There is a spectre haunting Britain – of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, an 18th-century cleric whose ideas are back in vogue. His most famous thesis, that population growth will outstrip food supply, has attracted interest in our age of geopolitical insecurity. The pandemic’s disruption of supply chains, Russia weaponising grain and the fight over food resources between the West and the rest seem to confirm Malthus’ pessimistic prediction.
Even the point that food production has more than kept pace with the tenfold increase of the world population from more than 800 million in Malthus’s time to today, does little to dissuade his ardent advocates. They make millennarian prophecies about our impending apocalypse, amid conflict over the shrinking resources of an overloaded planet.
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