Grat3fulh3ad said:
Ok agreed. But as humans when the same happens in our communities we find other ways of dealing with it. Here is something i found about human over population. But i do not think that it has the option to hunt and kill as a remedy.
Is population growth a problem? If so, what should be done about it? If not, why has it become a major issue?
Opinion A
Population is a serious problem. We need non-coercive population programmes to tackle it.
The world's population stands at 6.7 billion. It is expected to almost double by the middle of the next century. It took until 1804 for the first billion to be reached; by 1974 we reached four billion; the fifth billion came in 1987; and the seventh will arrive shortly.
The bulk of the population increases are in the Third World, where resources are already stretched. The more people there are in newly industrialising countries, the more consumers there will be in the year 2050.If those people consume at the same level that we are currently consuming, there will not be enough resources to feed them.
If nothing is done to check the growth in the world's population, the gap between rich and poor will widen, cities will face extreme pressures. Almost all developing country growth will be urban, and rapid urbanisation will contribute to pollution.
In Africa, the problem with population is stark. The total population of Africa is not high compared with other parts of the world. But the rate at which Africa's population is growing is one of the highest, if not the highest in the world. Kenya and Cote d'Ivoire's 3.8 per cent annual increase of natural growth is the developing world's fastest. Africa's projected annual growth rate for the years 1980-2000 is 3.2 per cent. That is much higher than the population growth rate in the previous period 1973-1984 which was 2.9 per cent. Sub-Saharan Africa's population is forecast to reach 729 million by the year 2000. Rapid urbanisation has also caused stress in many African economies.
Seventy five per cent (three quarters) of Africans live outside cities and towns. But more than 42 per cent of all urban dwellers now reside in cities of more than 500 000 people. In 1960 only eight per cent of Africans lived in cities of more than 500 000 people. In 1960 there were only two cities in the region with populations over 500 000. Today, there are 19 with populations of over a million.
There are also environmental concerns. Everyone is agreed that the " global commons", the air and the oceans and the rainforest, are under pressure. An ever expanding population cannot help but put pressure on such resources. People have been pointing out for years that it is the rich countries where population is not growing that have been destroying the environment more than poor countries, which is true. But that does not mean to say it is not a problem in developing countries. India is already the world's fifth or sixth largest emitter of the gases that cause the greenhouse effect.
In addition to urban and environmental stress, we should examine the effects large families in developing countries have on the individuals concerned. Children in large families are less likely to receive adequate nutrition and healthcare. They are less likely to go to school. Crowded and squalid living conditions obviously do not help their development.
Mothers with many children to support come under tremendous pressure. In places like Africa, childbirth is a risky business. One in six women die of it. Their health is affected, particularly if births are not spaced far apart. Very often abortion is the only way out , and abortions pose even greater dangers to women's health.
The crucial point is choice. Women need access to the right information, and the freedom to choose whether to have children, and when to have children, and how many children to have. If large families are genuinely desired by women, and not simply because they bring status to their men folk, they must have the freedom to have them. Coercive population programmes are not the answer, as millions of women in India and China would tell you if they could.
In addition to choice, the provision of health services is vital, since high infant mortality rates are a factor behind the desire for large families. Education is also extremely relevant to the population question. It is a fact that educated women have fewer children.
While the developing countries pose the greatest problem in terms of rapid population growth, that should not blind us to what we are doing in economically advanced countries in the North. Only twenty per cent of the world's population lives in the North, yet we consume 80 per cent of the world's resources. So population is not the only problem; the other is the distribution of the world's resources.
Opinion B
No, population growth is not a problem.
The idea that more people use more resources and therefore cause underdevelopment has a simplistic appeal, but simplistic arguments are not always scientific or right. The logic that links population growth to underdevelopment is so crude that it crumbles as soon as it is examined with any seriousness. Just contrast a country like Belgium with a country like Ghana and the flaw in the argument is immediately apparent. Belgium is one of the most densely populated countries on earth and yet it enjoys a level of development better than most. Ghana in comparison is sparsely populated and yet its development is stunted and slow.
The connection between population and development may sound logical but it is defied by reality. We should avoid the simplistic approach of the population lobby and explore the issue more rationally. In so doing we not only expose the flaws in the arguments for population control, we can also begin to understand why such arguments are promoted in establishment circles.
1. The problems of resource depletion are exaggerated
Arguments for population control have been around for a very long time but the population control lobby have yet to produce any convincing evidence that growing populations are about to outstrip the earth's natural resources.
The Reverend Thomas Malthus was the first person to argue that the growth in population would eventually outstrip food production. In a book published in 1798 called An Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the future improvement of society, Malthus argued that the increase in population would very soon outstrip increases in productivity in food production. The earth would be unable to sustain humanity.
Time and science proved Malthus to be quite wrong. His argument was flawed because he ignored a number of factors in agricultural production. For a start productivity increases in food production have been massive. Over the last two hundred years science has combined with agriculture to transform food production out of all recognition to what existed previously. Increased productivity in food production was spurred by a number of scientific developments. These range from the use of machinery, the use of fertilisers and the use of genetics to the use of new techniques. In addition to this, land that was previously considered uncultivable has been brought into use as farming techniques improved. This can continue into the future. Even today humanity only uses eleven per cent of land for farming. Even at the present level of technology about 25 percent of the earth's land is suitable for food production. With further advances in technology this figure could very easily expand.
