WILL YOU STARVE?
Plain Truth Magazine
October 1964
Volume: Vol XXIX, No.10
Issue:
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WILL YOU STARVE?

The frightening specter of world-wide STARVATION rears its head on the horizon! This article will SHOCK you — but it's time you knew the TRUTH about WHAT IS COMING!

   THE population explosion looms as the most serious threat to human survival ever!
   The reason?
   STARVATION!
   But to you, with your family, where you live — the "population explosion" may seem a little bit vague, academic, unreal. Well — get a grip on yourself, and be ready for a SHOCK!

The Official Report

   The World Health Organization (WHO) says the overcrowding of cities, or a population "implosion" brought about by the population explosion, is assuming catastrophic proportions — and warned it will get much worse.
   The "implosion" is the huge, steady stream of rural dwellers, leaving the land, flooding into the cities of the world, causing unbelievable congestion of people, industries, houses and vehicles — and creating stupefying problems of public health.
   The cities of the world "already present health problems of staggering dimensions," WHO said. But this is only a small PART of the truly GIGANTIC problems inherent in the population explosion. These dire predictions from the World Health Organization assume continuing food supply to these teeming, throbbing, sweltering, smog-choked jungles and jumbles of shacks, concrete, steel, corrugated tin and paper.
   But there won't be anywhere near enough food.
   The prospect of DROUGHT and immediately resultant FAMINE is a far more FEARSOME problem for the immediate future. And it's sure! It WILL happen! You'll SEE it develop before your own startled eyes — in the next single decade!
   It will affect YOUR life, YOUR children and loved ones! It's about time you were warned. But can you heed a warning? Would you take action in the face of danger?
   In the age of tension — the age of the BOMB — a calloused humanity is accustomed to alarm. We're INDIFFERENT to disaster; passive in the face of suffering; coldly impervious to the shocking era in which we live.
   Police are alarmed. Time after time, law enforcement officials have been aghast at cold, aloof, calloused public indifference to heinous crimes. Citizens stand and watch while a woman is raped. Citizens ignore the screams of a helpless victim of a knife attack, until her attacker reappears THREE TIMES to finally kill her. A group stands on the shore, watching a woman whose car has just plunged into the water, miraculously clamber out of the sinking automobile, to stand on its top as it begins to submerge. "HELP ME!" she screams — "I CAN'T SWIM!" The group watches as the car sinks. It sees the woman struggle momentarily — sees her kick convulsively — sees her disappear beneath the waves. No one lifts a finger to help! THINK of it! Does this ugly, calloused, apathetic indifference to human suffering — indifference to danger grow like a fertile weed in YOUR mind and heart?
   Can you still be stirred to ACTION in the face of danger — to COMPASSION and HELP when someone is in need?
   Do YOU HEED WARNINGS? Can YOU be shocked into a serious awareness of REALITY?
   Well — BE PREPARED FOR A SHOCK!
   This world doesn't have many more years to practice its aloof, careless, haughty, "don't care" attitude to the frightening DANGERS of these times! GRINDING, CRASHING, AWESOME, FRIGHTENING PUNISHMENT is just around the corner!
   Of far more concern than the stockpiling of nuclear weapons today is the new worry of scientists, agriculturalists and economists. They worry about FAMINE!

