Letters to the Editor
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what makes you think anything is being 'sustained'
Malthus said generally speaking in any closed system that the population would outstrip the capacity of that population to feed itself. Which is more or less the same thing Marx said about diminishing returns. Neither of them is entirely right or wrong. Why? Because there are big pieces of the world which NEVER had the ability to feed themselves or, like in the massively populous countries like Egypt, lost the ability to feed themselves decades ago.
But what does this mean? It means Egypt and all the Egypts do the best they can to buy what food they need. Sometimes it works, like in Egypt, sometimes it does not, like in Zimbabwe or North Korea. But the 'production problem' as it were is really an allocation problem born of politics. In fact in much of Africa e.g Sudan, Somlia, Uganda, Congo, food is a weapon of war.
If you look at it rationally it's actually the countries that have no where reached their absolute carrying capacity that do the absolutely worst job feeding their own people. The countries that already outstripped their ability to feed themselves have for the most part attempted to figure out how to overcome that problem.