From The New English Review:
 Saturday, 15 January 2011 Food crises are becoming larger and more frequent. Every time they strike, they result in deadly conflicts and famines around the Equator, and declining real wages everywhere, due to rising food prices. The main reason for the increasing number and severity of food crises is basically that we have become more people than Mother Earth can feed. There is broad consensus among experts that overpopulation is the direct cause of poverty, hunger and thirst and conflicts for space, food and grazing areas in developing countries. There is also broad consensus that these things are catalysts for religious fanaticism and large streams of refugees moving into the West. Today we are 6.9 billion peopleon earth, and we are approaching 10. We are about to empty the planet's storage of raw materials, and in many places the areas for cultivation are getting too small and the reserves of clean water are disappearing. At the same time it is a fact, that man is the world's biggest polluter. A decline of the earth's population - or at least a halt in its growth - is therefore good for both climate and environment. A bad climate and environment has a negative effect on food production, because drought, floods and pollution destroys harvests and cultivation areas. Here is my suggestion for a lasting solution: Pay poor people in the poor countries to have less children. In this way they do not have to have a lot of children in order to secure themselves when they get old - and they can afford to feed and educate the few children they have. We should support the families with full aid (e.g. 2 dollars pr. day) if they have no or one child, half aid if they have two children and no support if they have more than two children. An educated and well nourished population is the indispensable basis for functioning democracies and economies. In addition, it will stimulate the poor countries economy in a much healthier way than just sending food that is putting pressure on the prices and is just eaten up my ever more hungry mouths. By empowering the individual by giving our aid to the third world as individual micro aid or micro pensions for having fewer children, we will thus hit several birds with one stone. A theoretical experiment: The collected yearly aid to developing countries is 120 billion US dollars (in 2007). With this amount 164,383,561 families could have two US dollars every day for a whole year. Every family is - theoretically - consisting of two adults. If all families have no or one child, 328 million couples will thus be sharing the daily pension of two dollars, which is a significant amount of money in many of the world's poor areas. Many families will surely have more kids, and thus recieve one or no dollars a day. This means that developing aid can be shared by even more people (in smaller portions, though). This development policy will surely have an impact of the culture of having many children. It is therefore very possible, that having fewer children will become a trend (just like it has become a trend in other countries with succesful birth rate control programmes) - when the trend of having many children is losing energy. The Nobel Prize winning micro loan program has shown that small economic amounts are the solution. They have also shown that it is possible to control the distribution of small amounts of money to single persons in areas with bad economic and political infrastructure. Take heed: Overpopulation is no less a problem than violent Islam. |
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