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  3. The Global Food Crisis and Thomas Malthus Last year the skyr

The Global Food Crisis and Thomas Malthus Last year the skyr

游客2024-02-10  11
问题                 The Global Food Crisis and Thomas Malthus
    Last year the skyrocketing cost of food was a wake-up call for the planet. Between 2005 and the summer of 2008, the price of wheat and corn tripled, and the price of rice climbed fivefold, spurring food riots in nearly two dozen countries and pushing 75 million more people into poverty. But unlike previous shocks driven by short-term food shortages, this price spike came in a year when the world’s farmers reaped a record grain crop. This time, the high prices were a symptom of a larger problem tugging at the strands of our worldwide food web, one that’s not going away anytime soon. Simply put: for most of the past decade, the world has been consuming more food than it has been producing. After years of drawing down stockpiles, in 2007 the world saw global carryover stocks fall to 61 days of global consumption, the second lowest on record.
    " Agricultural productivity growth is only one to two percent a year," warned Joachim von Braun, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D. C. , at the height of the crisis. "This is too low to meet population growth and increased demand. "
Retrospection; Malthus’ Theory
    Ever since our ancestors gave up hunting and gathering for plowing and planting some 12,000 years ago, our numbers have marched corresponding with our agricultural productivity. Each advance—the domestication of animals, irrigation, wet rice production—led to a corresponding jump in human population. Every time food was stably supplied, population eventually leveled off. Early Arab and Chinese writers noted the relationship between population and food resources, but it wasn’t until the end of the 18th century that a British scholar tried to explain the exact mechanism linking the two—and became perhaps the most vilified(遭人辱骂的)social scientist in history.
    Thomas Robert Malthus, the namesake of such terms as " Malthusian collapse" and " Malthusian curse," was a mild-mannered mathematician, a clergyman—and, his critics would say, the ultimate glass-half-empty kind of guy. When a few Enlightenment philosophers, giddy from the success of the French Revolution, began predicting the continued improvement of the human condition, Malthus cut them off at the knees. Human population, he observed, increases at a geometric rate, doubling about every 25 years if unchecked, while agricultural production increases arithmetically—much more slowly. Therein lay a biological trap that humanity could never escape.
    "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man," he wrote in his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. " This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence." Malthus thought such checks could be voluntary, such as birth control, abstinence, or delayed marriage—or involuntary, through the disaster of war, famine, and disease. He advocated against food relief for all but the poorest people, since he felt such aid encouraged more children to be born into misery. That tough love earned him a bad name in English literature from none other than Charles Dickens. When Ebenezer Scrooge is asked to give help for the poor in A Christmas Carol, the heartless banker tells the do-gooders that the poor should head for the workhouses or prisons. And if they’d rather die than go there, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. "
Rereading Malthus’ Essay
    On a brisk fall day that has put color into the cheeks of the most die-hard Londoners, I visit the British Library and check out the first edition of the book that still generates such heated debate. Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population looks like an eighth-grade science primer. From its strong, clear prose comes the voice of a humble parish priest who hoped, as much as anything, to be proved wrong.
    "People who say Malthus is wrong usually haven’t read him," says Tim Dyson, a professor of population studies at the London School of Economics. " He was not taking a view any different than what Adam Smith took in the first volume of The Wealth of Nations. No one in their right mind doubts the idea that populations have to live within their resource base. And that the capacity of society to increase resources from that base is ultimately limited. "
    Though his essays emphasized "positive checks"(积极抑制)on population from famine, disease, and war, his "preventative checks"(预防性抑制)niay have been more important. A growing workforce, Malthus explained, depresses wages, which tends to make people delay marriage until they can better support a family. Delaying marriage reduces fertility rates, creating an equally powerful check on populations. It has now been shown that this is the basic mechanism that regulated population growth in western Europe for some 300 years before the industrial revolution—a pretty good record for any social scientist, says Dyson.
    Yet when Britain recently issued a new 20-pound note, it put Adam Smith on the back, not T. R. Malthus. He doesn’t fit the trend of the moment. We don’t want to think, about limits. But as we approach nine billion people on the planet, all demanding the same opportunities, the same lifestyles, the same hamburgers, we ignore them at our risks.
    None of the great classical economists saw the industrial revolution coming, or the transformation of economies and agriculture that it would bring about. The cheap, readily available energy contained in coal—and later in other fossil fuels—unreleased the greatest increase in food, personal wealth, and people the world has ever seen, enabling Earth’s population to increase sevenfold since Malthus’s day. And yet hunger, famine, and malnutrition are with us still, just as Malthus said they would be.
    " Years ago I was working with a Chinese demographer," Dyson says. " One day he pointed out to me the two Chinese characters above his office door that spelled the word ’ population.’ You had the character for a person and the character for an open mouth. It really struck me. Ultimately there has to be a balance between population and resources. And this notion that we can continue to grow forever, well it’s ridiculous. " Perhaps somewhere deep in his cellar crypt(地下室)in Bath Abbey(巴修道院), Malthus is quietly wagging a bony finger and saying, "Told you so. " [br] To Malthus, which of the following is a voluntary check?
选项 A、Famine.
B、War.
C、Abstinence.
D、Disease.
答案 C
解析 本题考查对voluntary check的理解。由定位句可知，马尔萨斯所说的，voluntary checks，即积极／自发的节制，包括birth control，abstinence和delayed marriage三个方面，故C)为本题答案。
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