A Highly Dispersed Food Reserve

Those who have thought about it are uncomfortably aware that a crisis in human population is building in the world and that the complex interactions among birth rate, death rate, energy supply, quality of life, and food supply may eventually lead to a precipitous decline in world population. Linus Pauling, in a talk before the American Chemical Society on April 5, 1976, predicted that the population of the world would increase to approximately 8 billion, followed by catastrophe and stability at a world population of 1 billion. The most likely cause of such a catastrophe is an inadequate supply of nutritious food resulting from a single cataclysmic event or a series of interrelated events. Possible events include new crop pests and diseases that reduce yields drastically, a nuclear disaster that puts large arable lands out of production, a major world war, insufficient energy supplies to maintain our agricultural and distribution...