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WORLD'S POPULATION WILL DOUBLE IN NEXT 40 YEARS AT CURRENT BIRTHRATES
IPS - The world's population - already at least 6.7 billion people - will double in the next 40 years if current growth rates are left unchecked, warns the United Nations Population Fund.
The effects of overpopulation are being felt across the globe, but the fastest growing regions are also some of the poorest. Sub-Saharan Africa has the most rapid overall growth, exacerbating existing problems like famine, disease and violent conflict over resources.
"What we see is countries like Kenya, which had stabilized its growth, are now growing faster again," Alex Ezeh, executive director of the Africa Population and Health Research Centre, told IPS. "By 2050 Kenya is projected to have 87 million people." Kenya currently has a population of 39 million.
The countries with the fastest individual growth rates also have marked concentrations of urban poor populations, such as India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Indonesia. . .
While fertility rates overall have fallen in every region in the past 30 years, they have fallen the slowest in Africa. . .
Despite the agreement of 179 countries on the importance of family planning at the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, the funding for family planning programmes targeted at the poor has stagnated over the past 15 years. . .
"Family planning is important because it has been shown with absolutely no doubt to empower women," Fatima Mrisho of the Tanzania Commission for AIDS, who attended the conference, told IPS.
"It gives women more opportunities for development, it makes herself as an individual survive better, it makes her children survive better, but as importantly, it also improves the general condition of a country," she stressed.
Worldwide, over 500,000 women die every year during pregnancy and childbirth, many of them from preventable or treatable medical problems. And for every death, another 20 women suffer lifelong injuries and disabilities.
Maternal mortality rates in Africa are at least 100 times those in developed countries. . .
The effects of overpopulation are being felt across the globe, but the fastest growing regions are also some of the poorest. Sub-Saharan Africa has the most rapid overall growth, exacerbating existing problems like famine, disease and violent conflict over resources.
"What we see is countries like Kenya, which had stabilized its growth, are now growing faster again," Alex Ezeh, executive director of the Africa Population and Health Research Centre, told IPS. "By 2050 Kenya is projected to have 87 million people." Kenya currently has a population of 39 million.
The countries with the fastest individual growth rates also have marked concentrations of urban poor populations, such as India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Indonesia. . .
While fertility rates overall have fallen in every region in the past 30 years, they have fallen the slowest in Africa. . .
Despite the agreement of 179 countries on the importance of family planning at the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, the funding for family planning programmes targeted at the poor has stagnated over the past 15 years. . .
"Family planning is important because it has been shown with absolutely no doubt to empower women," Fatima Mrisho of the Tanzania Commission for AIDS, who attended the conference, told IPS.
"It gives women more opportunities for development, it makes herself as an individual survive better, it makes her children survive better, but as importantly, it also improves the general condition of a country," she stressed.
Worldwide, over 500,000 women die every year during pregnancy and childbirth, many of them from preventable or treatable medical problems. And for every death, another 20 women suffer lifelong injuries and disabilities.
Maternal mortality rates in Africa are at least 100 times those in developed countries. . .
posted by TPR | 3:22 PM
8 Comments:
This article fails to state what it actually concludes: It is the effects of economic inequality that are being felt across the globe, and the failure to be able to control population is just one of those effects!
The Catholic Church opposes birth control because the Vatican has always found cheap labor devilishly luxurious.
I really don't think anyone needs look much further than fundy religiosity, represented most pathologically these days by the RC church and the perversions claiming to be Islam.
It's not a coincidence that the biggest waves of people fleeing poverty have come from countries overpopulated because of the lunatic, feudal, misogynist RC dogma. (Full disclosure: a child of a Highland Scots family, I was of course raised RC)
Not to mention the very sad fact that the RC church is officially in bed with the richest yet again in Honduras, backing the illegal and immoral anti-democratic coup being pulled off by the domestic and international oligarchs.
These rich and their false priestcrafters, too, would starve to death in short order if the cheap labor of billions of others that they live courtesy of was taken away from them.
As long as developed countries act as a safety valve, taking in hungry immigrants, there won't be any incentive for these poor countries to seriously address population growth.
The sad bit is that the US is the only developed country whose rulers provide that safety valve. They positively want the cheap labor and the pressure that overpopulation puts on the rest of us. As Abe Maslow pointed out, people struggling to keep body and soul in the same place don't have a lot of time or energy to get uppity toward their exploiters.
Been to Europe in the last 30 years?
Good point. No, it's been 42 years.
I wonder how much of that Euro "safety valve" was put in at the behest of the US hegemons, and how much the result of a realisation by the local hegemons that the US ones are onto a good thing. Divide et impera.
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