I think that, at the margin, very few people make a decision about whether to have kids based on global food supply projections. And, at any moment, a lot of population growth is just "baked in" by the birth rates of previous generations. Taking those two things together, I think there is a good argument for the "prevented starvation" interpretation.

> In my mind, crop domestication and selective breeding is what allowed population growth, not what prevented starvation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

"Norman Borlaug [...] is credited with saving over a billion people from starvation"

This was selective breeding of plants in order to take advantage of fossil fuel and mineral fertilizers and industrialization of fossil-fuel-powered machines to produce more food per unit land.

Says so right on the wikipedia dot org web site you showed the link to:

>It was associated with chemical fertilizers, agrochemicals, and controlled water-supply (usually involving irrigation) and newer methods of cultivation, including mechanization.

Bioengineering to convert petroleum products into something people could eat. Really, preventing famine and causing populations to increase are the same thing. A food surplus lets populations grow, a food shortage causes famine.