In my last blog post, I promised to wrestle with the time-honored Malthus Question: Does population growth outrun food supply? The old question is coming back as soaring food prices spark discontent, bread lines, and even riots around the world. I’ll try to answer this question decisively in the next 400 words.

Just kidding. Shelves heave under the weight of books that have grappled with the ideas of Thomas Robert Malthus since he first wrote in 1798. So maybe the answer will take more than one post.

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One of the dozens of countries around the world where hunger is back in the news is the Philippines, where soaring rice prices and long-standing reliance on imported food are raising an old question many people thought was buried for good: Does population growth eventually run into the limits of food production?

In More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want, I suggest this question will never be put to rest-not, at least, until populations stop growing.

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