Customer Reviews

Famine, 1975!: America's decision: Who will survive?

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As one of those "little brown brothers" to the south, I must shamefully admit that I was taken in by this Paddock and Paddock book. My only excuse is that I was a teenager and came under the influence of my white high school teachers who promoted this book. I trusted them and so I trusted this book. I was a foolish boy.

As an older, and hopefully wiser man, I intend to buy this book. It will sit on my shelf as a reminder to me of how foolish that youth can be and how evil is the true believer who has no G-d to restrain him.

A good counter-book is the novel "State of Fear" by Michael Crichton. I enjoyed it immensely because the author began with a certain idea: to prove the looming disaster of Global Warming and then could not justify the disaster with the given scientific data. He changed his mind when he judged his fear did not measure up to the reality. So he wrote the opposite type of book. I love a man who can change.

With global warming, the lyrics have changed but the tune remains the same. I refuse to dance this time.

Ahh, those halcyon days of the 60s when affluent, educated, white, Anglo Saxon and Jewish men could chastise their Little Brown Brothers in the Third World for breeding themselves into squalor and imminent disaster !

And see their books become best-sellers, and be received as visionaries by the Western intelligentsia and mass media. Whatever criticism they endured was discharged from outraged third world-ers; this was dutifully ignored by the mainstream media, which back in those days exerted a power over content and delivery that is hard to imagine today.

With `Famine- 1975 !' the Paddock brothers were following the path laid down by the first of the neo-Malthusian philosophers of the postwar era, William Vogt, whose 1948 book `The Road to Survival' was a best-seller and a Book of the Month Club selection. Only a year after the Paddock's book was published, Paul R. Ehrlich, who acknowledged the influence of the Paddocks and Vogt in formulating his own Malthusian approaches to the world food crisis, published `The Population Bomb' which was not only a best seller, but triggered the formation of the Zero Population Growth movement of the early 70s.

William Paddock was an agronomist and Paul Paddock a diplomat; both were active in their careers during the Second World War and in the postwar period. 'Famine- 1975 !' is divided into three Parts; the first Part reviews the population and food production situation in the third world ca. 1965. The second part of the book looks at grain production in the US and other Western nations and delivers the bad news that even significant advances in production would be inadequate to meet world demand in the early to mid 70s. The book's final part deals with the neo-Malthusian aspects of food policy in the disaster period of the mid-70s, and advocates that food aid be selectively delivered to only those nations that agreed to implement drastic changes in their demographic structure. This triage-oriented approach to dictating food aid was (and is) quite controversial: condemning millions of dusky-skinned Hindoos to death by starvation seems callous, to say the least.

Not many Americans realize it, but in the period from 1955 - 1965 there was every reason to believe that the earth was headed for catastrophic famines. Only massive amounts of food aid - provided under the P.L. 480 `Food for Peace' program - saved Pakistan and India from mass starvation. The US provided the majority of the grains donated to these countries (Canada, Argentina, and Australia preferred to sell their grain surpluses to the Soviets and Chinese rather than donate to the South Asians).

Even with the steady donation of grain, the populations of much of the Third World was growing at such an accelerated rate that extrapolating patterns of consumption to the 70s and early 80s gave disturbing implications: there would simply not be enough surplus grain in the developed world to feed the masses in the developing world.

It was the emergence of the Green Revolution, fomented by Norman Borlaug, that essentially saved much of the developing world from the forecasted mass famines. For example, in 1965 Borlaug shipped his new `dwarf' wheat seeds to Pakistan and, despite the skepticism of that country's apparatchiks, the new strain proved so successful that by 1968, just three years later, Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat.

But at the time the Paddocks and Ehrlich were writing their manuscripts, the success of the Green Revolution was by no means a sure thing.

So it is easy, in hindsight, to declare that the Paddocks and the other Population Bombers were racists and bigots who resorted to hyperbole as part of their sick desires to play God to the suffering multitudes of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But in 1967 they were among a large and well-respected cohort of agronomists, economists, diplomats, and politicians who had genuine reason to forecast a dire future for the world's poorer populations.

So were the Population Bombers prophets of doom whose cries of wolf served their own interests ?

Maybe....or maybe not. In 2008 world food prices nearly doubled compared to their 2007 values. Protests and riots over rising food prices took place in Egypt, and many governments, including the Philippines, were forced to implement emergency bulk purchases of rice and cease exports in order to avoid shortages in their staple foodstuff.

As I write this review in March 2009, the New York Times has a headline about starvation in Kenya. Australia, China, and Argentina are in the grip of the worst droughts in recent memory and their crop production statistics are expected to plummet to worrisome levels.

Famine 1975 ? Didn't happen. Famine 2010.............?

I'll be sincere.I tried to read this trash-book, for free on an internet site.After reading a few pages, I decided not to continous.The main "idea" of this trash-book is that until 1975, a massive famine would exterminate the majority of mankind, including the majority of american population.A fake.
Today, books following the same malthusians ideas of this trash-book, are being published and many of them, are best-sellers.Please, don't waste your money and time, buying this trash-book.