A GRICULTURAL economists know that the world faces a critical shortage of food within the next three decades if recent rapid trends in population growth and recent rather slow trends in the rate of adoption of modern agricultural technology continue in the developing nations. Moreover, if the current population trends continue to the year 2000 and beyond, the population forecasts for the earth quickly become absurdly astronomical. A favorite parlor game of some food experts is to estimate the maximum number of people the earth could support, provided we exploit the resources of the sea and the presently uncultivated mountains, deserts, and other wastelands to the fullest extent which science fiction writers could imagine. Calculations of this sort do not lead the way to a solution. No matter how large any estimate of the earth's population is deemed to be, present growth trends would bring the earth's total to that size within a matter of a few generations. No matter how well we reconcile ourselves to eating algae, hearts of oak breakfast cereal, and beefsteak synthesized from soybeans, there is always a doomsday-year-plus-one facing us. For more than a century, the official demographic view has been one of deep pessimism: that mankind could look forward to only a few more seconds (as the earth's history is computed) before, like Raymond Pearl's fruitflies, he becomes extinct from senseless reproduction. Agricultural economists have tended to accept this view, at least superficially. However, the great heart with which they have set about trying to update the agricultural economies of the developing nations leads one to believe that secretly they hoped it was all just a bad statistical dream and that somehow humanity would be snatched from Malthus' jaws in the nick of time by some kind Providence. Not since John Foster Dulles cancelled the Aswan Dam project in the name of inevitable overpopulation has any major action of developed nations with respect to the underdeveloped nations been based on the presumption that population