Yes, we need to develop non-land, non-agriculture-based economies, especially those relating to information technology. But if you have a shortage of land, an extremely impoverished rural population and money concentrated in the hands of a rich elite, then you have problems which ‘enhancing the quality of human capital’ alone will not help to solve. Land prices do rise quickly and this resource goes to those who can afford to buy it, or capture it by force.

Land is the resource over which different communities fight for it represents both a source of identity-formation and the last hope of economic security, if not survival. Where then are the alternatives in real time, in real places, for real people? Job creation in non-land-based activities is one, and this is an area of investment for domestic and international industry. This is unlikely to happen in large parts of South Asia for several more decades because of the reasons we have discussed throughout this book: the lack of infrastructure, the lack of growing incomes, local and regional disparities, the lack of adequate nutrition and the continuing gender bias.

What is the option? You pack up and go next door to where land appears to be a more equitable resource—or so it seems to you—and not under the kind of pressure that is faced at home. You inflict or carry the problems that you faced in your original home on a new community or set of communities, on new land.

A chapter in a recent World Watch book begins with these words: ‘While economists tout record-breaking increases in global commerce in recent decades, more sobering statistics are being put forth by the world’s leading biologists: the loss of living species in recent decades, they report, represents the largest mass extinction since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago.’7

So, how far was Malthus off the mark? Not very, I would say.

Immigration Revisited

Immigration is a dynamic force internationally. Immigrants are a worldwide resource. They are changing the demographics of nations as economically, politically and militarily as powerful as the United States. It has been predicted with some certainity that the ‘browning’ of America is a fact and that in the not very distant future, the whites will become a minority. This is a recognition of all population flows and growth in the world. Indian-Americans number more than 1.5 million in the country of their adoption and they have the highest average household income of any Asian ethnic group. They are leaders in business, but especially in high tech industries, particularly information technology. The Hispanics or Latinos, those who speak Spanish fluently and are of Central and South American stock, now number 12 per cent of the population and their proportion in the US population is expected to go up to 25 per cent by 2050!