The Bomb That Did Not Explode and the Policy That Did

In 1966 an American biologist named Paul Ehrlich rode through Delhi in a taxi at night, and the street around him seemed to press against the windows. People ate, slept, argued and washed at the roadside, and the car moved slowly through them. He later wrote that the scene had made him feel the problem of numbers in his body and not merely in a table. Two years afterwards, in 1968, he published The Population Bomb, a short and urgent book that opened with the Delhi night, declared that the battle to feed all of humanity was already lost, and warned that hundreds of millions would starve during the 1970s. It sold in the millions and shaped a generation of policy.

The prediction did not come true in the form stated. Human numbers rose from about three and a half billion in 1968 to eight billion in November 2022, according to the United Nations, and yet hunger fell as a share of humanity across most of that period. In India the change was visible. In the mid 1960s the country depended on imported grain, a dependence that humiliated its leaders and bound its diplomacy to foreign shipments. High yielding wheat and rice, fertiliser, irrigation and public procurement, associated with Norman Borlaug and with M S Swaminathan, lifted foodgrain output from about fifty million tonnes around 1950 to more than three hundred million tonnes in recent years. Ehrlich's critics concluded that he had mistaken a problem of technology for a law of nature.