World Setting: Paradoxical Constraints on Engineering

Hundreds of millions of people are suffering from malnutrition and starvation in the Third World, the largest of our worlds. Tens of millions die each year from these causes. Population growth is exponential; growth of food production, at best, is in arithmetic progression, and the gap is rapidly widening. We need more than scientific training if such immense problems are to be solved. In fact, our scientific and technical training may have left us with some flawed tools. Droughts are implicit in many of our volatile climates; persistent droughts are also a characteristic of nature and famine is their consequence. We need to be able to show and to feel that food is worth growing. Aid by the developed nations to the developing nations will not work in the long term without considerable changes in the cultures and technical skills of the poor. I have come to the following conclusions about constraints on development. (a) It is now technically easy for engineers and other professionals to benefit some of the needy for part of the time but not to benefit most of the needy for all of the time. (b) Capital aid or capital investment will not succeed for very long in ameliorating conditions in the Third World, for the implicit environmental problems are too massive and the cultural problems of population growth apparently insoluble and increasing rapidly. (c) Beneficial consequences of the transfer of technological skills are too slow to emerge. (d) To have much effect in our lifetimes, only draconian remedies will achieve much. These seem to me to focus on three immediate aspects: (i) forceful encouragement of birth control in developing countries as has been successful in, for example, Singapore and China; (ii) great reduction in the wastage of crops between the seed in the ground and food in the belly; (iii) more intensive evolution of synthetic proteins and other elements in the food chain by the developed countries.