The big idea: As population grows, it needs more resources — food, water, energy and land.
Two famous thinkers disagreed on what happens next:
- Malthus was a pessimist — he feared population would outgrow food and cause crisis. - Boserup was an optimist — she argued that more people drives new ideas and technology that grow more food.
This micro is mostly about Boserup's optimistic outlook and what makes population-resource use sustainable.
Key terms
- Resource — anything people use to meet a need (food, water, energy, minerals, land).
- Carrying capacity — the largest population an area can support with its resources.
- Malthusian (pessimist) view — population grows faster than food, leading to famine or war.
- Boserupian (optimist) view — population pressure drives innovation that raises food output: 'necessity is the mother of invention'.
- Sustainability — meeting today's needs without stopping future generations meeting theirs.
Two opposite predictions
- Malthus (1798) — food grows slowly (add a fixed amount), population grows fast (doubles). Eventually a gap forms and 'checks' (famine, disease, war) cut the population back.
- Boserup (1965) — when population presses on resources, people invent ways to grow more food (new crops, irrigation, machinery), so output keeps up.
- Boserup's logic — more mouths to feed = more pressure = more innovation. Food production is not fixed; it responds to demand.
Know which is which: Malthus = pessimist (crisis). Boserup = optimist (innovation saves us).
The past papers in this micro mostly ask about Boserup's optimistic stance — so be ready to explain how more people leads to more food.
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Real ways food output has been raised: Boserup's optimism is backed by real history — humans keep developing resources to feed more people.
Ways resources are developed
- Green Revolution (India, 1960s-70s) — new high-yield wheat and rice varieties more than doubled grain output, helping India go from food shortages to surplus.
- Irrigation and water control (e.g. Egypt's Nile, China) — bringing water to dry land lets farmers grow crops where they could not before, and harvest more times a year.
- Mechanisation and fertiliser — tractors, machinery and chemical fertiliser raise the output of each worker and each hectare.
- Land reclamation (e.g. the Netherlands' polders) — draining sea and wetland created new farmland from land that produced nothing.
- New technology (GM crops, vertical farming, aquaculture) — modern innovation keeps lifting how much food a given area can yield.
Develop the link: Each method only earns full marks if you link it to more food: e.g. new high-yield seeds → each plant gives more grain → total food production rises.
How this is tested: Paper 2 often shows a graph or table of population and food production over time. You Identify a value, Estimate off the axis, or Describe the trend. This data is also strong evidence for Boserup: food has out-grown population, not fallen behind it.
Read carefully and quote the units (here, an index where 1961 = 100).
| Year | Population (index) | Food production (index) | Food per person (index) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1961 | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| 1980 | 146 | 166 | 114 |
| 2000 | 201 | 245 | 122 |
| 2020 | 256 | 350 | 137 |
IB-style question — read the data
Using the table above: (a) identify the population index in 2020 [1]; (b) estimate food production in 1980 [1]; (c) describe what happened to food per person between 1961 and 2020 [2].
How to answer each part
- (a) Identify the value. Read the 2020 row, population column → 256.
- (b) Estimate 1980 food. Read the 1980 row, food-production column → about 166.
- (c) Describe food per person. It rose, from 100 (1961) to 137 (2020) — a clear increase, meaning food grew faster than population. This supports Boserup, not Malthus.
Final answer
(a) 256; (b) about 166; (c) food per person rose from 100 to 137 — an increase, so food out-grew population (Boserup).