Peter Atkins and Ian Bowler (2001) Food in society: economy, culture,

geography London: Arnold

ISBN 0 340 72003 4 (hbk); 0 340 72004 2 (pbk)
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780340720042/

FOOD PRODUCTION AND POPULATION

‘Food scarcity will be the defining issue of the new era now unfolding, much as
ideological conflict was the defining issue of the historical era that recently ended’
(Brown 1996, 19).

INTRODUCTION

The relationship between the world’s growing population and our ability to feed it at
an acceptable level of nutrition is one of the most important and also one of the most
controversial of current global issues. This chapter studies some of the arguments
which have been put forward, but the literature is so vast and complex that we cannot
do more than sketch them in outline. Caution is essential because any student of the
relationship between population and resources soon realises that simplistic
explanations are potentially misleading, and perhaps even dangerous, if they spawn
inaccurate forecasts and misplaced policy responses.
Figure 9.1 is one conceptual approach to the relationship between population growth
and food supply. It stresses the role of poverty rather than food supply, the
implication being that wealth-creation would be of fundamental assistance in reducing
the size of families. Not all commentators agree with this analysis and one purpose of
this chapter is to alert the reader to the polarized nature of the debate between what we
shall call the pessimists and the optimists.

THE PESSIMISTS

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1999 is a particularly apposite time to be writing this chapter because the United
Nations’ Fund for Population Activity has estimated that this year the world’s
population reached six billion. The number itself is almost impossible to comprehend
but it represents a highly significant stage psychologically on the via dolorosa to what
some writers have called the ‘overpopulation’ of the planet, with the accompanying
potentially disastrous environmental and human consequences.
Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) was the most influential of the early writers in this area.
His Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) and subsequent publications argued in
essence that in hard times society is subjected to the ‘checks’ of increased death rates
due to starvation and disease. These limit the numbers of the indigent classes when
food is scarce or expensive. His analysis was not as crude as is sometimes portrayed
but it was nevertheless gloomy because he recognised a tendency of the population to
expand at a faster (geometric) rate than the (arithmetic) growth in agricultural output.
As a theory, Malthusianism actually gained little ground in nineteenth century Europe
because its predictions of hunger were undermined by the increased availability of
cheap food. This was caused by the opening up of new lands such as the North
American grain-growing prairies and also by improved yields from crop breeding and
the use of fertilisers. Nevertheless an undercurrent of worry remained and resurfaced
from time to time in the twentieth century as localised famines in Africa and Asia have
highlighted the fragility of food security. Since the 1960s there has been a well
publicised school of thought known as ‘neo-Malthusianism’ which has revived parts
of the original model and has propagated its warnings about the consequences of rapid
population growth.

Table 9.1 A summary of the pessimists’ case

• Population growth, coupled with income growth and a recognition of ‘the right to
food’, has meant a rapid acceleration in demand.
• Food-producing resources are reaching their limit and there is evidence of a
reduction in the availability of agricultural land and water per head.
• Inappropriate human activity is leading to environmental degradation, including
reduced yields and the ruination of some formerly productive cropland and pasture.
• Global warming and other secular changes in the environment will impact
negatively on productivity in some densely populated parts of the developing
world.
• Improvements in the technology of production and marketing will not be enough to
offset the negative factors. Food availability will decline and prices will rise. Food
security is under threat.
• The will be an increase of hunger, malnutrition and famine, coupled with food riots
and possibly wars between nations over scarce resources such as irrigation water.

Principal sources: Brown 1994, 1996; Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1990; Hardin 1993.

Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, is perhaps the best known
proponent of demographic pessimism. For over thirty years he has been alarmed by
what he regards as the unsustainable use of the earth’s resources and one of his recent

2
books was subtitled a ‘wake-up call for a small planet’. Brown identifies sixteen
dimensions of the population problem but here we will rehearse only those parts of his
proposition which address the question of food. Table 9.1 summarises the main points
of the pessimists’ thesis.
The first and most obvious point is the striking acceleration in the global population
that took place in the late twentieth century (Figure 9.2). Although the developed
countries have ageing populations and have reduced their fertility to replacement
levels only, the poor nations have yet to complete this ‘demographic transition’ and in
consequence their growth potential over the next few decades remains high. There are
78 million additional mouths to feed each year, 97 per cent of which are in low-
income countries.

