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University Daily Kansan
Tuesday, Feb. 9, 1965
Editorial Policy
To stick with a tradition pretty much adhered to in the past, we feel obliged to begin this semester with a statement of policy.
The function of an editorial page is to inform, entertain, and serve as a forum to reflect the diverse opinions of readers in letters to the editor or guest editors. We also reserve the right to express our opinions on any matter. This will usually be done in an editorial in the top left part of this page.
The rest of the page will be used for features, guest editorials, book reviews, letters and reprints which we feel are of interest to our readers.
THE KANSAN BOARD CONSTITUTION specifies that "Letters to the Daily Kansan are printed provided they are signed, do not violate the laws of libel and the tenets of decency and good taste and are not unreasonably long."
We welcome typed letters that comply with the above standards, and that are double-spaced on one side of the paper.
of our readers feel the editorial page does not deal adequately with controversial subjects.
It has been brought to our attention that many
WE HOPE DURING THE SEMESTER to discuss a variety of troublesome topics. We feel the editorial page should seek student opinion and feeling on education, the "sexual revolution," civil rights, and other areas in which there is considerable disagreement on the nature of the problem and the solution. The editorial page is the only place in the paper where these problems can be discussed frankly and responsibly. Nothing can be gained by ignoring them.
Before the semester is over we will probably be labeled conservative, liberal, reactionary and radical in our outlook. Each may be justified as we don't believe that one simple "tag" can cover a man's belief in all matters of political and social consequence. A liberal in one arena may be a conservative in another. We may be somewhat more conservatively inclined (politically) than recent editors of this page. But if we contradict ourselves, so we contradict ourselves.
— The Editors
People May Outstrip Food Supply
(Editor's Note: The following is the first of a four-part series on the world food and population problem. The first is an introduction to the problem. The second will analyze birth control ideas, the third will discuss food production ideas. The last will analyze the relative values of birth control and agricultural production, including the financial means for carrying out a program.)
1970: Famine strikes India, Pakistan, and China.
1975: Famine strikes Indonesia, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, and Brazil.
1980: Famine strikes the rest of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Now, 170 years later, the Malthusian theory has come true. The world's population has outgrown its food supply.
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It seems impossible that world hunger—worse than it is now—will come in the next decade—a decade only five years away. But that is what Dr. Raymond Ewell, economist, chemical engineer, and former consultant to the government of India, predicted last September.
THE PROBLEM IS ESSENTially this: Modern science and development are lowering the death rates in underdeveloped countries while the birth rates remain static. The result is a record world population growth rate of more than 2 per cent—a rate which is greater than the increase in world food production.
A 2 per cent population increase may not seem like a great increase, but when a few hypothetical cases are analyzed, the figure is staggering. As a recent article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists points out, a mere dozen people reproducing at the rate of 2 per cent per year would require only 976 years to produce the population to three billion people which we now have. Furthermore, if these same 12 people had begun reproducing at that same rate of 2 per cent per year since the beginning of the Christian era, each could have had 300 million descendants by 1962.
Yet the population growth is a reality. Man in his present form is believed to have been on this earth 25,000 to 30,000 years. It took that time to attain our present population; yet our population is supposed to double in the next 30 years. Latin America, which has the highest growth rate in the world, could triple its population by the turn of the century.
WHAT MAKES MATTERS worse is the fact that populations are growing fastest in areas which could use the increase the least. For instance, according to the July issue of Americas, the United States, which could sustain a population growth the easiest, has the second lowest growth rate in our hemisphere (second only to Uruguay). Fourteen countries in this hemisphere have growth rates above $2\frac{1}{2}$ per cent, and two, Costa Rica and Venezuela, have growth rates as high as 4 per cent.
The Third World Food Survey has concluded that 10-15 per cent of the world's population is undernourished and that up to half suffer from hunger or malnutrition, and usually both. It says world food supplies need to increase by more than 35 per cent merely to sustain the world at its present deplorable state, and that to give reasonable improvement, food supplies must increase by 80 per cent in the next 12 years and animal foods must increase by more than 120 per cent.
Grenville Clark, in a recent paper, has said that world disarmament will have to precede any effort to limit the population. Basing his argument on the fact that birth control is used most extensively by peoples in developed areas, he says the $120 billion spent on military units and equipment must be used to upgrade the living standards of the world before birth control will work.
Despite these and many other warnings, voices are raised which say the problem is unsolvable in the near future and some have even said we need not worry for the immediate future.
