The myth of
overpopulation
THAT
MANKIND CAN ABOLISH POVERTY, as Socialists assert, has often been
challenged by those who claim that poverty is the natural and
inevitable condition of mankind. The most notorious exponent of this
view was the Rev. Thomas Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of
Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, first
published in 1798. Malthus, like all the others who have held this
view, failed to explain why it was that in every country a privileged
minority managed to escape this curse of poverty.
Malthus, as
the title of his essay suggests, was arguing against those who said
that human society could be improved and, in particular, against
William Godwin, an early Utopian socialist Briefly, the 'principle of
population' which he laid down stated the obvious fact that population
cannot grow beyond the means of subsistence; but went on to claim that
population always tended to outstrip the food supply, with the result
that periodically its growth was checked by famine, disease and war.
Any attempt to improve social conditions would merely bring about an
increase in the birth rate and so make matters worse than they were
before. This view was meant to be a defence of existing poverty and an
argument against social reform. Needless to say, it was at one time
very popular amongst apologists for capitalism.
In the second
edition of his Essay, published in 1803, Malthus contradicted himself
in introducing 'moral restraint' because he conceded that human beings
could control their birth rate — which was one of the points at issue.
Godwin answered Malthus by making the simple point that every extra
human being born brought with him not only an extra mouth but also an
extra pair of hands. Marx, too, showed how there was no such thing as a
general law of population that applied to all societies and to all
times. At times under capitalism there seemed to be overpopulation and
at others underpopulation. But this had nothing to do with the birth
rate. It was a feature which appeared at the various stages of the
business cycle. In depressions there were more people than jobs offered
by capitalist industry. In booms, on the other hand, there was a
comparative shortage of workers.
What was more effective in
refuting Malthus than his own inconsistencies and the arguments of
Godwin and Marx, was what in fact happened to population trends in the
industrialised countries. After 1880, particularly when birth control
propaganda was launched on a large scale, the birth rate began to drop.
Malthus had also overlooked that it was not just a question of the
number of people and the food supply but that the productivity of
man-made machines should also be taken into account. Beginning with the
industrial revolution, technical development increased social
productivity so that more food was provided for the increasing
population.
In recent years, Malthusian ideas have enjoyed
something of a revival. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the
United Nations has many times warned that the world's population is
increasing at a (slightly) faster rate than the food supply. The FAO
itself does not accept Malthusian ideas of course and is fully aware
that, with the application of modern technology to food production,
there could be more than enough for everyone on this planet. But others
argue that because population is increasing faster than the food supply
this must always be so. The implication here is that overpopulation
would be a barrier to the establishment of Socialism as a society of
abundance.
Let us consider this proposition in more detail.
Population growth can be controlled, and tbe birth rate has dropped in
many countries through the extensive use of birth control. However,
birth control is really a red herring: it concentrates attention on the
population rather than on food supplies and why they are not being
increased at anything like the rate they could. Godwin's point about
every extra human being bringing in an extra pair of hands is still
valid. The real issue is whether the social system allows those hands
to be used to produce the extra wealth. It has long been known that the
world can produce more than enough food for all. Lord Boyd-Orr, the
first Director-General of the FAO, pointed out:
'There was no
difficulty about producing enough food for the present population of
the world, or even twice that number, but the problem was, could
politics and economics arrange that the food that was produced was
dispersed and consumed in the countries that needed it?' (The Times, 22
July 1949).
At the second international agricultural aviation
conference in Paris in 1962, Dr. Maan, the director of the
International Agricultural Aviation Centre at the Hague, was reported
as saying:
'The world's population, now a little over 2,000
million was expected to reach 6,000 million in the not very distant
future. It had been calculated that the earth could support a
population of 28,000 million if food production were organised on lines
now known to be practicable' (The Times, 24 September 1962).
Estimates
such as the tripling of world food production by irrigating areas now
regarded as deserts are commonplace in the literature on the subject.
Sea water can be turned into fresh water for irrigation purposes and
indeed the sea itself, as a source of food, has scarcely begun to be
exploited.
In discussing food production it is important to
grasp that it is not just the farmers and peasants who produce food.
Food production is rapidly becoming a social process involving the
labour of millions working in industry. With the increasing use of
fertilisers, pesticides, modern tools and machines the labour spent in
producing these is just as important as the labour of the farmer, also
technical advances in these fields allow food production to be
increased. Agriculture is now an industry in which scientific methods
can be used but there are still vast opportunities for applying such
methods.
The technical problem of providing enough for everyone
has long been solved. The real problem, pin-pointed by Boyd-Orr, is how
can human society be arranged to allow
sufficient to be produced and
distributed amongst mankind. The Socialist Party of Great Britain holds
that the only social system which will ensure this is one in which
wealth is produced solely to meet human needs on the basis of the
common ownership of the resources of the world by the whole of mankind.
Today under capitalism, food is not produced to meet human
needs and indeed could not be since the resources of the world do not
belong to mankind but only to a privileged few. That food is not
produced to meet human needs cannot be denied, otherwise there is no
sensible reason why, with the possibility of adequately feeding
everybody, millions starve and many millions are undernourished. Food
is produced to be sold on a market (increasingly the world market) with
a view to profit. The starving and undernourished millions of the world
do not constitute a market as they cannot pay for the food they need.