Set against this ‘ticking population time-bomb’ is the argument that the increase in
food production is unlikely to keep pace. Lester Brown is in good company when he
articulates the view that many aspects of modern farming systems are unsustainable
because of their intensive use of limited resources such as cropland and irrigation
water, and their reliance upon environment-damaging inputs from the agro-chemical
industries. An additional point in the 1990s has been the prediction that Global
Warming will disrupt agricultural production because of shifting weather patterns and
the flooding of fertile coastal land by rising sea levels.

Box 9.1 Case study: who will feed China?

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One of Brown’s most interesting books (1995) concerns the problems of producing
sufficient food for China’s people. It is summarised in the following bullet points. The
arguments are not new but using the context of the world’s most populous nation is
telling, especially when one considers the geopolitical implications of food shortages
in this emerging super-power.

• Despite its efforts at containment, including the one-child-family policy, China’s

population will rise to 1.6 billion by 2030.
• Incomes have risen, increasing the demand for all food products. Consumers are
now wanting more meat, especially pork, and this requires the use of scarce feeding
stuffs such as grain.
• Grain land is being diverted from its traditional uses, especially diversification into
higher value crops and loss to building land for new houses and industry. The
availability of grain land per head will shrink from 0.08 ha in 1990 to 0.03 ha in
2030.
• The area under irrigation has stagnated in the last twenty years and groundwater
reserves are over-exploited. Water must now be used increasingly for the rapidly
growing urban population.
• Yield increases have slowed in recent years despite a heavy use of chemical
fertilizers.
• China’s grain production will fall by 20 per cent between 1990 and 2030.
• If population and income growth meet expectations, there will be a shortfall of 369
million tons a year, nearly double the world’s entire grain exports at present.
Large-scale imports are inevitable and these will drive up the world price of grain.
• Signs of strain in the economy have already appeared with several periods of high
inflation due mainly to increases in food prices.
• Hunger is nothing new in China. During the Great Leap Forward (1959-61)
approximately 30 million people died in a famine caused by climatic problems and
administrative incompetence.

In its most extreme form, neo-Malthusianism foresees widespread famine amongst

poor people in the least developed countries. Ehrlich, Ehrlich and Daily (1995)
remark that 250 million people have died from hunger-related causes since 1970, with
the implication that this is a trend which will become more pronounced in future if
population is not controlled.

THE OPTIMISTS

It is perhaps no coincidence that the pessimists and the optimists in the main have
different disciplinary origins. Many of the neo-Malthusians have a scientific
background and a knowledge of the ecological mechanisms which balance animal and
plant populations with the natural environment. Lester Brown was originally trained as
an agricultural scientist and Paul Ehrlich as an ecologist. In contrast, many optimists
work in social science and especially in economics, where there is a long tradition of
identifying the flexible responses that humans adopt to imbalances between the supply
of goods and demand in the market. Without wishing to make too much of these
divisions of intellectual genealogy, we can reasonably speculate that some of the

