Food Crises are Caused by Overpopulation
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.
Posted on 01/15/2011 10:56 AM by Nicolai Sennels
Comments
15 Jan 2011
Rebecca Bynum
While I agree that overpopulation is a problem, I see two major stumbling blocks to this proposal. One is that the money is quite a large amount - I don't know how many people we're talking about but we're looking at 100's of millions of dollars per day for the indefinite future. Secondly, the Islamic countries would view this as a Western plot to destroy Islam and would never take part.
I think it's something that needs to be discussed, though, and I thank you for bringing it up.
15 Jan 2011
Stan
I'm afraid replacing one mickey mouse aid scheme by another will not resolve a serious crisis such as this. If we are motivated by self-interest, the most direct way to deal with third-world overpopulation is a hands-off Malthusian approach, letting these societies deal with the consequences of their own collective behavior. The only adjustment required of us would be a willingness to go back to a rigorous policing of our national borders, which is necessary in any case. Failing that, the only alternative would be to have the mightiest and most resourceful nations take over the troubled parts of the world in order to impose authoritarian controls on food distribution and reproduction. Of course, we can sit on our laurels and hope for some technological miracle. But an achievement of controlled nuclear fusion is not around the corner, and even the existing plans for the humanization of cislunar space following Gerard O'Neill remain unpopular...
16 Jan 2011
class factotum
It's not that simple. In many poor countries, children are valued. A woman's status is determined by how many children she has and a childless woman is an object of pity. Men will leave their wives if they can't have children. This is not about money. In Chile, access to birth control is easy and cheap, but people don't get it because they want children.
http://class-factotum.blogspot.com
5 Jun 2011
Igor Slamoff
You re a psychologist and I am an economist. You say that the food crisis is casued by overpopulation and I say that s a load of crap, The food crisis is caused by the parasitical financial oligarchy. As a result of deregulation, nothing nowadays stops billionaires from buying up a couple of million tons of wheat or sorghum and putting it aside for a rainy day. Food prices go up although the number of people is the same,. Why? Because part oif the food supply is coinfiscated by Wall Street parasites so they can feather their nests.
You know eho told me that? A German economist who is the head of UNCTAD, in Vienna. Forget his name.
Goldmnan Sachs is genocidal in exactly the same sense as Adolf Eichmann was genocidal.
Stick to psychology, bro. You need a lot of knowledge to make any sense of the economy.
2 Dec 2011
chris
This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard, how can anyone say that people in third world countries don't have a right to procreate. Have you ever driven through Pennsylvania.......?? nothing but trees for 8 hours I have better uses for 120 billion.
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