Paul W. Barada
Guest Columnist
May 12, 2008 11:07 am
—
Despite all the more immediate “problems” the nation and the world seem to be facing, there is another, even more serious problem that nobody’s really talking about in the mainstream media. The problem is world overpopulation. Today, there are approximately 6.6 billion people in the world, and that’s “billion” with a “B.” Predictions are that by the year 2050, just 42 years from now, the world’s population will exceed nine billion people. What is likely to become the world’s greatest problem will be our inability, some contend, to feed another 2.4 billion people concentrated largely in the world’s poorest nations where population growth and mass starvation is already staggering.
At the present time, there are at least two different schools of thought about the pending population crisis. One school agues that there is only so much food that the world can produce and, that by the time the world’s population has grown by another 2.4 billion people, there will be more people than the world has the agricultural capacity to feed. The result, which we’re already seeing in several African countries, is going to be mass starvation. The point is – if we’re having trouble feeding 6.6 billion people today, how will the world ever feed 9 billion people less than 50 years from now?
Others contend there is ample food production capacity and that the real problem is poverty, or the inability of the chronically poor to buy even the minimum amount of food required to prevent starvation. Another component of the problem is the corruption of many foreign governments, not to mention those areas where there really is no semblance of a government in place to get the available food into the hands of the people who need it most. Another factor is rising food prices, as more and more attention is being given to the production of higher cost bio-fuels instead of the production of food for human consumption.
So, we are left with a fundamental argument about whether it’s population growth, rising food prices, government corruption, or a finite ability to grow enough food to feed the world’s starving millions. The answer seems to be clear – overpopulation is ultimately the most dangerous problem facing humanity in the foreseeable future. It is a dangerous problem because hungry people are usually not happy people and, even where there is some form of government in place, food riots may be only the beginning. Wars start because starving people reach such a state of desperation that they will arm themselves to take food from those who have it, and those who have it will resist with equal vigor having it taken from them. As long ago as the 1970s, Indiana Senator, Dick Lugar, predicted that the ultimate weapon would not be the atomic bomb, but food! People will kill each other rather than see their families die of starvation.
Left unchecked, overpopulation, with the prospect of millions of hungry people on the march, is frightening, to say the least. So, is there an answer to this increasingly dangerous problem? If the people who calculate such things are correct about world population growth, the key is to slow that rate to a manageable percentage. The truly sad part is that the people who are the least able to afford to grow food are the ones producing the most children, many of whom are already starving to death in various parts of the world. Right now, every year, 15 million children are dying of hunger throughout the world.
The solution, bluntly stated, has to be a reduction in the birth rate, particularly in the underdeveloped countries of the world. To even hint, however, at some form of birth control, raises moral, religious, and ethical issues that stir the most basic and strongly held beliefs of many, many people. One is still bound to ask the question, regardless of how unpleasant it may be, which is the greater wrong – some form of birth control or the needless death from starvation and disease of 15 million children every year?
The time will clearly come when the world will not be able to produce enough food to feed all the people being born at the present birth rate – especially in the world’s underdeveloped countries. Can we, therefore, be looking forward to a time when wars will be fought over a limited supply of food? If the price of food continues to rise, the problem will become far worse sooner rather than later. The time will come when all the well-meaning people in the world will not be able to produce, let alone buy or distribute, enough food to give to the millions who will literally be starving to death.
Food riots have already started in several parts of the world. The ultimate solution will not be growing more food, or redistribution of the wealth, or greater generosity on the part of the world’s industrialized nations, or moving to another form of renewable fuel. The solution has to be teaching people about the coming crisis of continued population growth. The world’s birth rate has to decrease – however it can be done within the confines of moral precepts and religious doctrine. If we fail, morality and religion will not be able to stop the human disaster that will surely come.
That’s —30— for this week.
Add a comment at www.rushvillerepublican.com.
Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.