“The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” The opening line to Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 jeremiad The Population Bomb is a sober one. “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”
Ehrlich wasn’t alone in his doom and gloom. The decade saw a gaggle of hippie professors mustering to announce that the extinction of the human race was imminent.
Fast forward to 2017. The human race is still here. Not only has worldwide famine failed to materialize, but we now have more food than we know what to do with. The Wall Street Journal reports that American farmers are struggling to cope with record surplus crops. Demand is high, but it can’t keep up with a superabundance of corn and soybeans.
In response to this crisis (a pleasant one, as crises go), farmers are looking for alternative uses for their products. Food scientists have turned the cornucopia into everything from seat cushions to moisturizers to mattresses. Reebok now makes sneakers from corn and Lego is considering molding toy blocks from corn and wheat.
Meanwhile, vast amounts of corn are converted to fuel. Currently, 38 percent of American corn gets turned into ethanol, up from less than 1 percent in 1980. Research for how crops could replace petroleum has been given new urgency by the current surplus.
And it’s not just corn and beans—a month ago, the government bailed out the blueberry industry by purchasing $10 million worth of surplus berries, the second such purchase in as many years. Obviously, those giant blueberry muffins at Starbucks aren’t nearly big enough.
Such are the problems of plenty—the sort of problems that Ehrlich failed to anticipate. In the face of dire warnings from enviro-scolds, it’s always worth remembering that one of the wrongest men ever was an enviro-scold.
Wild predictions of eco-apocalypse make for a good fright, but they usually don’t amount to a hill of soybeans.