4
disagreement between the two sides is a function of their conflicting constructions of
knowledge.
Until his untimely recent death, Julian Simon was in the forefront of the demographic
optimists. He saw human beings as our greatest asset and argued (Simon 1981, 355)
that:
‘The standard of living has risen along with the size of the world’s population
since the beginning of recorded time. And with increases in income and
population have come less severe shortages, lower costs, and an increased
availability of resources...And there is no convincing economic reason why
these trends towards a better life, and toward lower prices for raw materials
(including food and energy) should not continue indefinitely.’
Ester Boserup (1965) was less concerned with skills of individuals than in the social
response to the pressure of population upon resources. Contrary to the Malthusian
concept of ‘checks’ through famine, she identified examples where changes in the
organization of cultivation and the adoption of technological innovations had helped to
increase food production through a gradual process of intensification, even in the most
‘primitive’ agricultural economies. In other words, population density might actually
be a causal variable contributing to the upgrading of productivity. If this is correct
then the idea of ‘over-population’ is redundant and famines are rather the result of
short-term anomalies such as wars or climatic phenomena. In the longer term the
balance between population and resources will be maintained.
One example of the Boserupian stance is given by Tiffen et al. (1994). In the
Machakos District of Kenya these researchers studied an area which had been
described in the 1930s during the colonial era as ‘an appalling example of a large area
of land which has been subjected to uncoordinated development...the inhabitants of
which are rapidly drifting to a state of hopeless and miserable poverty and their land to
a parching desert of rocks, stones and sand’. Since then, through the efforts of the
Akamba people, and without significant aid from outside, the region has been
transformed in sixty years into a model of sustainable agriculture. Soil improvement
measures were widely adopted, including conservation tillage, contour farming and
terracing. Coffee, fruit and horticultural crops were introduced and the rural
infrastructure was improved. All of this was achieved despite, or perhaps because of,
a six-fold increase of population between 1932 and 1989.
Other optimists, this time from science and technology, point to the foodproducing
potential of the new high-yielding varieties of crops which have been bred in the last
forty years, during the era of the Green Revolution, and also to the more recent
developments in biotechnology which are promising ‘designer crops’ to suit particular
circumstances of each region (Chapter 17). In view of the tremendous strides made in
crop breeding and agronomy during the twentieth century, it would seem unreasonable
to expect such advances to cease now, even if their impact may begin to slow.

THE EVIDENCE

The first element of evidence relates to demography. Most of the developed world has
already achieved very low levels of population growth, with replacement levels of
fertility only. The ‘South’ is now following, with encouraging achievements of
demographic control in the 1990s that have led to successive reductions in global
population forecasts by the U.N.. In Figure 9.3 we can see the U.N.'s predictions
according to low, medium and high assumptions about fertility. It seems most likely

5
that a stable population of about eleven billion will be reached in the next hundred
years.

At this point it is worth reminding ourselves that high fertility is usually less to do with
religious taboos on contraception or with cultural preferences for large families than
with poverty (Figure 9.1). Poor households have to think of every means at their
disposal to increase their income and the addition of more children is a strategic
investment in the family’s labour force. Where infant mortality rates are high, having
many babies may be essential to ensure that some survive to the economically
productive age. Economic development and better infant health then would make
important contributions to reduced fertility, but also very important are the education
of women and empowering them with control over their own bodies. This was one of
the main conclusions of the World Population Conference at Cairo in 1994.
Contraception is generally welcome where people genuinely wish to limit their family
size but imposing it officiously can be both offensive and counter-productive.

Table 9.2 Land not used to its full arable potential, 1988-90 (million hectares)

6
Region Presently Further potential Total
cultivated arable land
Developing countries 721 1816 2537
Sub-Saharan Africa 213 797 1009
Middle East and North 62 16 78
Africa
East Asia (excl China) 88 97 184
South Asia 175 38 213
Latin America and 185 869 1054
Caribbean
Developed countries 677 200 877

Source: Buringh and Dudal (1987); Alexandratos (1995).

Table 9.3 Possible efficiency gains in food availability by 2050

Changes compared to 1990 practices Gains equivalent to global 1990

food energy consumption (per
cent)
Improved field efficiencies
 Better agronomic practices (raise 22
average yields 20 per cent)
 Higher fertilizer uptake (raise nutrient 7
use efficiency 30 per cent)
 Reduced irrigation waste (raise water 7
use efficiency 30 per cent) Reduced
waste
 Postharvest losses (lower by 20 per 8
cent)
 End-use waste (lower by 20 per cent) 8
Healthier diets
 limit fat intake to 30 per cent of total 10
energy
Total gain 60

Source: Smil (1994).

Secondly, the evidence must answer the question ‘are we running out of agricultural
resources?’. The pessimists would like us to think so, but optimists in the past have
rejected such limitations and indeed 40 per cent of estimates made in the last 50 years
of the earth’s carrying capacity say that it could exceed 20 billions, over three times
the present population figure.
In reality only 11.2 per cent of the earth’s land area is presently exploited by arable
agriculture, and much of that at relatively low levels of intensity. Mountainous
topography, poor soils, short growing seasons near the poles, and shortages of