A WRITER IN ATLANTIC Monthly recently proclaimed that the population problem was not his to worry about, since the problem would become acute, he
said, not before the turn of the century. Even more frightening, he said, "If the critical moment comes at, or near, the year 2000, it is almost a certainty that our technology will still be well in advance of that of our assailants, so that however badly hurt, we would still be able to retaliate strongly . . . with a storm of unimaginable horrors."
Anyone seriously looking into the future possibilities will readily see that the problem does exist and that world famine will indeed occur in the very near future.
While the fact that half the world will be starving to death may not concern some in an opulent country such as ours, certainly we should be able to understand the threat to the future of the United States. Starving people want food, and they certainly don't care what sort of government they get it under. In all likelihood, these people would turn to a government of force, one of regimented actions — Communism, for instance. At that time, the full force of the Communist and underdeveloped world would fall upon the United States.
TO SAY, AS THAT WRITER in Atlantic Monthly said, that "evidence is lacking that we, as a people, have made sufficient progress toward mastering the art of self-government to be competent to advise others in a matter closely related to their national—or should one say tribal (?)-existence" is first of all to neglect our own national self-interest. Second, the requests for aid indicate that our aid is, indeed, wanted by these countries. While it may be self-centered, the basic strength of this nation is that we believe we have mastered to a great extent the art of self-government.
DailijHänsan
— Greg Swartz
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"Well, The Next Time A Winston Churchill Dies, Maybe I Can Do Better"
BOOK REVIEWS
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF AMERICAN FOLK SONGS, edited by Alan Lomax (Penguin, $1.95).
Most of us, probably, would prefer to take the easy way out and listen to folk music on records. There are, of course, many who are taking up the guitar, and some are willing to try the songs on the piano. This beautiful paperback, with words, piano arrangements and guitar chords, and compiled by the dean of folk music collectors, deserves wide sales.
It is just right for propping up on the piano. There are good notes and introductions, and Lomax gives background on the many popular favorites. The cover is a delight—representations of two guitars, one of them in red, white and blue.
Now, what's in it? Lomax breaks the book down into Yankee songs, mountain songs of the South, lullabies and reels, spirituals and work songs, western songs, and songs of modern times. This means that what you've been hearing, whether the popular level Kingston Trio or Peter, Paul and Mary or the more authentic—so we are told—Joan Baez, is likely to be here.
For a sampling: "The Wild Mizzourye," "The Erie Canal," "Old Blue," "Goober Peas," "Frog Went A-Courtin," "Blue Tail Fly," "Sourwood Mountain," "The Cherry Tree Carol," "John Henry," "Sweet Betsy from Pike," "The Old Chisholm Trail," "Casey Jones," "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum," and "Worried Man."
***
HORN OF THE HUNTER, by Robert Ruark (Crest, 75 cents).
Robert Ruark is a kind of poor man's Heminway, on perpetual safari, looking for the gut experiences of life, trapped by his own primitivism. This quality comes out in his novels; you get it in this story of an African safari as well.
As for the story itself, it is a straightforward account of hunting for big game, embellished with considerable detail on animal life, and Ruarkian opinions, which are always pointed, Ruark never being the type to hold himself back.
East Africa is the setting, and there is an excellent middle section of photographs, some of the best photographs of a safari that have appeared in book form. Ruark also reveals a talent about which his readers may have been unaware—pen-and-ink sketches of African life.
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Lewis and Miss Thompson were wed when both were riding high, he as the hot novelist of the twenties, she as the woman who had broken through in foreign correspondence. Near the end of their marriage the positions were reversed: Lewis had gone into decline after "Dodsworth," Dorothy Thompson had become a celebrity whose mail required several trucks for delivery.
DOROTHY AND RED. by Vincent Sheean (Crest, 75 cents).
You read this memoir with the feeling that you are peeping into a bedroom. Yet it isn't salacious; it's merely so personal that it makes you squirm. Vincent Sheean was a close friend of Dorothy Thompson and Sinclair Lewis, and he records their stormy marriage, using the primary documents themselves—the letters of the two.
Lewis pursued Miss Thompson across two continents, persuading her to marry him. It was a blunder, for him and for her, too. Their temperaments were too volatile; Lewis had, as well, a propensity to hurt, as much as possible, those they loved. Miss Thompson was an intellectual; Lewis was really a man of Sauk Centre, and not much more, despite his harsh books about the small town and small town values.
The Thompson papers are in the Syracuse University library, and there Sheean went to work. He does more than string letters together, however; he gives his quite personal account of knowing the "Lewises" in their marriage. 1927 to 1942.