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Description
Food and Population is an editorial written and published in 1970 by People’s Canada Daily News, the then-organ of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist). Opposing the imperialist ideology of 18th-19th century English reverend T.R. Malthus and the neo-Malthusians, which declares poverty and malnutrition to be a result of the growing population and the resultant supposedly shrinking resources, it elaborates the Marxist-Leninist materialist viewpoint that poverty, as it exists, is due to the immense ruin of the masses of people by the bourgeoisie. Malthusianism espouses the view that famine and death are natural, and are indeed self-correcting phenomena to stop the depletion of the earth by a growing population — the population over the supposed sustainability level termed “surplus population,” namely the people of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Later, under the signboard of birth control and abortion, neo-Malthusians like Margaret Sanger and Dr. Henry Morgentaler took up a new imperialist effort to limit the “surplus population,” with no intentions of defending women’s rights. PCDN makes it clear that famines in India, for example, were a result of imperialist-imposed capitalist relations, not overpopulation, and that the elimination of hunger has occurred in societies where new, socialist relations of production have come into being. To end poverty at this stage means to put an end to the relations of production which foment it, and replace them with those which match social productive forces.