More Dangerous Than Hydrogen Bomb

   Today, scientists are working to unlock the mysteries of human reproduction.
   They're engaged in a frantic, last-ditch race against time.
   Their adversaries are myriad.
   They seek, somehow, to find a solution to the POPULATION explosion. And unless they come up with the right answers, they say, THIS WORLD IS DOOMED!
   Today, judging by present trends — and assuming birth rates do not increase, scientists predict this earth's population will DOUBLE to 6 BILLION persons by the year 2000.
   It will REDOUBLE by 2035, just 35 short years later, they say, to TWELVE BILLION!
   But all this is somehow unreal to the average American, Briton, Australian. Huge figures, distant dates, alarming words about "some day" fail to penetrate the thick blanket of public indifference shrouding the well-fed Western world. The plight of the "have-not" nations is common knowledge. Haven't the missionaries, CARE, and a worried government made appeals to help the starving hordes of India for years?
   It's difficult for people in Perth, Paris or Portland to become alarmed because Malaysians or Indians starve.
   But difficult or not — when a large collection of Nobel prize winners calls upon the United Nations to immediately organize a world-wide birth-control program — the stark DANGER of the imminent future had better be realized!
   The scientists said, "Unless a favorable balance of population and resources is achieved with a minimum of delay, there is in prospect a dark age of human misery, famine, under-education and unrest which could generate growing panic, exploding into wars fought to appropriate the dwindling means of survival!"
   It's time you were awake to the stark seriousness of these times — alert to their deeper meaning — and it's time you knew what is ahead!

FAMINE Was Prophesied

   One of the major prophecies of your Bible is of DROUGHT, FAMINE, STARVATION, DISEASE!
   And these striking prophecies of the Bible are not vague "generalities," based upon the obvious likelihood of recurring dry cycles — but definite, specific, positive events — naming the nations, telling WHEN and WHY!
   Anciently, the Creator pronounced a perpetual prophecy upon our peoples. Turn to Deuteronomy, the 28th chapter. Read it all! This means OUR peoples, now! (If you have not yet seen the amazing proofs of the identity of our peoples in Bible prophecy, then read our free booklet, "The United States and British Commonwealth in Prophecy" immediately)
   After promising blessings of good weather, good crops, protection from the ravages of disease and war IF WE WOULD OBEY THE LAWS GOD GAVE FOR OUR Goon, The Eternal foretold what would happen if we disobeyed!
   "But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt NOT hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe to do all His commandments and His statutes which I command you this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee:
   "CURSED shalt thou be in the city" [and LOOK at the wretched asphalt and concrete jungles of ours — where rape, robbery, murder, race riots, sexual depravity, poverty, venereal disease and pornography run rampant!] "and CURSED shalt thou be in the field."
   Today, as never before, that curse is coming true! It is real!
   Not only have we broken God's spiritual laws involving every facet of how to live happily, but we have broken the many "natural" laws involving the proper USE of our lands!
   God said, "CURSED shall be thy basket and thy store. Cursed shall be the fruit of your body [and LOOK at the "thalidomide" babies, the malformed babies, blind, deaf, seriously handicapped babies, at the stillbirths, Mongoloids, Siamese twins, and at the many thousands of infants born each year with serious congenital diseases, even such as cancer, heart defects, leukemia, and a host of others!] and the fruit of your land, the increase of your kine [cattle], and the flocks of your sheep."
   Today, lustful man dumps millions of pounds of chemical fertilizers, insecticides and fungicides onto his fields in a greedy attempt to wring every last dollar out of his land. Studies have shown residual poisons build up in the land, drain off during the rainy season into the ditches, streams and rivers — where, in many areas, commercial fishing has been totally wiped out! Surely blind, stupid man should have enough sense to be a little alarmed? Apparently not. At least, at this writing, IN SPITE OF extensive statistics compiled over a period of years concerning the almost incredible waste of wildlife, fish, and the continued pollution of both land and water — the chemicals are still being dumped on!
   First, the farmers fertilize the land artificially. Second, they spray and chemically treat the land to kill "harmful" insects, fungus, and microbes.
   Then, as the struggling plants emerge from the soil, they are sprayed again and again against the ravages of persistently spray-proof bugs and insects of all kinds. Finally, barring all the possible blights, insect attacks, unheard-of weather ravages, and suddenly shifting markets, the farmer sells his product.
   Again, it may be sprayed or treated with a preservative before it gets to the shelf where it is purchased by the consumer.
   A single drop of some of these unbelievably potent sprays, such as Lindane, would KILL a grown man, if falling only on the back of his hand — yet these poisons are diluted and sprayed extensively over our fields where rodents, rabbits, ground squirrels, quail, pheasants, and all sorts of wildlife are found lying dead — all this; and still we continue to ignore the great God who controls the weather, believing we can fight God, fight nature, fight the weather, fight the land and still succeed!
   God said, "The Eternal shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the sword [according to some ancient versions: drought], and with blasting, and with mildew; and they shall pursue you until you perish! And your heaven that is over your head shall be brass and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.
   "The Eternal shall make the rain of your land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee until thou be destroyed!" (Deut. 28:22-24)
   Yes, DROUGHT, FAMINE, DISEASE were prophesied — and no amount of "reasoning," "kidding ourselves," or simply ignoring the facts will ever change it!

