ABSTRACT
The first difficulties in the problem of feeding the world’s population is that no one knows precisely how many people there are in the world. The League of Nations’ Statistical Branch, and the Food and Agriculture Organization have collects and examines the available evidence and arrived at figures which represent as well as is possible the order of magnitude of the populations of the different countries. The rates of increases in population in any particular country do not remain constant, but vary, and the changes follow the same course in all countries. In unimproved peasant conditions, birth–rates and death–rates are both high and the population remains fairly steady, fluctuating up and down according to food supplies, pestilences, and wars. The fall in the birth–rate is not uniform; it is almost invariably greater among the educated, higher income, and therefore presumably more intelligent groups than among the others.
