High rates of population growth have correlated to high surges in per capita wealth growth, as in Western Europe and the USA, where the wealth is widely distributed and thus the individual self interests of the expanding families, or rather their response to prosperity under traditional values, sensibly correlate to the number of babies--they can afford bigger families, we might conclude, and so population surges. Actually when we look more closely at it, even in nations as per capita rich and getting richer rapidly such as Britain during the first industrial revolution, we see a rather more ugly picture--much of the growth was coming from rather desperately poor people, people more abject and hand to mouth than their recent ancestors, who formed the labor forces of early factories working 12 or 16 hour days, 6 or 6 1/2 day weeks, and sending their young children to work in factories as well because wages were that low. Eventually, the working classes in Western Europe and the United States, through a series of transformations that definitely included stern demands for more political power and a higher share of the domestic product in wages, did get richer, later. And then they underwent a second demographic transition in which despite even higher levels of family prosperity than had been known to humanity before (at least, on a per capita basis, since we ceased to be gatherer-hunters, and on a thousands times higher absolute basis) started reining in family sizes again, voluntarily. Major drops correlate to major depressions and other causes involving general misery (such as a relative shortage of men after the bloodletting of the Great War) and relative surges correlate to prosperous days, but the general trend in the first world in the 20th century was for population growth to slow down and fall toward mere replacement levels, or even below.
Population surges in the Third World also correlate to general rises in productivity; as I said before, in order to possible for a continent to be fed from overseas, surplus wealth must exist to enable the necessary foreign purchases! But as in the early First World, if we look at the details of who did the work versus who got rich, we find they were not the same people, and the people having larger families were often not individually in a better position in terms of household finances to do so. The point I was making was that political conditions were needed to enable the working masses to share in the benefits of rising productivity in general, and those political conditions do not automatically follow from the economics. Pressure to get their share tends to exist but the response of the owners of wealth need not be the same as in the past or in other countries. The first world ruling classes did not have superdeveloped superpowers to appeal to for help in keeping their own working classes in check politically; they each had to figure out how to manage the social crises on their own, and typically did so in part by giving ground and letting the working people have a larger share. But in the Third World, it is an option for a kleptocratic dictatorship to get aid in the form of apparatus of repression, and use it with the implicit if not openly stated approval of the expatriate owners of a big share of the local national wealth, and this has happened many times.
If the working masses are able to get a larger share of the national product, in rough proportion to the rise in productivity, it may be that they still will have to purchase adequate food supplies from overseas as you say. But I think it is reasonable to figure that before having recourse to that, their rising effective demand will tend to patronize local production of food first. For one thing, it is local agriculturalists who are adapted to produce the mix of traditional foodstuffs the people with more wage money will prefer to buy first. Second, the platitudes of the old British Smithian and Ricardian economists and those of the latter day Chicago school to the contrary, very few successful capitalist nations have followed their dicta of laissez faire free trade policy to a successful outcome. All the rising economic powers of the capitalist world first took care, in the days before they rode to the top of the wheel of fortune, to guarantee national interest in national development in defiance of Smith, Ricardo, von Mises, Friedman et al, by looking to their national self-suffciency in essential crops, and to fostering industrial development under the protection of tariffs and other preferential policies. Japan is probably as textbook an example of a nation that lacks extensive resources per capita, including good agricultural land--I would bet its proportion of arable land to land agriculturally nearly useless (high mountain slopes instead of dry deserts) is no better than Iran's. But the Japanese are infamous among their would-be rice exporting partners in favoring domestic production of rice, and blocking cheaper imports, though this results in considerably higher food prices for the urban majority.
If Iran had been left in peace to evolve its own democracy, if Guatemala at the same time had similarly had its sovereignty respected, I would bet that the percentage of food imports would be considerably lower, and if this as in Japan meant higher prices for a meal, incomes would also be higher on average and at the poorest extremes, to enable survival. It may be that a world of hyperspecialization in agriculture as in all industries, where the large majority of every country's product is exported and the majority of necessities are imported, is more inevitable as the population grows, and according to the British and Chicago school economists, such a world would be richer than any other alternative too. But that is an assumption they take as proven, not demonstrated, and whether they are right that this is the outcome a market wherein the primary producers of wealth--the working people--enjoyed the lion's share of purchasing power, it should be clear that if we live in a world where the majority of purchasing power is in the hands of people considerably higher up the economic ladder, we have no rational reason to expect good outcomes for the people near the bottom. If their weak market bargaining position is compounded with a weak political position as well, in political systems most aptly described as "one dollar, one vote," then we can expect even starker disparities.
Iran, Guatemala and a long list of other nations were not left free to develop as their own domestic political process would have it; the priorities of powerful superstates were imposed on them instead. I believe this, more than a presumed inevitable population surge, determines the nature of the market priorities and land usage in these countries, and indeed that the population surges themselves are outcomes of the imposition of colonial and neo-colonial dependencies, just as the great surge in British population correlated with the expulsion of the peasant majorities off the land into wage dependency in industry (and the remnant on the land also fell into wage dependency as hired farm workers). The question is, when and in what form, if ever, will there be the political restoration that shifts a larger share of the higher productivity produced wealth back into their hands that would form the basis of a market economy responsive to the needs of the working masses, rather than to the profits and pleasures of a privileged few? Obviously that day need never come.
