ABSTRACT
Fischer assumes, however, as do most of the other authors cited above, as a matter of course, that within that time there would be improvements in agricultural technology that would then increase the agricultural carrying capacity of the earth. Among the more recent estimates that take into account only the earth’s agricultural carrying capacity, perhaps the highest is that of a project that is currently still under way: the “MOIRA project” under Hans Linneman at the Vrije Universitet in Amsterdam. Generally, it seems that, as the actual world population increased from one estimate to the next, subsequent authors did not come up with a correspondingly shorter remaining span of time within which the world’s population limit would be reached, but rather, they typically came to a higher figure for the earth’s potential agricultural carrying capacity—apparently because improvements in agricultural technology led in the meantime to higher yields per acre. This paper was originally written in 1979.
