THE REVENGE OF JOHN MALTHUS
The CHART below depicts the loss to America’s human society caused by various natural and man-made disasters in the US over the last 4 decades and the consequent loss to GDP. It pretty much sums up what could well be the state of the rest of the world too .. no doubt about it .
The Chart read together with the summary of the Malthusian Theory ( https://www.intelligenteconomist.com/malthusian-theory/) which conventional economist wisdom for long has held to be an anachronism, tells me that Malthus is very much alive , relevant to the modern 21st century world as much as to the 18th century one in which he formulated his grim theory about the human condition.
We must not forget that it is the relentless growth of human population on our planet today that has all along been driving our relentless quest for Food — both in quantity and in variety .
The relentless search for increased quantities of Food needed to feed increased millions of population led to discovery of new technology we know has fuelled and enabled rampant mass-scale industrialisation of agriculture, dairy and poultry farming, aquaculture and deep-sea fishing … It has led to mass-scale slaughter and exploitation of other members of the animal kingdom as well being as they are believed to be in common understanding as alternate sources of “protein-rich” Food viz.: eels, snakes , rats , lobsters , dogs, varieties of reptiles and crustaceans , even insects and worms .. and , .. now, as we know from what happened in Wuhan in China … bats too.
We must ask ourselves this question: Why has the human society gone about in the last 4 decades (I.e. the timeline of this chart) searching for Food so ravenously and rapaciously ?
The Answer is simple : population growth and the innate belief that “new technology” can exploit Nature and Nature’s resources quite easily in many different ways and produce any amount of Food required to feed populations.
But then there is a grace caveat implicit in that facile answer:
It is the Price to be paid for ever increasing Food supply.
The price to pay for such untamed and relentless technological drive .. and such unrestrained exploitation of nature .. is the risk-premium that comes along with high-end R&D (Research & Development) that goes into Food production, Storage , Distribution and Consumption.
The “wet market” of Wuhan fish and surrounding animal slaughterhouses, the “mad-cow” dairy farms of UK, the assembly-line chicken-factories across the world .. and the vast corn-fields in the US that produce non-stop the humongous feed-supply chains for cows, pigs ,chickens and fish …. all of them have to be fully supported and sustained by Food-related R&D …
Epidemiology and/or Animal Disease Control is one such branch of Food-related R&D .
Today everyone in the world realises that the risk-premium we all had to come at last to pay in 2020 for 40+ years of Food R&D driven by the relentless search for ever-increasing sources of Food-supply, needed for feeding ever-rising human populations across the planet, was the unexpected outbreak of a deadly bat-virus that bred itself, either aided or accidentally, either inside a “wet market” or within an epidemiology R&D centre somewhere in the world !
That price of a risk-premium — in terms of sheer loss to human lives and semi-permanent damage to global economic health today — is exactly what is sought to be depicted in this colorful but stark bar-Chart.
Almost 300 years ago, John Malthus correctly predicted that societies and nations would have to keep paying that very same risk-premium price for ever burgeoning populations needing ever increasing Food supplies.
John Malthus I believe is truly alive today , kicking hard and he is back indeed with a revenge just when we all were brainwashed into believing what our scientists , food technologists , economists and politicians were telling us was absolute gospel: “Malthusian theory is an anachronism: there need be no limit to human population growth since there is really no limit to Food technology that can unlock the limitless resources of Nature”.
😇😔😩
Sudarshan Madabushi