Too Many People? 4/5

Anti-humanism

The belief in overpopulation is an ancient one. In the days of the Roman Empire, some held that the earth was worn out, and population growth too great. For some folk there is always too many of "the wrong kind" of people; these may be blacks, whites, Asians, the lower class. The proponents of the myth have a static view of history. They assume that population will increase wildly, but the food supply will remain static. Yet as we've seen the population of the United States doubling, the number of farmers has decreased, and the food supply has increased dramatically. Many farmlands have returned to timberlands because they are not needed. The static view of history leads to an end-of-the-world mentality. A society that sees no future has no future. What is amazing is the willful blindness of many to the possibilities and potentials open to free men and women.

We have been bombarded for decades with the idea of overpopulation and food scarcity. It all seems logical and credible, right? Well, think again. All the "doomsday" prophets of the "population bomb" have been proved wrong time and time again. The utility of the population myth is a justification for the inhuman miseries inflicted upon people by the ruling class.

The world’s population is declining. Those are fighting words in most circles but it’s the truth, and it’s occurring right before our eyes. How can that be when the world’s population is over 7 billion? That’s a lot of zeros!  Well, the proof is in the statistics. Let’s begin with what we know about fertility rate.  To achieve perfect replacement, humans must have 2.13 children per woman.  Some women have more children while others have fewer, but 2.13 is the magic number to maintain a steady population. More than 90 countries (the USA and Canada among them) are currently experiencing a birthrate under that magic number. People are simply not having children.

When children are well nourished, vaccinated, and treated for common illnesses, the future is more predictable and parents make decisions based on the expectation their children will live. In Thailand, for example, child mortality rates started going down in 1960, and around 1970 – after government investment in a strong family planning program – birth-rates started to drop. Thai women went from having an average of six children to an average of two in the course of just two decades. This pattern of falling death rates followed by falling birth rates applies for the vast majority of the world. Human beings are not machines. We don’t reproduce mindlessly. We make decisions based on the circumstances we face.

Just to be clear: there is a big difference between overcrowding and overpopulation. No question, there are hundreds of mega-cities around the world with woeful infrastructure problems. Shitty city-planning and inhumane development do not mean the world is overpopulated. Sure, some places are way too crowded, but that hardly means we have a global overpopulation problem.

The world already grows enough food for 10 billion people. The world production of grain and many other foods is sufficient to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day. We don’t have a scarcity problem. We have a distribution problem. High populations are in fact an advantage: more hands to do the work! Our problem is not about numbers. People who claim that population growth is the big environmental issue are shifting the blame from the rich to the poor.

World hunger is extensive in spite of sufficient global food resources. Therefore increased food production is no solution. The problem is that many people are too poor to buy readily available food. The market responds to money and not to actual need. Even in countries with excess food production millions are starving. According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, In 1997, 78 percent of all malnourished children aged under five live in countries with food surpluses. Even though 'hungry countries' have enough food for all their people right now, many are net exporters of food and other agricultural products - abundant food resources coexist with hunger. The belief that world hunger can be solved by increasing food production is an unsubstantiated myth. It has lead to policies by international organs that have supported farming policies that in practice have boosted production of expensive export foods on the expense of production of basic foods for the population. The world's food supply is abundant, not scarce. In Costa Rica, that only has half of Honduras' cropped acres per person, the life expectancy is 11 years longer than in Honduras. Hunger is not caused by too many people sharing the land. In the Central America and Caribbean region, for example, Trinidad and Tobago show the lowest percentage of stunted children under five and Guatemala the highest (almost twelve times greater); yet Trinidad and Tobago's cropland per person -a key indicator of human population density - is less than half that of Guatemala's. In Asia, South Korea has just under half the farmland per person found in Bangladesh, yet no one speaks of overcrowding causing hunger in South Korea. Surveying the globe, we can find no direct correlation between population density and hunger. Population in India is growing swiftly in which about 49,000 individuals are added per day and 18 million a year. By looking at the population data it is clear that still about 70% of Indian population lives in villages. 40% of Indians are younger than 15 years of age that means lack of skilled and actual manpower. By 2020 average Indian will be 29 years. Dependency ratio of India is just 0.4. It is the measure of the productive age group which again is very low.

If 5% of the United States were converted into urban area with a population density of 6,000/km2, and 45% were converted into suburban area with a population density of 2,000/km2, with the remaining 50% left for rural area, parks, and farms, there would be enough room for 3 billion in the urban areas, and 9 billion in the suburban areas, for a total population of 12 billion. This is in the US alone. This scheme could be extended to the other countries and continents for a total population of around 100 billion. Everything between the Arctic and Antarctic circles can be potential targets for colonisation.

A future of overpopulation is one of a number of hoary old objections to progress and longer, healthier lives. It has been raised over and over again throughout recent history, but like all other Malthusian concepts, it was wrong then, and it's just as wrong now. Common Malthusianism - the idea that a given resource (such as living space or food) will run out in the future based on extrapolation of present trends - stems from fundamental misunderstandings about economics, human action, and change. We create change in response to our environment; our self-interest leads us to constantly strive at the creation of new resources where old resources are becoming scarce.

Socialists do not consider themselves as optimists nor pessimists. Our ideas about humanity’s future viability are entirely conditional. We have no way of knowing whether we as a global family can change our hearts and minds and alter our behaviour quickly enough to avert the unthinkable. A call to action should not wait for a guarantee of success. What some presently view as "overpopulation" is more accurately described as crushing poverty amidst the potential for plenty and resources left unused. This is the result of CAPITALISM - it is not a matter of counting heads.