That said, the article struck me as more of a calling for greater privatization as complaints against the government were mentioned. The other comments you see here are generally valid though I did think you picked up on the hint of “overpopulation” talk that was there.

I’m glad you point out Malthusianism as lazy journalism though. Time magazine at one time (not sure if it was recent or not) had an article praising China for its population control efforts. The things about China is that it proves how big a failure population control is when used as a means to protect the environment. Right now China is having less and less children so the population there is growing by smaller and smaller amounts. But pollution is growing by greater and greater amounts because it is determined by things like the number of cars and factories-which have been increasing. Thus China is having its people trade in their children for cars or electronic devices that use electricity provided by coal fired power plants. China now finds itself with record levels of pollution and is very much not an example of how to save the world.

“If the rate of population growth exceeds the rate of agricultural output growth, then people get hungrier, regardless of what the population density is – and regardless of whether there were famines when population levels were much lower.”

Nonsene. If they have a decent paying job, they can always buy food. So the problem is: It is more profitable to sell the food to foreigners, and export it, than to sell it to the local, starving, population. If Ethiopians had jobs, less food would have been exported, and more consumed domestically.

After all, many of the richest countries in this world relies on imports for much of their calorie needs. there is no systematic relationship between domestic food production and famine. But there are a systematic relationship between what kind of job you have and poverty, and there is a systematic relationship between poverty and hunger.

I think you might be being a bit harsh! The passage you quote does not blame overpopulation, it just points to a declining agricultural output per capita, which is just another way of saying people are getting hungrier, which is the problem to be explained, not an explanation. The article does say that “an exploding population is one problem”. If the rate of population growth exceeds the rate of agricultural output growth, then people get hungrier, regardless of what the population density is – and regardless of whether there were famines when population levels were much lower. Why might the rate of agricultural production growth lag the rate of population growth? Because Ethiopia makes such little use of irrigation, fertilizer, modified seeds etc. So it looks to me like the LA Times story pointing to the rate of population growth fits nicely with your lack of technological progress explanation. I don’t sense a whiff of racism or knee-jerkism.