7
irrigation water are all obvious constraints, yet there does seem to be plenty of scope
for increasing production (Table 9.2). Reductions in fallow, conversion of grassland
to arable, growing more than one crop per year, increased use of fertilizer, and the
colonization of new land are all options, although the environmental consequences of
cutting tropical rainforest and polluting water courses with chemicals are unacceptable
to most observers. For Smil (1994), a 60 per cent gain in food availability is possible
without any such environmental damage (Table 9.3) and Penning de Vries et al.
(1995) estimate that the global food production potential is between four and nine
times the present output.
Much of the literature on macro-scale food production is over-literal in its use of
technological and biophysical criteria in making calculations. Little account is taken of
uncertain factors such as the boost to productivity that would result if peasant farmers
in the L.I.C.s) were given increased financial incentives for their products and were
supported by the kind of expensive agricultural research and extension services which
are taken for granted in the ‘North’. Maybe the answer lies with them because small
farms are certainly more productive per hectare than large ones, albeit at a lower level
of economic ‘efficiency’. Also, their traditional soil and water conservation practices
are more sustainable, as is their mixing of crops in each field to reduce the risk of
losses from pests and disease.
Nor are physical infrastructure and the organization of marketing often considered.
The Former Soviet Union has vast resources of agricultural land which produce only a
fraction of their potential because neither the collective farms nor their privatised
successors have been able to afford the necessary investment in modern production
equipment and inputs, transport, storage and processing facilities, and information and
communication networks. Without these, yields are disappointing and much of the
harvest rots before it can reach the consumer.
Two further points are important under the heading of agricultural resources. First,
national and international politics significantly influence food production (see
Chapters 11-13). Traditionally, the rural sector has been used as a taxation milch cow
in the early stages of development and has later been seen as a lesser priority for
investment than urban-based industrialization. Both types of policy militate against
securing a well-nourished rural population. The advanced countries, on the other
hand, are frequently embarrassed by surpluses of food production (produced at
subsidised prices) and have to formulate policies to control their farming sector
(Chapter 11). Achieving the full biological potential of the soil is therefore an aim
very rarely encouraged by politicians today in developed countries.
A second and related point arises when L.I.C.s are planning their trading strategies in
order to maximise their economic development. Most have accepted the economic
theory that specialization can help and they have therefore encouraged the export of
raw materials to markets in the North, such as peanuts or cotton, or high value
products such as cut flowers or luxury vegetables, which are air-freighted at great
expense because of perishability. The amount of scarce land, labour, irrigation water
and capital devoted to these cash crops is a drain upon the traditional farming
economy and self-sufficiency in basic dietary commodities may be sacrificed. Under
our review of the evidence, we must finally think about food production and
availability. About 40 per cent of the world’s grain output is used as animal feed in
the pursuit of meat and milk production, and there are vegans and vegetarians who
argue that a widespread adoption of their dietary practices would reduce the present
inefficiency of translating the sun’s energy into human nutrition. Apart from the
release of grain for human consumption there would probably also be improvements in

8
public health through a reduction in animal fat intake. Realistically, however, such a
revolution in eating habits is very unlikely in the short term and we have to look for
other sources of consolation on the world’s food future.

Figure 9.4 does not look very promising at first sight. It shows very clearly a
stagnation in global grain production per head from about 1980, and is perhaps a little
surprising when one considers that grain yields have risen steadily throughout the last
thirty years, as have the total cultivated area and the irrigated area. In fact this graph
demonstrates the dangers of limiting the analysis to the global scale, because a full
understanding can only be achieved by disaggregating the trends to a continental and
sub-continental level. In the 1980s and 1990s the developed countries in North
America and the E.U. have deliberately limited their cereal output by persuading
farmers to set aside marginal land or to grow other crops. At the same time the
collapse of the communist governments in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet
Union has led to a disastrous period of falling productivity as guaranteed purchases by
the state have disappeared. Together, the recent history of cereal farming in these two
blocks of countries is sufficient to explain the global slowdown. In contrast, the
record of increased food production in Asia has been outstanding (Figure 9.5).

9
Table 9.4 Global per capita food supplies for direct human consumption (kg per
capita)

1969-71 1988-90 2010

Cereals 146.3 164.6 167
Roots, tubers, plantains 82.3 65.7 65
Pulses, dry 7.6 6.3 7
Sugar, raw equivalent 22.1 22.7 24
Vegetable oils 6.7 10.1 13
Meat 26.0 31.9 37
Milk 74.6 75.3 72
All food (kCalories per day) 2,430 2,700 2,860

Source: Alexandratos (1995).

