TOO MANY PEOPLE

3 of a series Part 3 of a series on Science and the Environment by Crawford Environment 'No room! No room!' shout the doomsday men. With their computers churning out predictions and projections by the yard, they exhort us to recognize that a popula. tion which doubles every few decades must soon use up all the possibilities for supporting life on earth.

It is true, of course, that the fall in death rates in many colonial countries since the war, especially among the younger age groups, has meant a rapid rise in population. But, as is well known, improvement in living conditions has generally through better housing and education, been associated with a fall in the birth rate.

The real question to ask is sition is delayed in the under- this 'demographic trandeveloped countries? The answer, of course, lies with the consequences of imperialist domination of world economy.

Piling up Ehrlich and company scream duction, peasants still use ploughs and oxen. No great improvement in agricultural technology is possible because of the forms of land ownership maintained by the imperialist powers for political reasons. Meanwhile, food 'surpluses' pile up in Europe and North America.

The refusal of the population panic- mongers to face the property relations for mass starvation is very clearly seen in Meadows' book 'Limits to Growth' To who than: urowin. 1o таке ден сошputer predictions of disaster Took 'objective', the authors pretend to discuss the so-called green revolution'.

This is the technology devised in the 1960s to utilize new varieties of plant, pesticides and fertilizers to raise agricultural productivity in backward countries. Meadows has to admit that it has worked in some areas, but, he says, not without "social-effects'.

'The more common pattern in the non-industrialized world is a wide range of land ownership, with most people working on very small farms and a few people in possesion of the vast majority of land. Where these conditions of inequality already exist, the green revolution tends to cause widening inequality. Large farmers generally adopt the new methods first ... Simple economic considerations lead almost inevitably to the use of labour-displacing machinery and to the purchase of still more land.

The ultimate effects of this socioeconomic positive feedback loop are agricultral unemployment, increased migration to the city and perhaps even increased malnutrition, since the poor and unemployed do not have the means to buy Professor Meadows' computer, of course, does not know how to work out the consequences of a revolution transforming the ownership of land with it the productivity of agricultural labour. So his projections are made — no doubt with great precision— on the assumption that imperialism will continue for ever, or until everyone has starved to death.

Barriers In Volume III of 'Capital, Marx shows how Professor Meadows' 'social side effect' is the essential result of capitalist private property in land. Both where there are a few the limits of food production can smash this obstacle out of the path of man's development. That is why, the further science and technology reach in controlling the forces of nature, the deeper the crisis of modern society.

A mere quarter of a century of industrial expansion, from 1945 to 1970, was sufficient to reveal the conflict between the productive forces and capitalist social relations in new and more horrifying ways. To those who see capitalism as the 'natural' social form, these effects appear as the inevitable results of too much growth in production.

On the other side, the more