Worsening Conditions in the United States

   The handwriting is on the wall for the United States and Great Britain — NOW! Not only does the frightening specter of the starving millions of the many "have-not" nations rear its ugly head on the horizon, but increasingly, crop damage, drought, flooding, severe temperatures, and shifting markets plague the average stockman and farmer.
   How does one KNOW? How could I make such a statement? Where do I get my FACTS?
   First — from the same source as anyone: newscasts and newspapers. Secondly, from the world's finest and most up-to-date news magazines. But MOST important, from sources that are in many ways even superior to THESE!
   Here at Ambassador College, in Pasadena, California, we have our own wire service, ticking away 24 hours a day and night! At our Ambassador College News Bureau several full-time men are carefully sifting through the most respected news sources from around the world! They receive inside information in the form of private business letters which go only to huge corporations; economists' reports; printed reports from government agencies; newspapers and periodicals from other nations (and our multilingual department translates them all). Each week, the head of that department, Mr. Gene Hogberg, whose articles have appeared in The PLAIN TRUTH, distributes a weekly news report. These weekly reports represent only the most vitally important points of news which relate directly to the PROPHECIES of the Bible, and the most significant events occurring in our time. In addition to these weekly reports, certain SPECIAL reports are compiled from time to time.
   As the months and years go by, all of the hundreds of thousands of clippings, papers, letters, articles, or Photostats of microfilms of them, are carefully stored and filed.
   At these extensive "central files" of information, it is possible for our News Bureau staff to gather the most pertinent information on a subject such as drought and weather conditions for the past decades!
   But what I want you readers to understand is that all this is STILL only a PART of the news data at our fingertips!
   Hundreds of thousands of letters per year come flooding into our Headquarters office at Pasadena, through Box 111. And multiple THOUSANDS of these come from farmers in every state of the union, every territory, and every part of this vast, sprawling, broad earth!
   Farmers are concerned about their farms. They talk about the weather. They talk about their crops. When they hear me make certain statements on the radio concerning weather, or mention the prophecies to which I refer in this article, MANY will write in their own PERSONAL EXPERIENCES!
   We receive literally HUNDREDS of letters every single week from Maine to Florida, and from Washington to Southern California, telling us of the local conditions in their areas.
   It would take you literally MONTHS to read them all! But if you COULD, as our staff does, and has — your hair would stand on end — your breath would come short — your face would take on a grayish pallor — your flesh would stand up in goose bumps — and you would begin to KNOW, as you have never known before, the really SERIOUS conditions of our lands — just as they really are!
   When I began this article, I asked Mr. Hogberg for a file on the most current conditions. Here are just a few of the facts he gave me.

