ABSTRACT
The capacity of the land to meet the demand for food and other services has been a recurring public concern since the time of Malthus, but the Malthusian principle was anticipated as early as 1589. 1 Three centuries later, Sir William Crookes again posed the specter of food demand exceeding the capacity of the land to supply it. The topic of his 1898 presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science was not that of world population and starvation, as in the case of Malthus, but of food supply for the “bread eaters” of the world, or the developed countries. 2
