Moon Jung-hoon
The author is a professor of agricultural economics and rural development at Seoul National University and director of the Food Business Lab.
Thomas Malthus’s “An Essay on the Principle of Population” (1798), published in Britain, presented humanity with an apocalyptic vision during the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution. Malthus argued that while food production would increase only arithmetically, population would grow geometrically, leaving humanity trapped under the constant pressure of poverty and famine. At the time, rapidly industrializing cities across Europe were witnessing a soaring rate of urban poverty, making Malthus’s grim prediction appear plausible.
A farmer who achieved a high-yield harvest with Tongil rice poses with bundles of harvested rice in a rural village in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi, in the 1970s. The government designated and supported collective cultivation zones to expand nationwide adoption of Tongil rice, which was developed in 1971. [JOONGANG PHOTO]
But agriculture soon produced a technological breakthrough that fundamentally overturned Malthus’s theory. In 1909, German chemist Fritz Haber developed a method for synthesizing nitrogen fertilizer, and Carl Bosch later made mass production possible through high-pressure industrial processing. Once nitrogen fertilizer was applied to crops, yields per unit of land rose beyond anything previously imaginable. Agriculture was no longer strictly constrained by natural soil fertility or the area of arable land available. The “arithmetic limits” of food production envisioned by Malthus began to collapse under the force of technological innovation.
