Why should we thank Neil Armstrong for our daily bread?

The new Chapter 31 of Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom

On Friday, 5 September, I joined a panel of economists at the Swartland Agricultural Show in Moorreesburg to debate South Africa’s economic future. In preparing for the conversation, I revisited the chapter I wrote on the Green Revolution for the second edition of Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom, published nine months ago. For international readers, it is available on Kindle. South Africans can find it in any good South African bookshop. Several chapters are available here: Chapter 3, Chapter 5, Chapter 11, Chapter 16, Chapter 20, Chapter 27, Chapter 33 and Chapter 36. Consider a paid subscription to read them – and this one – in full.

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On July 18, 1969, two days before Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin were the first humans to walk on the moon, the US president’s speechwriter penned the following words: ‘Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace’, began the speech that the president would read if the two astronauts could not return. ‘In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood. Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts. For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.’¹

Fortunately, Richard Nixon was never required to read these solemn yet profound words. On July 20, Armstrong stepped onto the moon with his famous quip: ‘That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’ Four days later, the crew returned to Earth, signaling US victory over the Soviet Union in the Space Race and fulfilling President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 promise to land a man on the moon and return him safely before the decade’s end.

Yet despite the Space Race igniting global interest in humanity’s quest to settle other planets, it seemingly did little to alleviate the very immediate concerns about the future of life on earth. One book, published only a year before Armstrong walked on the moon, encapsulated this fear best. The opening statement in an early edition spelt out the imminent threat: ‘The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...’²

The Population Bomb, written by Paul Ehrlich and Anne Howland Ehrlich, became an immediate bestseller. It brought unprecedented attention to food supply and, more importantly, policies at combating fertility. The Ehrlichs had their own proposals to defuse the bomb: ‘We must rapidly bring the world population under control, reducing the growth rate to zero or making it negative. Conscious regulation of human numbers must be achieved. Simultaneously we must, at least temporarily, greatly increase our food production.’³ It was Thomas Malthus, the eighteenth-century English cleric we discussed in Chapter 17, on steroids.

But, just as with Malthus, the Ehrlichs had it all wrong. Now, almost six decades after its publication, the world looks very different. The Population Bomb’s grim predictions came at exactly the time that global population growth rate, the difference between the number of people born and the number of people dying, was at its maximum. Consider the evidence: the global annual crude death rate in 1968 was 13.52 per 1000 people, and in 2021 it was 8.76.⁴ Instead of widespread famine, disease and social unrest, the world experienced one of the most prosperous and peaceful periods in human history. Famines, such as those in the Horn of Africa, were often more the result of politics than production.

They were especially wrong about India. In The Population Bomb, the Ehrlichs wrote: ‘India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.’⁵ They went as far as to propose that aid should be cut off from India if they did not implement fertility control, a proposal that would have certainly created the conditions for famine. In April 2023, India surpassed the population of mainland China, a country that did take Ehrlich’s predictions to heart and enacted population control measures. While India is now the most populous country on earth, China has serious concerns about an ageing population.

But how could the Ehrlichs, and the many others who believed their thesis, get it so wrong?