Current Conditions

   The United States Government has designated as disaster areas 306 counties in fourteen states! Continued drought in key growing areas has meant fall harvests will be seriously below normal — in some places nonexistent. Corn plants wither and are earless in northeastern Iowa. Yellowed soybean plants in southern Illinois bear less than half the normal number of pods and these contain only buckshot-sized beans. Cotton is deteriorating in Texas and Oklahoma.
   At Alma Center, Wisconsin, thousands gathered for a gala strawberry festival — only to find a wasteland instead. The community suffered a vicious hailstorm of up to fifteen inches which obliterated all crops. Hailstones the size of golf balls turned strawberries, hay, grain, corn, tomatoes, sweet corn into a slushy quagmire. Damage was 100 per cent to crops in the area, and windows were shattered in nearly every home in town. A deputy sheriff said, "A lot of the roofs look as if they'd been chewed off — the hail perforated them like sieves."
   And in New York, the U.S. Weather Bureau reports the worst drought since 1826 — and this at the same time as unusually cold and wet weather in other parts of the nation!
   And this violently different weather side by side was definitely PROPHESIED.
   Notice what God inspired Amos to say about it. "And also I have withholden the rain from you, when there were yet three months to the harvest: and I caused it to rain upon one city, and caused it not to rain upon another city: one piece was rained upon, and the piece whereupon it rained not withered" (Amos 4:7).
   God said, "So two or three cities wandered unto one city, to drink water; but they were not satisfied..." WATER RATIONING!
   In town after town, during the summer of 1964, wells simply dried up. Water rationing was in effect in many communities.
   Think about it. What WOULD your life be like, if your water supply were suddenly CUT OFF? If you housewives walked to your sinks and suddenly found no water — what would you do?
   Probably, you would first try all the other faucets in the house. Then, you might try flushing the toilets to see if they "worked." (C.D. officials and conservationists say the average per son would panic in this way, and, in so doing, would completely drain the home of the one or two small "reservoirs" of water left in it!)
   Then, you would probably reason that the water was only cut off at YOUR house. You would go next door — or call the neighbors — to find out what had happened. At their home, the story would be the same. Then you might try to call the police. But the police department would have no water, either! Then you may turn on the radio — to hear that ALL water has been shut off as an emergency measure because the city's reservoirs and water supplies are down to almost NOTHING, and only the hospitals and fire departments can have any water.
   What do you do? It's a good question. It will happen to you, where you live!
   You should think about it now.

Can We Feed the World?

   Too many a citizen in the United States has the fanciful notion that we are so rich, so blessed, given so much abundance — that we can right every wrong; solve every problem; feed every starving person; lead the world onward and upward into a glittering Utopian era of American-made prosperity!
   If so — they're due for a surprise!
   If the existing food supplies (and this means not just reserves, but continuing capacity to produce food based upon present production reports and projected increases!) were equally distributed among the nations on this earth at this present time — then every human being on the face of this earth would be living at a bare subsistence level, with just BARELY enough to stay alive!
   You would be fortunate to eat a small piece of meat once every week or ten days. You would be fortunate to EVER see an egg! You would be fortunate, indeed, to ever lay hands on any vegetable, fruit, or delicacy, which came from SOME OTHER COUNTRY — since all international commerce would break down, and people would find themselves living on a diet dictated by what is produced in their own local areas!
   We assume our CARE packages, government surpluses, or Christmas dinners for Korean orphans will feed the hungry. But a full belly this noon means an empty one tonight — an even emptier one tomorrow morning — and a really gnawing hunger by the next night. In three days? That hungry and empty belly has influenced a mind to the extent that it will do almost ANYTHING to get food!
   Wake up, America and Britain! Wake up and FACE THE FACTS!
   People have literally EATEN each other, they have cut off and eaten portions of THEMSELVES in a depraved moment of crazed starvation! And your Bible predicts STARVATION IS AHEAD!
   One reporter said, "We are living in a small anteroom in time where the threat of war is a daily tension. It is with us all the time. So much so that we are becoming numbed to fright. It will not go away and so, like children at a horror movie, we sit wide-eyed, just watching...
   "If there are no accidental wars, then my guess would be that one will be started by design no later than 1970.
   IT WILL BE A FOOD WAR. The populations of the nations are increasing so swiftly that some of the big ones will begin to feel the pinch of starvation within ten years. When that happens, either the people revolt or the government goes to war...
   "If you locked ten men in a room, and there was no way out, and enough food was sent in for six, do you think that you would have trouble? No matter how peaceable the ten would be, the craving for sustenance would overcome the men and they would have to fight to the death."
   Dr. Georg Borgstrom of Michigan State University's Department of Food Science said, "The 'food gap' is a bigger threat to civilization and peace than H-bombs, germ warfare, and intercontinental missiles."
   He said, "If all the food of the world — including surplus stores — were distributed equally and each human received identical quantities, we would all be malnourished. If the entire world were fed on the U.S. level, all available food would be only enough to feed less than half the human race! The world as a global household knows of no surpluses — merely enormous deficits.
   "Yet every month we are adding to the world the population of a Los Angeles (four and a half million) and every third year more than an entire United States (nearly 200 million)."
   Think of it! The world's population explodes upwards at a gigantic SIXTY-THREE MILLION PER YEAR!
   Dr. Borgstrom has pinpointed one of the most brain-chilling and frightening facts of today! He worries about a "hunger curtain" dividing the world. The exclusive food 'club, he said, consists of Americans, New Zealanders, some 200 million well-fed Europeans, and some 15 million persons in Oceania. On the wrong side of the hunger curtain are TWO BILLION HUMANS with 600 millions perched on the fence. And, further, partly from hunger, half of the one billion children alive at this moment throughout this earth will never reach adulthood!
   Dr. Borgstrom is an expert. Dr. Borgstrom deals with the "food gap" every day of his life. But Dr. Borgstrom says he sees NO HOPES of conquering hunger unless world population is controlled, and even that "will be a close thing."
   He said, "Mankind is facing the alternatives of extinction or survival!"

