Here's how I'm coming to understand it. The higher the standard of living, the lower the birth rate - because this population has already gone through their population growth phase, or their big spurt. Increasing food production will produce a corresponding increase in population, but not necessarily in the area in which the increase in food production occurred. Someone, somewhere, is consuming the surplus, be it in another city, country or continent, and that is having an effect on the population growth in that area. Sending free food to Zaire just makes more hungry people in Zaire, for example. I think that's what Caveman was driving at?

Regardless, FE&T makes a ton more sense as a solution than does sending food, or implementing birth control, or increasing food production.

I read an interesting take on the whole vegetarianism-as-solution issue: that it would effectively convert more and more of the earth's resources into human beings and cause further problems, rather than solving any. More grain, more monoculture, more food being sent here and there = more people, who would then (as the current logic goes) require more food, and so on.

I'm still working and muddling this through. Interesting stuff, great thread.