Neo-Malthusianism

Thomas Malthus was an English clergyman who popularized a set of ideas on population and agricultural growth in the early 19th century. Neo-Malthusianism refers to the variant forms of these ideas that have appeared in scholarly and scientific publications, shaped various kinds of policy making, and often exerted considerable influence on popular discourse over the years.

Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population was published anonymously in London in 1798. It challenged the optimistic writing of Enlightenment giants Godwin and Condorcet, who believed that scientific progress and refinement of social institutions would ensure enough food for all. Malthus instead pointed to “fixed laws of our nature,” specifically that “population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio … subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.” Since this imbalance was intrinsic to human ecology, food shortage would be a permanent force shaping society and limiting population. Therefore, he argued, aid to the poor and hungry would only succeed in forestalling the population-limiting effects of food shortage, ultimately making for more people who would inevitably suffer from conflict, sickness, and potential starvation.

Developments since Malthus's time have not fit Malthus's postulates well. Various social institutions, government policies, education, and economic development are now known to effectively curb population growth, and total fertility rates have plummeted worldwide (including throughout most of the developing world since the 1960s). Agricultural output has outpaced human food needs, due largely to the use of external inputs that were largely unknown in Malthus's day: nitrogen fertilizer, mechanization, breeding, pesticides, and information technology. The Food and Agriculture Organization predicts agriculture to continue to outpace food needs for decades; yet hunger continues to stalk areas of the developing world, and food insecurity affects significant numbers in industrialized countries. In 1996, the economist Amartya Sen was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for showing how little overall food supply had to do with famine. Malthus—as Cohen (1995) bluntly put it in How Many People Can the Earth Support?—“has been wrong for nearly two centuries” (p. 429).

Yet Malthus's basic view of population growth as a persistent driver of food shortage has continued to exert widespread and persistent influence on a long and varied history of theories, schools of thought, movements, and policies. Much of this persistent power is due to its malleability and the fact that its basic tenets and implications can be adjusted to changing agendas.

For instance, in the early 20th century, neo-Malthusians took Malthus's stress on the overabundance of poor people to support antiimmigrant organizations and policies in the United States. Academic books stressed the dangers posed by the reproductive urges of “inferior races,” including Jews and the Irish. In the 1960s, neo-Malthusians, such as the Club of Rome, sounded the alarm over the world's high population growth rate and its impacts on resources and the earth's capacity to sustain rising numbers of people. Neo-Malthusianism shaped Cold War thinking in the United States, attributing the spread of communism to high population densities in Asia. These fears were particularly focused on India, where [Page 2016]post–World War II peasant movements were taken as warnings that India might go the way of China. Through the PL-480 program, large amounts of American grain were exported to India well into the 1960s to check the spread of communism while absorbing U.S. grain surpluses.

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