Notes

The question of human overpopulation and its relationship to human carrying capacity has been controversial for over two centuries. In 1798 the Reverend Thomas Malthus put forward the hypothesis that population growth would exceed the growth of resources, leading to the periodic reduction of human numbers by either “positive checks”, such as disease, famine, and war, or “preventive checks”, by which (in the absence of contraception) Malthus meant restrictions on marriage. This “Malthusian view” was rapidly accepted by most politicians, demographers, and the general public, and remained popular until fairly recently.
Malthus's worst fears were not borne out through the century following his death in 1834—food production largely kept pace with the slowly growing global population. However, soon after 1934, the global population began to rise steeply as antibiotics, vaccines, and technology increased life expectancy. By the 1960s, concerns of a mismatch between global population and global food supply peaked—expressed in books such as Paul Ehrlich's 1968 The Population Bomb. This book predicted a future scarred by increasing famine, epidemic, and war—the three main Malthusian positive checks.
In 1966, United States President Lyndon Johnson shipped wheat to India to avert a famine on the condition that the country accelerate its already vigorous family planning campaign. Johnson was part of an unbroken series of US presidents concerned with the harmful effects of rapid population growth in developing countries. This line extended (at least) from John F. Kennedy to Jimmy Carter. George H. W. Bush was also sympathetic to this view, prior to becoming vice president in 1981.
But the 1970s surprised population watchers. Instead of being a period shadowed by calamitous famine, the new crop strains introduced by the “Green Revolution” (especially grains such as rice, wheat, and maize) caused a dramatic increase in the global production of cereals, the main source of energy in the global diet. Among the development community, despair turned into cautious optimism. By the end of the decade, the public health community felt sufficiently empowered to proclaim “Health for All by the Year 2000”. Average life expectancy continued to zoom upwards almost everywhere.
The introduction of safe contraception contributed to a rapid fertility decline in many countries. But while the rate of global population growth declined from its peak in the late 1960s, the absolute increment of increase in annual global population continued to grow. Most population-related scientists, including food scientists and demographers, as well as US President Jimmy Carter, continued to be very concerned about global overpopulation. In 1970, the father of the Green Revolution, the agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In his Nobel lecture, Borlaug warned that the success of the Green Revolution would buy a breathing space for humankind of three decades, unless equivalent action was taken to reduce fertility rates.
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