate of population growth is even higher than in Asia). Brazil's vast Amazon basin, amounting to nearly one-twentieth of the land surface of the earth, is still virgin soil. In Ethiopia alone, more than 180 million of the world's most fertile acres lie fallow. Even in crowded Asia, great tracts of potentially arable land, such as the Philippine island of Mindanao and the central highlands of South Viet Nam, remain uncultivated. Meanwhile, the U.S., surfeited with food, has put 22.5 million acres of once productive land into its soil bank.
But without opening up any new land, the world's food production could be vastly increased. In 1959, India spent over $300 million on food imports and resigned itself to importing 3,000,000 to 4,000,000 tons of grain a year for the "next several years." Yet there is no technological reason why India could not triple her grain production by matching Japanese crop yield per acre. The difference between Indian and Japanese agricultural productivity lies in the Japanese farmer's use of insecticides, better seed, and vastly more chemical fertilizer. If all the world employed its potentially arable land as effectively as do Holland's skilled farmers, British Economist Colin Clark estimates that present agricultural techniques would support 28 billion people (ten times the present world population) at a European level of diet. "The basic raw materials for the industries of the future," says Caltech's Geochemist Harrison Brown, "will be sea water, air, ordinary rock, sedimentary deposits of limestone and phosphate, rock, and sunlight. All the ingredients essential to a highly industrialized society are present in the combination of those substances." The dwindling of usable supplies of fresh water is being matched by steady progress toward a cheap method of desalinizing sea water; nuclear energy has dispelled the neo-Malthusians' favorite bogeyman of exhausted coal and oil deposits; and should the earth's supply of uranium ever be used up, men could turn to solar energy—which is already used in Japan to operate 200,000 water heaters.