FOOD AND POPULATION: WHERE CONCERN IS JUSTIFIED

Sub-Saharan Africa is usually quoted as the region with most remaining difficulties in
its relations between population and resources. Countries such as the Central African
Republic, Chad, Angola, Mozambique and Somalia still have high birth rates and their
inability to feed their present populations from their own agricultural resources does
pose obvious questions about the future. Although the disruption of civil wars in

10
Africa have been an important factor in food shortages, we return to our original point
made in the introduction, that poverty is fundamental. Figure 9.6 provides
confirmation in a graph of calorie intake against G.N.P. per capita, where the latter has
been adjusted by taking purchasing power parities into account in order to allow for
variations in the local cost of living.

CONCLUSION

Along with Amartya Sen (1994), we deplore the artificial and simplistic debate
between what he calls ‘apocalyptic pessimism, on the one hand, and a dismissive
smugness, on the other’, and we concur with Dyson (1996) that the reality of the
food/population relationship lies somewhere in between these extremes. The latter’s
impartial analysis of a wide range of the latest official data leads us to the following
conclusions:

1. Lester Brown is correct that global food production per capita has been falling
since 1984, but this fall is largely due to policies and events in North America, Europe
and the Former Soviet Union. Once these are factored out, the trend in the rest of the
world is positive. Only Sub-Saharan Africa shows true signs of a food production
crisis.

2. The world’s grain harvests have become slightly more variable in the recent
past, due to extreme weather phenomena associated with El Niño and other
macroenvironmental changes; but the impact of floods and droughts has been
localised and most regions saw a reduction in harvest variability between 1970 and
1990.

3. It is not true that yields have plateaued. On the contrary, they continue to rise
more or less in the linear fashion predicted by Malthus (Figure 9.7).

11
4. The toll of hunger and famine is declining and food security in most countries
has improved (see Chapter 10).

5. The easing of the world food problem is demonstrated by the secular decline in
the real price of grain in the international markets.

Table 9.5 Results from regression analyses of the determinants of food supply factors
in 90 developing countries, 1989

Proportion of land cultivated +++ Explanatory variable

- Region
Cropping
Supply frequency
factor +++
Population GDP per Latin + Mid. East
density capita America Asia N. Africa
Proportion of area for food crops
---
Crop yield ++ +++ ++ ++
Trade multiplier +++
Proportion directly consumed
- --- - ---

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Animal product multiplier +++ ++
Calories per capita per day +++ +++

Note: +++ or ---: p<0.01; ++ or --: 0.01<p<0.05; + or -: 0.05<p<0.1. Source:

Bongaarts (1996).

Dyson’s (1996) regression analysis of food availability found that it was accounted
for most satisfactorily by per capita income, and that the addition of population density
to the model achieved very little extra explanatory power. This is because the higher
income countries have navigated the demographic transition to low levels of fertility
and they are able to command ample food for their consumers. For comparison, the
results of Bongaarts’ (1996) regression analysis of food supply are shown in Table 9.5.
He finds that population density is a significant explanation of the proportion of land
cultivated, cropping frequency and crop yield, but not of other supply factors or of
caloric intake per capita. The latter are better accounted for by national wealth. We
ought to add here that both Dyson and Bongaarts based their work on national-level
data and therefore took no account of the variability of access to food within countries.
At times one seriously wonders about the utility of much writing about the global
balance between food production and population growth. First, the calculations of
future trends are usually based upon heroic assumptions and the margin of possible
error is great. To give but one example, everyone seems agreed that Global Warming
will affect agricultural production in the medium and long term; but the forecasts for
particular regions are very fragile, because sub-continental-scale models of climatic
change are still at an early stage of formulation. At best these predictions are
sophisticated ‘guestimates’.
Second, irrespective of the over-flowing grain stores of Green Revolution
beneficiaries, such as India, even the most basic of nutritionally balanced diets is still
beyond the reach of the very poorest people. Ministers of Agriculture in the Third
World may proudly declare their country to be ‘self-sufficient’ in grain but in reality
poverty is still artificially inhibiting demand. It is access to, and economic command
over, food that matters to people in the lowest income decile, far more than
agricultural or demographic statistics. In the next chapter we will investigate patterns
of hunger and food security in order better to understand this paradox of food scarcity
amongst plenty.
Deconstructing the literature on ‘overpopulation’ is instructive. Most originates and
is published in those rich countries that have clear interests in criticising the
demographic behaviour of the Third World. Their biggest underlying concern is that
the world’s destitute will become ‘economic migrants’ and that the coming decades
will see an upturn in their long-distance mobility. Stiffer immigration controls have
already been imposed by virtually all of the advanced countries but the illegal crossing
of borders has increased nevertheless. Among other arguments is the worry that larger
populations in L.I.C.s will lead to the degradation of ‘the commons’, such as the
acceleration of Global Warming and ozone depletion by industrialization, and the
conviction that a growth in consumption in poor countries will accelerate the demise
of so-called non-renewable resources, especially the mineral raw materials so vital for
manufacturing industries in the North. It takes no great powers of insight to see that
these arguments are essentially selfish.

