Source: The Montreal Gazette
URL: http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=wMQtAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1p8FAAAAIBAJ&pg=7265,4157380&dq
Date: 18/12/1967
Event: Montreal Gazette: American Scientist Sees Millions Dying of Hunger
Credit: The Montreal Gazette
THE MONTREAL GAZETTE - DEC 18, 1967
American Scientist Sees Millions Dying of Hunger
LONDON - (Reuters) - Mankind has lost the battle to feed itself and hundreds of millions of people will starve to death sometime between 1970 and 1985, says an American biologist.
Paul Ehrlich of the biological sciences department at Stanford University in California writes in this week's issue of the British weekly magazine New Scientist that many people will die of famine despite any crash programs that might be started now.
He suggests the United States stops shipping food to countries such as India - "where dispassionate analysis indicates that the unbalance between food and population is hopeless" - and reserve its aid for those whom it might save.
Ehrlich says plans to tap marine food, synthesize food from petroleum and use desalination plants to make deserts fertile were impractical in the short run and would not save mankind from the coming crisis.
He says an attempt to greatly increase world agricultural production could lead in the long run to ecological instability, loss of soil and pesticide poisoning which might result in more misery and death than a famine.
Ehrlich says population control is primarily a matter of human attitudes, not contraceptive technology, "and human attitudes are not changing or being changed at anything like the rate necessary to minimize the coming catastrophe".
He urged a massive propaganda campaign to convince people that a reduced and stabilized population alone could give them "a long-range chance of health, happiness and prosperity."
He suggests the U.S. should remove income tax deductions for children, tax baby food and equipment, make birth control instruction compulsory in schools, ease abortion laws and invest more in population control programs.
He says the U.S. should refuse aid to countries not undertaking a sufficiently vigorous birth control program, give massive aid to help countries increase the yield on land already under cultivation and bring diplomatic and economic pressures to bear on any country or organization which impeded a solution to the population control problem.