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This simple simulation was originally produced over 20 years ago to demonstrate the potential impact of cultural gift aid on a community that does not develop economically to replace the gift. It has since been used in teaching. So I won't make my point just yet, but rather let it be demonstrated.
The Initialise button, initialises the population to 1000 and resets all other values. Month runs one month in the simulation. Year runs one year of the simulation. Repeat stepping through the simulation until you see a convergence in the population.
You can click on the 'Gift Aid' box to give a gift to the community at any time. This will be added immedately to 'Food Reserves'. You can increase the value in 'Annual Harvest' or 'Land Area' (by small amounts!) to represent a sustainable development.
Assumptions: To keep it simple and explicable I have made a number of assumptions, which I do not think detract from the final conclusions that can be drawn from the simulation. The most important thing is the availability of out-migration in response to harder times. It would not be hard to modify the simulation to make each of these more complex, but this would not change the trend of the outcome.
The simulation is written in javascript, and is entirely contained in the source of this page. If you want to modify it, simply do a "Save" from the File menu, making sure you choose "source" or "html" from the save menu, thus not selecting so called 'archive' formats or pdf format. Then you can edit the page in the program of your choice and run it directly in a browser.
It runs in Firefox and Safari, and should work in recent versions of Internet Explorer and others.