Compare Malthus’s and Boserup’s theories of the relationship

between population growth and food supply. [6 MARKS]

Malthus was known to be an all “doom and gloom” gentleman

who thought that if the population was still increasing we would
die of global disasters like famine, illness and war. Whereas,
Boserup had optimistic and positive views, where she thought
that solutions would be found and that we would survive. A
good way to understand Malthus’ views is through a
geometrical and arithmetical scale, when the population is
going up “1,2,4,6,8,16…” the food supply is going up “1,2,3,4,5,6”,
representing a big gap between those 2 main factors
(population growth and food supply and demand.) Boserup’s
views were completely different in this case, therefore thinking
that “necessity is the mother of all inventions”; meaning that
there would eventually be a solution to fix this issue. Overall,
neither theory has been proved to be completely accurate, right
or even wrong, noting that there has of course been famine and
war, and that so far, food production has kept up with global
population increase.