Forty years ago, a book called The Population Bomb jolted people awake with images of impending famine. Since then, as miracle crops have filled the worlds granaries, attention has drifted. Now the people bomb is back with us, and its ticking loudly. The Earths carrying capacity, especially its ability to meet food needs, is unravelling under two kinds of stress. The first is raw population growth. Each day the Earth adds 200,000 people -a good-sized city. Imagine provisioning another anakkale every day of the year. The world population has more than doubled since Paul Erlich wrote his book, going from 3 billion to nearly 7 billion. It rolls merrily along, especially in Asia, never mind the gradual shrinkage of some European populations. Remember that Asia has close to 70 percent of the worlds people, and that Indias population numbers swell by a million every 23 days. Complicating the raw growth factor is a new qualitative factor - the surge of middle-class populations in the billion-plus countries, China and India. Their new bourgeois classes - we are talking about some 400 million people, more than the population of the United States - are no longer scraping by on subsistence diets. They have begun a food-consumption revolution by demanding and being able to pay for a far more varied and protein-dense fare than ever before, including regular meat, fresh vegetables and dairy products. They are eating like Europeans, Americans and most big-city Turks. Of course their numbers will increase as the two countries economies expand. And therein lies the second stress that menaces global food sufficiency. Meat production - meaning mainly the raising of cattle and pigs - drastically draws down the worlds stock of food grains. Producing one kilo of beef requires 10 kilos of wheat or other grains that could have fed humans. Dairy products bring the same input-output imbalance. So what is emerging from the economic successes of China and India is a scarce resource calorie race in which the newly comfortable will push the still-poor into more hunger - unless there is a major global food production breakthrough. Such a breakthrough probably lies in a radical speedup in the planting of genetically modified food crops, which are increasingly drought, pest and weed resistant. Heated opposition swirls around them, led by environmentalists and organic food believers. G.M. foods are widely banned in Europe, where health fears have caused them to routinely be called Frankenfoods. Yet, after more than a decade of G.M. food consumption and intense monitoring in most of the rest of the world, the U.N. Food & Agricultural Organization and the World Health Organization have spotted no connected illnesses. Since population overtook the output of the miracle Green Revolution food grains (rice and wheat) 15 years ago, the big grain exporters (Brazil, Argentina, Australia, Russia, the U.S.) have followed G.M. strategies. Most food eaten today in America and Canada has G.M. origins. More exporters will need to follow this trend if population surges and the demands of the new affluence are to be coped with. Turkey has no immediate problems here, even with the growth of its middle class. Over the next decade the ukurova alone could come close to feeding the country. The GAP is steadily opening up more agricultural land. If, however, Turks were to heed the exhortation that three children per family are preferable to the current average of two, it would face the country in 2035 with a population not of the projected 97 million, but of 150 million, twice todays - a situation few might wish to contemplate. Hurriyet Dail News, Turkey