Only if it can be transported, Tim.
1 - It can be. It is now, it was then, both in terms of trade, and in food aid.
2 - Ehrlich predicted famine well beyond local famines, spreading in to countries that where food exporters at the time he made his prediction. For his prediction to come true we wouldn't only have to fail to transport food internationally, we would have to fail to transport it within major food producers that are also rich countries, or alternatively production world wide, would have had to have fallen off a cliff.
A rational person would take such information and say "hmm, this could be a problem. How do we make sure it doesn't become one?".
A rational person would recognize that steps already had been taken, and the process of taking such steps went back for centuries. If he worried they might not be enough, he might have called for them to be stepped up, not say that its hopeless. Ehrlich didn't say "hmm, this could be a problem. How do we make sure it doesn't become one?". That thought would have been rational. But Ehrlich said that no matter what might be done, no matter what other things might happen, that hundreds of millions were doomed to starve in just a few years, and that the famine would spread over most of the world. Hundreds of millions was the lower end for him that he though certain. He though it was reasonably possible it could be a billion or more starving in the 70s. He didn't just say the third world was screwed, he also said - "By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people ... If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." And "millions of people will soon perish in smog disasters in New York and Los Angeles s...the oceans will die of DDT poisoning by 1979...the U.S. life expectancy will drop to 42 years by 1980 due to cancer epidemics." He kept making such predictions even after the results of the green revolution started to show.
Then after the green revolution a person acting rationally and with knowledge of what is going on in the world would not have claimed the the incredibly dire predictions that he had made where "way too optimistic". |