Man's March to Oblivion

   Mankind is gaining 120 thousand mouths to feed each day and losing 20 million acres of food-producing land each year!
   Raymond Bouillenne, Professor of Botany at the University of Liege, Belgium, in a paper published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said, "Man, the GREAT DESTROYER, having wiped out hundreds of animal and plant species, is well embarked on a course which threatens his own kind with extinction!" "Man," according to Bouillenne, "seems reluctant to accept his place in nature." He does great things. He tunnels through mountains, diverts rivers, builds dams, throws bridges over mighty waterways, masters the air, leaps into space, releases the atoms' forces, levels forests. "But much of mankind," he went on, "apparently has not tumbled to the elementary fact that Homo sapiens and all other animal species are absolutely dependent upon vegetation. The green plants are the only basic producers of food."
   As the Belgian scientist noted, "All flesh is grass."
   Yet man, in order to gain a strictly temporary increase in food production, has for CENTURIES been DESTROYING IRRETRIEVABLY the food-producing power of the land!
   Bouillenne said, "Before man tries to explore the moon, he must continue to eat on earth!"
   The United States Department of Agriculture says, "Hunger is to emerge as the number one problem for the world in the years immediately ahead."
   In the foreseeable future, according to their report, famine looms as a prospect that can become more serious than the threat of nuclear war! In this particular report to which I refer, the Agriculture Department had set down, for the very first time, facts of POPULATION GROWTH alongside the prospects for increasing the world's supply of food. The findings of the study were described as "startling" by experts who make it their business to chart population growth. As only one shocking and salient point of the report, the U.S. Department of Agriculture cited the case of India. India today has close to 450 million people. In another 15 short years, that population will increase by the staggering number of 187 million! Thus, a country in which the average diet is now deficient has only a FEW YEARS to find a way to feed an added population equal to that of the entire United States!
   The population of Communist China is estimated to be increasing at the rate of 2 per cent or more per year. At this rate, Red China is adding 12 to 15 million people annually! That number is approximately equivalent to the total of Australia's population — yearly!
   All this, at the very same time when the world's leaders, and notably among them Mao Tse-tung and Khrushchev, are saying that some way MUST BE FOUND to upgrade diets in the "have-not" nations, if hungry people are to be kept from exploding into open revolt!
   The prophecies of your Bible plainly WARN you of approaching DROUGHT, FAMINE and DISEASE! And the facts of these modern times plainly reveal these prophecies are about to be fulfilled before your startled eyes! So remember — one may scoff, doubt, or "kid" himself all he chooses — but THESE FACTS ARE REAL — THE PROPHECIES OF YOUR BIBLE ARE REAL!