So they are left to starve.
To a certain extent this is an
aspect of the problem of the uneven development we discussed in the
previous section. In countries where capitalist social relations
embrace nearly the whole population, famine is not a problem.
Capitalist industry by and large is able to provide its workers with
the food they must have to generate enough energy to work year in year
out under modem industrial conditions. Problems arise however from the
impact of capitalism on backward pre-indnsmal conditions. For
centuries
the people of Asia and Africa survived on what they themselves could
produce. Capitalism upset the balance in a number of ways: by
destroying home industries through cheap competition; by emcouraging
cash crops in place of subsistence farming thus putting the peasants at
the mercy of the world market; and by improved medical techniques thus
reducing the death rate. The ironic fact that because science has been
used to keep human beings alive, but not to provide the food to feed
them, many have been saved from death by disease only to
die of
starvation. Capitalism does indeed have a food problem here. Because of
the restrictions of the profit system, food production is held back
while the population
increases.
Agriculture is less under the
control of man than the production of manufactured articles. Under
capitalism this can cause violent price fluctuations. A good harvest
one year brings prices tumbling; a bad harvest the next sends them
soaring again. Huge amounts of capital are now invested in cash crops
by large international corporations and such fluctuations cause them
great inconvenience. Hence the attempts to control prices by
restricting production to a given amount, divided among the producing
countries. This quota system is nothing less than a huge restrictive
practice applied to all foodstuffs as well as to agricultural and
mineral raw materials — wheat, rice, sugar, coffee, cocoa, sisal, soya
beans, rubber, tin, copper, etc.
When things go wrong then we
see capitalism at its most vicious. It is then that one reads of a
bumper harvest described as a disaster, to hear about 'burdensome
surpluses' and the 'problem' of over-population. In a world where many
millions need food how can there be a surplus or over-production of
food? Yet for the capitalist firms and the peasant farmers engaged in
producing crops, to have produced more than the world market can absorb
is a problem. Prices fall so that they lose not only the anticipated
profit but even some of their original capital. Shareholders have to
take a cut in dividends while the small farmers can be ruined.
This
is the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty which capitalism
solves not by giving the plenty to the poor but by actually destroying
the surplus food that has been produced, in order to keep up prices and
profits. So we read in the Press of huge surpluses of fruit and
vegetables being burnt, ploughed in or just dumped as vast compost
heaps; hundreds of tons of tomatoes being jettisoned because of the
tomato 'glut'; milk being poured down disused mine shafts; cheese and
butter (and even skimmed milk that could easily be transported to
famine areas) being fed to pigs. These are regular occurrences in the
capitalist world.
The most dramatic examples of capitalism's
inability to produce for human needs are the huge bonfires that occur
from time to time. Before the second world war Brazil led the way by
burning coffee. Here are two examples of the deliberate destruction of
food in Africa, where many are starving:
'Sir Tsibu Darku, the
Chairman of Ghana's Cocoa Marketing Board, today put the torch to about
500 tons of cocoa which went up in flames near here. He said the
bonfire was the first of a series which would go on until they had
completely destroyed two per cent of Ghana's basic quota, to give
effect to a decision of the alliance of cocoa producing countries' (The
Times, 12 December 1964).
'Over 300,000 coffee seedlings were
uprooted and burned on a nursery near Nairobi today as the first step
in the Agriculture Ministry's plan to restrict coffee production. Mr.
G. R. Medforth, the Kenya Coffee Board's chief inspector, who
supervised the burning, said about one million — or ,20 per cent — of
the plants in nurseries throughout the country were surplus and would
be burned. Growers would get compensation' (The Times. 12 May 1967)
In
the 1930s the American government evolved a policy which, instead of
waiting for the food to be produced and then destroying it, involved
paying farmers not to produce it in the first place, The result of
course was the same. Food supplies were artificially restricted. This
policy which continues to this day was frankly described described by
the late President Kennedy as 'planned and subsidised under-production'.
The
stark fact is that capitalism is responsible for the starvation of
millions of people. Given modern technology, famine is avoidable:
wherever it occurs the blame must be laid at the door of the social
system that is incapable of meeting human needs. It is not
overpopulation that is the problem but the chronic and often planned
underproduction that is a built in feature of capitalism. Only when the
fetters which capitalism places on production have been removed by
establishing the common ownership of the means of life can mankind set
about ending the threat of famine.
Not only is capitalism in
effect a system of artificial scarcity, it is also a system of
organised waste. The most obvious example is the huge amount of wealth
used up in
training and keeping armed forces and in developing the
most destructive weapons of war. Capitalism also diverts the labour of
millions into work that would be useless in a rationally-organised
society, namely, the labour of those engaged in commerce and finance;
the cashiers, the computer operatives, the accountants, the salesmen,
the bank clerks, the ticket collectors and the host of others working
in activities concerned with buying and selling.
Socialism, with
no built-in drive toward war and therefore with no need for armies and
armaments, and with production solely for use instead of for sale on
the market, will release the labour and resources at present wasted by
capitalism to be used, as necessary, for producing food.
Increases
in population are no barrier to the establishment of Socialism.
Socialist society will use the resources of the earth to ensure that
every man, woman and child is amply fed, clothed and sheltered.
Capitalism cannot do this — it does not exist for this purpose!
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