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FURTHER READING AND REFERENCES

Tim Dyson has written an accessible and detailed account of the relationship between
food and population. The publications of Lester Brown, the Ehrlichs and the
Pimentels are thought provoking but the reader should remember that they are very
firmly on one side of the argument. Bongaarts’ 1994 paper is a good popular
summary of the issues.

Abraham, J. 1991: Food and development: the political economy of hunger and the
modern diet. London: Kogan Page.
Alexandratos, N. (ed.) 1995: World agriculture: toward 2010. Chichester:
Wiley.
Bongaarts, J. 1994: Can the growing human population feed itself? Scientific
American 270, 3, 18-24.
Bongaarts, J. 1995: Global and regional population projections to 2025. In Islam, N.
(ed.) Population and food in the early twenty-first century: meeting future food
demand of an increasing population. Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy
Research Institute.
Bongaarts, J. 1996: Population pressure and the food supply system in the developing
world. Population and Development Review 22, 483-503.
Boserup. E. 1965: The conditions of agricultural growth. Chicago: Aldine.
Brown, L.R. 1994: Full house: reassessing the earth’s population carrying capacity.
New York: W.W. Norton.
Brown, L.R. 1995: Who will feed China? Wake-up call for a small planet. London:
Earthscan.
Brown, L.R. 1996: Tough choices: facing the challenge of food scarcity.
New York: W.W. Norton.
Brown, L.R., Gardner, G. & Halweil, B. 1998: Beyond Malthus: Sixteen dimensions
of the population problem. Worldwatch Paper 143. Washington DC:
Worldwatch Institute.
Buringh, P. and Dudal, R. 1987: Agricultural land use in space and time. In Wolman,
M.G. and Fournier (eds) Land transformation in agriculture. Chichester: Wiley, 9-
43.
Dyson, T. 1996: Population and food: global trends and future prospects. London:
Routledge.
Ehrlich, P.R.and Ehrlich, A.H. 1990: The population explosion New York: Simon
and Schuster.
Ehrlich, P.R., Ehrlich, A.H. and Daily, G.C. 1995: The stork and the plough: the
equity answer to the human dilemma. New York: Grosset/Putnam.
Hardin, G. 1993: Living within limits: ecology, economics and population taboos.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Penning de Vries, F.W.T., Keulen, H. van, Rabbinge, R. and Luyten, J.C. 1995:
Biophysical limits to global food production. 2020 Brief No. 18. Washington, D.C.:
International Food Policy Institute.
Pimentel, D. and Pimentel, M. 1999: Population growth, environmental resources,
and the global availability of food. Social Research 66, 417-28.
First. Oakland, CA: The Institute for Food and Development Policy.
Sen, A. 1994: Population: delusion and reality. New York Review of Books 41, 15,
62-71.

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 Simon, J.L. 1981: The ultimate resource. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Smil, V. 1994: How many people can the earth feed? Population and Development
Review 20, 255-92.
Tiffen, M., Mortimore, M. and Gichuki, F. 1994: More people, less erosion:
environmental recovery in Kenya. Chichester: Wiley.

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