Here's What's Coming!

   Jesus Christ said one of the MAJOR events signaling the end of man's self-willed governments on this earth would be the torturous changes in the weather, and the disasters they would bring!
   His disciples asked, "Tell us, when shall these things be, and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?" (Matt. 24:3).
   Jesus answered, "... ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars... nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there shall be FAMINES, and PESTILENCES, and EARTHQUAKES in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows [TRIBULATION, reads the margin]" (Matt. 24:6-8).
   He said the main events leading to His return to RULE this earth would be terribly destructive FAMINES and DISEASE epidemics!
   God says we are guilty of depending on foreign allies; on our own human leaders; on military might, to deliver us from international troubles. He calls such dependence on others spiritual adultery! "... Therefore the showers have been witholden, and there hath been no latter rain; and thou hadst a whore's forehead, thou refusedst to be ashamed..." (Jer. 3:3).
   "But this people hath a revolting and a rebellious heart; they are revolted and gone. Neither say they in their heart, 'Let us now fear the Eternal our God, that giveth rain, both the former and the latter, in his season: He reserveth unto us the appointed weeks of the harvest.'
   "Your INIQUITIES [our national and personal crimes and sins!] have turned away these things, and your sins have witholden good things from you..." (Jer. 5:23-25).
   God is ANGRY! God is going to PUNISH the false prophets and their followers alike! "Then said the Eternal unto me, 'Pray NOT for this people for their good. When they fast, I will not hear their cry;... but I will consume them by the sword [symbol of WARFARE], and by the FAMINE, and by the pestilence [disease]" (Jer. 14:11-12).
   God says, through the striking prophecies of Lamentations, that "they that did feed delicately are desolate in the streets: they that were brought up in scarlet embrace dunghills" (Lam. 4:5).
   In describing the terrifying results of prolonged drought and famine, God says, "Their visage is blacker than a coal; they are not known in the streets: their skin cleaveth to their bones; it is withered, it is become like a stick.
   "They that be slain with the sword are better than they that be slain with hunger; for these pine away, stricken through for want of the fruits of the field.
   "The hands of the pitiful women have sodden [BOILED margin] their own children: THEY [the children] were their meat in the destruction of the daughter of my people." (Lam. 4:8-10)
   The people — YOUR FRIENDS AND RELATIVES — AND YOU, unless you heed and REPENT before it's everlastingly too late — are pictured as crying out as if with one voice when they say, "Remember, O Eternal, what is come upon us: consider, and behold our reproach!"
   "Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens. We are orphans and fatherless, our mothers are as widows.... Our skin was black like an oven because of the terrible FAMINE!" (Lam., chapter 5)
   Yes — IT'S REALLY COMING!
   Jesus Christ said conditions would grow so alarming that unless God INTERVENES to SAVE mankind from literally ANNIHILATING HIMSELF — all civilization would be DOOMED to extinction!
   You are living in these prophesied times! You are living in the death throes of an age! You are living at the time spoken of by Jesus Christ in the 24th chapter of Matthew, "For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.
   "And except those days should be SHORTENED — there should be no flesh saved: but for the ELECT'S sake, those days shall be shortened!
   There it is!
   That is YOUR PROTECTION — if you're willing to avail yourself of it! Jesus Christ promises PROTECTION TO HIS OWN ELECT — those who are busily engaged in doing HIS OWN END-TIME WORK on this' earth; that Of WARNING the world of what will surely come!
   Make no mistake! What you have read is REAL. What you do about it is entirely up to you.

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Plain Truth MagazineOctober 1964Vol XXIX, No.10