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By 2050 the world’s population will have grown by another 3.5 billion, the same number as lived on the entire planet in 1950. Can a depleted planet support population growth? We look at both sides of the debate.
 | Too Many or Not Enough?People standing on a crowded train leaving Dhaka airport rail station, while an old man waits at an empty platform in Prague (Photos: Reuters) |
The Question: Can the world support more people?
Answer 1: No, because we are facing a population crisis.
Development agencies and demographers warn that rapidly rising populations will cripple impoverished nations and destroy the environment. With half the world’s population now under 25, they say that if we do not stabilize the world’s population, we risk catastrophe.
Over 200 years ago, Thomas Malthus warned against unchecked population growth and spoke of “the perpetual struggle for food and land.” At the time, world population was less than a billion people.
Now, the United Nations predicts that the world population will likely grow from 6.7 billion today to 9.2 billion in 2050. Even with six billion people, humanity is already living well beyond the sustainability of its environment, says environmental NGO WWF. According to a WWF report, mankind currently consumes about 25 percent more natural resources than the Earth can produce. The organization warns that if humanity reaches of 9.1 billion people by 2050 it will be using the biological capacity of two Earths.
 | Ecological Footprint ScenariosSee how many Earths we need to sustain our lifestyle (Image: Living Planet Report 2006, WWF) |
Most of that population growth will happen in the developing world, with the fastest growth in the fifty least-developed nations, such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia. That growth, said the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in a statement on World Population Day 2008, “poses a bigger threat to poverty reduction in most African countries than HIV/AIDS.”
John Cleland, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says that rapid population growth will lead to deprivation in sub-Saharan Africa. “High fertility of nearly five children per woman, 40-45 percent of the population under 15, and the doubling of the population every 20 years means you have to double the numbers of teachers, medical supplies, doctors and food imports,” he says.
On the flip side, reduced population growth in East Asia and Latin America is credited with creating a “demographic dividend” — larger numbers of productive, working age people with fewer non-productive children — that contributed 30 percent of the recent economic growth of those regions.
Thinking along these lines, many countries introduced voluntary population control programs during the 1950s and 1960s. These incorporated family planning, contraception, and abortion into health care systems, improving female education and employment, and discouraging early marriage. More disturbing were China’s coercive one-child program and forced sterilisations in Indira Gandhi’s India. Today, around 70 percent of the least developed countries have policies aimed at reducing their birth rates.
Modern Malthusians such as the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), a UK-based think tank, also stress the impact of population growth on the environment. “If the world was run by biologists rather than by economists, we would have come to our senses by now,” argues John Guillebaud of OPT.
“This world is three quarters salt water and half the rest is desert,” says Guillebaud. “Biologists know that any species cannot live beyond the sustainability of its environment. The condom, the Pill, and the intrauterine device ought to be as powerful symbols for the green movement as the bicycle.”
Read more:
Are We Too Many? Part 2: The Lifestyle Crisis
editor: James Tulloch
publishing date: July 21, 2008
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Population Growth
with the rate at which population growth is going,there seems to be no stop especially in the developing world due to values,beliefs,cultural practice and ignorance in the use of birth...