- Ticking away…
It is strange how we look at colours and see so many varieties but the truth is that there are only three colours which when mixed up in a particular way create the many varieties of colour.
Similarly there are a variety of problems in our lives, however there are only a handful of things that we need to understand. We come up with a million reasons for life to be the way it is, although in reality the solutions are very basic but we refuse to accept them, as we know we don’t want to do what is necessary to fix them.
The population pandemic is one of them. As much as we complain about the world heating up, refugee crises, lack of water, uncontrolled waste going into the oceans, lack of food and sanitation, pollution and wars perhaps the primary problem is over population.
At 7.6 billion people and growing these problems have no hope of getting fixed and will probably keep getting worse until we face the basic reality that there are too many people and too little resources.
To understand this we need to go back in time and analyse the sharp growth in population. In 1900 there were only 1.6 billion people and in one hundred and eighteen years there are six billion more.
Interestingly, there was no culture of population control back in the year 1900 and in fact families were a lot bigger than what they are now. Population was controlled due to the lack of management, scientific discoveries and basic facilities that we take for granted today.
There was no electricity, no sanitation, no flush and drainage systems, no blood transfusions, no organ transplantation and many other things that simply did not exist and even if they did they were not widely available to the public. So even though people reproduced excessively only a certain percentage was born and stayed alive due to lack of the things that we take for granted. In a way we are victims of our own success.
The solution is economic, legal and social. If the economic conditions of the masses are improved and they can get out of a state of extreme poverty then perhaps they will improve the standard of their lives
Population, which was earlier controlled by nature, must now be controlled through law and culture. The present trend of population growth shows that there are certain geographic centers with a high growth rate and some with a low growth rate.
Comparing the two it is evident that a certain set of socio economic dynamics are prevalent in the low population growth centers where the population is mostly educated and financial secure and can be categorised as part of the rich world. Whereas the opposite is prevalent in the high population growth areas which can be categorised as poor world.
Simply put the privileged lot prefers to have less children as they prefer spending more time on themselves and when they have children they invest in them as they want to give them a basic quality of life and if they cannot provide that quality of life they simply do not reproduce.
A documentary on the 2008 financial collapse in the US stated that over four million children were not born as a whole generation found themselves out of jobs or in jobs that did not pay well. This further asserts the earlier point.
On the other hand we have people living below the poverty line who reproduce with impunity, as they are aware that they will not be able to provide for any one of their children so the question of providing doesn’t arise. Besides since they have done without for many generations they really don’t consider doing without as deprivation. In fact many send their children to work at tender ages converting them into a source of income as opposed to investing in them.
Even in the poor world, population growth is highest amongst the poor and down trodden. The middle classes and above struggle to simply provide education, health care and basic facilities to the few that they do have.
The solution to this problem is mostly over simplified. A class on birth control is offered which mostly proves ineffective. The harsh reality is that if people did not know how to avoid pregnancy there would be a sizeable population of children born out of wedlock. As this is not the case it would be fair to state that the sole solution to this problem is not a class on birth control.
The Chinese one child policy is a solution but there is a human rights element that may need to be considered. Perhaps not many countries will be comfortable policing the number of children a family produces and secondly most nations will probably not have the level of administrative control that the Chinese government has on its citizens to implement such a policy.
The solution is economic, legal and social. If the economic conditions of the masses are improved and they can get out of a state of extreme poverty then perhaps they will improve the standard of their lives. Making child labour illegal will in effect discourage many from having too many children. Social awareness campaigns through the numerous mediums of media may be an effective tool where the responsibility towards the next generation and the importance of fulfilling that responsibility is focused upon.
It’s not the economic powers such as China with a GDP of $12.24 trillion who have the best per capita income with a population of almost 1.4 billion the per capita income is $8,826. It’s the countries with very small populations as in Norway with a relatively small GDP of $398.8 billion, which have one of the best per capita income of $75,504 as there is just a lot more to go around with a population of just 5.258 million people.
