Malthus wasn't completely wrong, but international trade mitigates the problem. This, of course, requires large surpluses in the exporting countries and fully operational supply chains, which we tended to take for granted until now.
An example: Egypt, a former granary of the Mediterranean, is now a net food importer and a sudden swing in world commodity prices could very well topple the ruling junta.
This wouldn't have happened if the Egyptian population growth leveled off at more reasonable numbers (say, only 30 million people crammed into the narrow Nile delta instead of 100 million).
Egypt's grain imports were caused by bad governance and theft, not by population. Mubarak instituted a bizarre form of reverse land reform in which he stole land from families who had farmed it for ten generations and gave it to cronies who attempted to grow fruit and flowers for Europe. The cronies were not farmers, their crops failed, the desert rolled in. Truly, the apex of capitalism.
All authoritarians confiscate property when it benefits them to do so. When communists have taken farm land, they have mostly left it as farm land, even if production has sometimes decreased due to incompetence. No one with a clue would consider Hosni Mubarak a communist, because he transformed land that had produced grain for millennia into "investment vehicles" for cronies, and then into desert. Not even communists are that incompetent, or venal.
