Opinion: A State of Siege

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Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.

-Thomas Robert Malthus (1798) This famed warning has been widely revived in recent years. Only the prospect of universal nuclear destruction is viewed with more horrified relish by pessimistic social prophets than the prospect of man's inability to feed an unchecked population. The latest authority to update the Malthusian theory is British Novelist C. P. Snow (The Corridors of Power, The Two Cultures), who is celebrated for his observations on the disparity between the worlds of science and the humanities. Lord Snow issued his warning last week as he delivered the John Findlay Green lecture at Westminster College, Fulton, Mo. (where Winston Churchill made his classic "iron curtain" speech in 1946). In effect, Snow said that Malthus' gloomy prognostication might be borne out within a generation.

Sea of Famine. "I have to say that I have been nearer to despair this year, 1968, than ever in my life," observed Snow, who is 63. "We may be moving—perhaps in ten years—into large-scale famine. Many millions of people are going to starve. We shall see them doing so upon our television sets."

Snow predicted that this "major catastrophe" would happen before the year 2000. "We shall, in the rich countries, be surrounded by a sea of famine, unless three tremendous social tasks are by then in operation." The tasks: massive grants of food, money and technical aid from rich nations to poor, perhaps amounting to 20% of the well-off countries' gross national products for 15 years; increased efficiency in food production by poor nations themselves; and new efforts in poor nations "to reduce or stop their population increase, with a corresponding reduction in the population increase in the rich countries also."

Snow doubts that mankind will make these efforts. Already, he noted, men recoil in horror from the spectacle of famine in India or Biafra, but do little. "We draw the curtains and take care not to listen to anything which is going on in the streets outside," he said. "We are behaving as though we were in a state of siege." Even if man's quantitative needs can somehow be met, Snow doubts that the quality of civilized life can be maintained if—as demographers widely predict—world population doubles to more than 6 billion by the end of the 20th century. "There are already too many people in the world," he said. "Within a generation, there will be far too many. Within two or three generations—unless we show more sense, good will and foresight than men have ever shown—ordinary human hopes will have disappeared."