In that there is a problem in food production in places like Africa, the problems do not stem from the fact that there are too many mouths to feed. Rather the problem stems from the fact that too many African farmers are using backward technology that is more suited to the age of Malthus than the end of the twentieth century.
2. New arguments for an old prejudice
Since history proved Malthus wrong few now argue his line. Today, however, there is a new development on the old Malthusian argument. Many of those who support population control argue that while we may well be able to feed a population several times greater than the present one (so there may not be an absolute problem of resource depletion) population increases it nevertheless pose a threat to environmental stability and cause irreparable environmental degradation.
It is argued that an increase in population leads to a more intensive use of land. This then necessarily leads to soil erosion and deterioration. But a look at farming techniques across the globe indicate that there is no correlation between population size and the state of the soil. The United States for example farms its land more than five times more intensively and therefore productively than Africa. And yet land in the US is less eroded than land in Africa. Ironically soil erosion is often caused by under-population rather than over-population. Hillside terracing, for example, requires a lot of intensive work and maintenance. There is evidence to show that when the rural population drops below a certain critical level the terraces can no longer be maintained and topsoil is washed down the hillsides. Intensive farming is not the menace that it is often portrayed.
3. Women and population control
The other modern justification for population control is the argument that it is in the interests of women to limit family size in the third world. By repackaging population control as something that benefits women, the policy has become more acceptable to more people.
Women should have the right to use contraception and abortion facilities as and when they need them. It is up to women themselves to determine when to have and when not to have children. Population control programmes in the South however are not ones which are run with the interests of women in mind. While promoting themselves as pro-women such programmes in fact have one objective in mind - namely to reduce third world fertility rates.
It becomes clear that reducing fertility is the objective of these policies when one looks at what matters are prioritised in so called family planning projects. Educating women about contraception and child spacing is given a very high priority as is the distribution of contraceptives. Other matters like treating infertility or setting up IVF programmes on the other hand are given no resources. Project organisers claim that this bias in favour of contraception is the result of the fact that there is an unmet need for contraception in places like Ghana. But there is no evidence that this unmet need exists except in the imaginations of the project organisers.
In a recent survey it was reported that over 90 percent of Ghanaian women are well aware of contraceptives, where to get them and how to use them. Only a much smaller percentage of women however use contraceptives. Moreover when the women were asked what was their ideal family size the average figure was just under five children. The average family in Ghana has just over five children indicating that by and large women are having for the families that they want. Promoting family planning as the most important unmet need of African women flies in the face of reality. Most women would no doubt claim that they were far more concerned about their unmet need for decent housing, clean water, productive industry and cheap foodstuffs.
4. A hidden agenda
Population control programmes may defy logic but they still remain extremely popular amongst the governments and politicians in Northern countries. Bodies like the Overseas Development Agency (the aid wing of the British Foreign Office) have done much to promote family planning projects in Southern nations. The ODA will now give 100 percent funding for projects that contain a family planning element. Other projects can only attract up to 50 percent government funding. The same funding policy can be found amongst other official donors like the World Bank.
In fact throughout the whole of the post war period Western nations–especially the USA - have systematically tried to promote population control programmes in various guises. Even when faced with fierce opposition from Southern nations the USA has rarely deflected from this task. At the Bucharest United Nations Conference on population in 1974 the USA was widely condemned as racist and imperialist for promoting such policies but it was not deflected from its desire to see such programmes through. True, US politicians went away and repackaged its programmes as women's reproductive health programmes but the real objective of reducing the fertility rates of people in the South remained.
Western politicians have been keen to push population control programmes because such programmes fit into their own particular way of seeing the world. Many establishment figures are worried about the fact that the (mainly black) populations of the South are expanding while the (mainly white) populations of Europe and America seem to be declining. It is no exaggeration to say that the Western establishment fear that power will shift to Southern nations. Such a sentiment can be seen in a recent article that was published in one of America's leading foreign policy journals.
The UN diplomat who wrote the piece compared the threat posed to the West by migration from the 'overcrowded' third world to the Japanese invasion of British-held Singapore in 1941. Like the Japanese, he notes, the modern 'invading armies' of the third world poor will 'also arrive on bicycles and on foot', but they will be 'moving without commanders or orders, and seeping slowly through porous borders' (K Mahbubani, 'The West and the rest', National Interest, Summer 1992).
Scratch the surface of the debate about population, and it begins to look more like a war between the Western nations and the rest.
Many other influential authors of our age touch upon this racial concern with population. In his pessimistic tract Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, Paul Kennedy questions whether, given the growth of third world population, 'Western values' can survive against the irrational, illiberal in&Mac223;uence of other cultures. In his description of a journey through Delhi in The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich exposes the emotional fears underlying the concern of Western intellectuals with population growth in the third world:
'My wife and daughter and I were returning to our hotel in an ancient taxi. The seats were hopping with fleas....The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.'
As long as such sentiments continue to exist amongst influential individuals and organisations in the North about people in the South, it is understandable that many men and women in the South remain highly suspicious of population control programmes.
Now maybe i have a different angle on the whole thing but as humans we can put our heads together and come up with population control programmes without having to hunt and kill ourselves. Why then is it necessary to hunt and kill other animals to control their population. Would i then be right in saying that in not hunting and killing our overpopulated areas we are not actually having our best interests looked after.