And this is why I am an economic Eeyore and not a buoyant optimist. Because economy is political economy, the political position of the ordinary person is very poor and getting worse along with the economic, and we have so damn many neo-Malthusian apologists who cherry pick out a single point to attack in an effort to evade the larger crisis staring us in the face. I know a Marxist proletarian revolution is out of the question because it will turn into a nuclear civil war, with all the other WMD and other arsenals of high tech repression thrown in too. Finding another way is not easy. But a childlike faith in the good benefits an Islamic like submission, not like Muslims to a purported loving and merciful and all powerful if stern God, but to the "magic of the marketplace" in all its mindlessness and perversity, is definitely not better.
Population surges in the Third World also correlate to general rises in productivity; as I said before, in order to possible for a continent to be fed from overseas, surplus wealth must exist to enable the necessary foreign purchases! But as in the early First World, if we look at the details of who did the work versus who got rich, we find they were not the same people, and the people having larger families were often not individually in a better position in terms of household finances to do so. The point I was making was that political conditions were needed to enable the working masses to share in the benefits of rising productivity in general, and those political conditions do not automatically follow from the economics. Pressure to get their share tends to exist but the response of the owners of wealth need not be the same as in the past or in other countries. The first world ruling classes did not have superdeveloped superpowers to appeal to for help in keeping their own working classes in check politically; they each had to figure out how to manage the social crises on their own, and typically did so in part by giving ground and letting the working people have a larger share. But in the Third World, it is an option for a kleptocratic dictatorship to get aid in the form of apparatus of repression, and use it with the implicit if not openly stated approval of the expatriate owners of a big share of the local national wealth, and this has happened many times.
If the working masses are able to get a larger share of the national product, in rough proportion to the rise in productivity, it may be that they still will have to purchase adequate food supplies from overseas as you say. But I think it is reasonable to figure that before having recourse to that, their rising effective demand will tend to patronize local production of food first. For one thing, it is local agriculturalists who are adapted to produce the mix of traditional foodstuffs the people with more wage money will prefer to buy first. Second, the platitudes of the old British Smithian and Ricardian economists and those of the latter day Chicago school to the contrary, very few successful capitalist nations have followed their dicta of laissez faire free trade policy to a successful outcome. All the rising economic powers of the capitalist world first took care, in the days before they rode to the top of the wheel of fortune, to guarantee national interest in national development in defiance of Smith, Ricardo, von Mises, Friedman et al, by looking to their national self-suffciency in essential crops, and to fostering industrial development under the protection of tariffs and other preferential policies. Japan is probably as textbook an example of a nation that lacks extensive resources per capita, including good agricultural land--I would bet its proportion of arable land to land agriculturally nearly useless (high mountain slopes instead of dry deserts) is no better than Iran's. But the Japanese are infamous among their would-be rice exporting partners in favoring domestic production of rice, and blocking cheaper imports, though this results in considerably higher food prices for the urban majority.
If Iran had been left in peace to evolve its own democracy, if Guatemala at the same time had similarly had its sovereignty respected, I would bet that the percentage of food imports would be considerably lower, and if this as in Japan meant higher prices for a meal, incomes would also be higher on average and at the poorest extremes, to enable survival. It may be that a world of hyperspecialization in agriculture as in all industries, where the large majority of every country's product is exported and the majority of necessities are imported, is more inevitable as the population grows, and according to the British and Chicago school economists, such a world would be richer than any other alternative too. But that is an assumption they take as proven, not demonstrated, and whether they are right that this is the outcome a market wherein the primary producers of wealth--the working people--enjoyed the lion's share of purchasing power, it should be clear that if we live in a world where the majority of purchasing power is in the hands of people considerably higher up the economic ladder, we have no rational reason to expect good outcomes for the people near the bottom. If their weak market bargaining position is compounded with a weak political position as well, in political systems most aptly described as "one dollar, one vote," then we can expect even starker disparities.
Iran, Guatemala and a long list of other nations were not left free to develop as their own domestic political process would have it; the priorities of powerful superstates were imposed on them instead. I believe this, more than a presumed inevitable population surge, determines the nature of the market priorities and land usage in these countries, and indeed that the population surges themselves are outcomes of the imposition of colonial and neo-colonial dependencies, just as the great surge in British population correlated with the expulsion of the peasant majorities off the land into wage dependency in industry (and the remnant on the land also fell into wage dependency as hired farm workers). The question is, when and in what form, if ever, will there be the political restoration that shifts a larger share of the higher productivity produced wealth back into their hands that would form the basis of a market economy responsive to the needs of the working masses, rather than to the profits and pleasures of a privileged few? Obviously that day need never come.
And this is why I am an economic Eeyore and not a buoyant optimist. Because economy is political economy, the political position of the ordinary person is very poor and getting worse along with the economic, and we have so damn many neo-Malthusian apologists who cherry pick out a single point to attack in an effort to evade the larger crisis staring us in the face. I know a Marxist proletarian revolution is out of the question because it will turn into a nuclear civil war, with all the other WMD and other arsenals of high tech repression thrown in too. Finding another way is not easy. But a childlike faith in the good benefits an Islamic like submission, not like Muslims to a purported loving and merciful and all powerful if stern God, but to the "magic of the marketplace" in all its mindlessness and perversity, is definitely not better.