MALTHUS Two hundred years ago, Thomas Robert Malthus, a British economist , wrote “An Essay on the Principle of Population” in which he argued that the world population would increase faster than the food supply, with disastrous results for the general human welfare. A world population of 250 million at the time of Christ has now grown to 5.7 billion in spite of wars, plagues, famine, and epidemics. World food production has been keeping pace with population growth until recently. If the world food supply had been distributed equally to each member of society in the mid 1980’s, the population of 4.7 billion would have been allocated a weekly diet of 11 pounds of meat, grain a