An Analysis of the Global Issue of Overpopulation and the Measures Against It

The day of six billion. October 12, 1999 was the day the world s population was estimated to reach six billion people. That is enough people to fill a football field 400,000 times. If everyone was willing to stand, everyone on earth could fit comfortably into half of Rhode Island. The worlds population has doubled in the last 33 years. What does that mean to a student at North Scott high school; a 12 year old bride in New Delhi, India whose parents have just married her to a 30 year old man she s never seen before; a young man in a farm community devastated by soil erosion; a sixty year old man contemplating retirement and two or more decades of active health and life? Can the earth support six billion or more people? Is overpopulation really a problem?

Scott County Park can t support the deer population within the park boundaries. The ecosystem of the park has been devastated by the large deer herd. The forest in the park has become an a typical forest. The deer have eaten all the branches of trees they can reach. If you were kneeling and looking through the trees the view would be further than is normal in a healthy forest. Few disagrees there are too many deer in the park. During the first few weeks in December the park will be open only to hunters. The solution to the large deer herd is extermination.

Not extermination but government controlled family planning in China has reduced the birthrate. In 1969 the birthrate was 34.11 per thousand and by 1994 the birth rate had dropped to 17.7 per thousand. The Government told couples they could have only one child. The government policy of family planning is late marriages and late childbirth. Chinese couples are having fewer but healthier children. This government policy has resulted in a genocide. Since couples can only have one child many times the child is killed if it is not a male. To this day no one knows precisely how many babies and women have died at the hands of the population control fanatics in China. Certainly this program will go down in history as one of the greatest abuses of human rights in the 20th century. According to the CATO Institute this has resulted in one of the greatest genocide's in the 20th century. The Chinese policy has resulted in five to ten million deaths, Hitler s holocaust murdered six million.

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The Chinese policy was driven by food shortages or a perceived inability to supply the nations people with food and a fear that the country could not support the population. Another fear of overpopulation is similar to the problem of the large deer herd in Scott County park. There is a fear that to many people will destroy the environment. The environment is not destroyed by people. Some people believe that population control is necessary to stop hunger and preserve our worlds resources. In their view human beings are not resources but destroyers of the environment. The people that destroy the environment are those who don t respect their stewardship of the land.

Steven Moore of the CATO Institute wrote, Reagan had it right when he declared 15 years ago that economic growth is the best contraceptive. To help women and children in the developing world the United States should be Exporting capitalism. Capitalist nations have a larger share of women in the work force. The women have a sense of value to the community outside of the value of childbirth. Africa still has the highest birthrates in the world it remains profoundly child centered. A person who doesn t have children is looked down on, a women explained, because that person is incomplete in the society. (National Geographic Oct.. 98 pg. 46) In developing countries a women's value is more closely tied to her ability to produce offspring. Now studies show that family planning is the most effective means of lowering births worldwide, experts say. Contraceptives are the best contraceptive. Some may disagree but capitalism provides a more modern and improved way of life. It also encourages the treatment of women as men s equal. According to the nonprofit Population Council in New York City, one can promote a smaller world by promoting a more just world.

If you had asked someone in 1890 about the population today he would have said. There s no way the United States can support two hundred and seventy million people. Where are they going to pasture all their horses? During the past century, the world population has increased from on billion, to six billion. Because of this, many people have an exaggerated fear that the population will keep exploding till there are too many people for the earth to support. During the 1960's, the world population was growing by two percent a year, now it is growing by one percent; and if trends continue the world population may actually decline. The rapid population growth can for the most part be credited to the plunging death rate and increasing life expectancy worldwide.

So what about that sixty year old man contemplating retirement? A 1997 report from goldman Sachs points out that low reproduction rates combined with longer life ps are undermining pension and other retirement plans around the world. the developed world is facing a demographic disaster with respect to pension obligations and funding, the report says. The dramatic aging of the developed world s population is expected to cause a financial crisis at both the governmental and personal levels. (www.heartland.org/perspectives/worldpopday.htm) Basically not enough young people are entering the work force to support the pensions and entitlements of those about to retire. But in 1995 the U.S. government gave developing countries $600 million to help finance population control programs, according to one estimate. July 11 is World Population Day. In celebration maybe you should sit down and write to your elected politicians and ask them to stop spending your tax dollars to slow population growth in developing countries.

The world is not even close to being overpopulated. If every one of the six billion people on the planet right now were to reside in Texas, there would be enough space for every family of four to have a house and an 1/8th of acre of land. The rest of the world would be vacant. What about food? In the United States, we have to pay farmers to not grow food. A Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) study published in 1982 concluded that the Third World could support over 30 billion people using modern agricultural methods. Few demographers envision a world likely to be populated with less than twelve billion humans in the twenty first century. The rapidly increasing population has created a need for more food for the population. Supplies have grown at least as fast as the population has. U.S. farmers will most likely provide 60 percent of the developing world s needs by 2020 (Quad City Times, November 7, 1999 3a) Although farms worldwide produce enough food to feed the whole world, hundreds of millions in undeveloped and developed countries cannot afford a balanced diet. Even in the U.S, despite its wealth, some thirty million people go hungry; And President Clinton gives developing countries 600 million dollars to fund population control programs.

The world is passing through a transition of not enough births. The world population is expected to decline by the year 2040. Several Centuries from now there could be fewer people living in the whole world than currently live in the United States. The fertility rate in most countries has fallen below 2.1, the replacement rate. In Sweden and Italy the fertility rate has dropped for so long that there are more deaths than births. The world population will only stay stable if fertility rates average out to 2.1 children per women. A preference for fewer children is associated with modern societies in which high living standards make children financially unproductive and expensive to care for. The fertility rate will fall even further once developing countries reach economic maturity. Trends in families may change from decade to decade so the fertility rate may climb to an average of 2.1 or above.

Overpopulation is fuzzy. Consider two nations. One is about the size of Maryland and has a population of 7.2 million; the other is as big as Montana but has a population of 123.5 million. The first has a population density of 703 people per square mile, a lot by most standards the second has a density of 860 per square mile, among the highest on the planet. Country No. 1 has tracts of untouched forest and reserves of gold, tin, tungsten, and natural gas. Country No.2 has few natural resources and little arable land. Life there is so crowded that the subways hire special guards to mash people onto the trains. Country No. 2 is overpopulated. Country No.2 happens to be Japan (www.theatlantic.com/issues/93feb/mann1.htm). The overpopulation is a myth. Many philosophers has predicted the overpopulation of the world, the hunger, scarcity of resources, and so on. The most famous was Sir Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) in his famous work, An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus stated that poverty and distress are unavoidable because population increases faster than the means of subsistence. The only check against overpopulation was war, famine, disease, and moral restraint.

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