Quote:
Originally Posted by August
We're at 6.8 billion and you don't consider that over populated? Far from stabilizing as you claim world population is expected to rise to 9 Billion over the next 30-40 years. I mean I'd like you to be right but I just don't see it happening.
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It'll stabilize as the food supply loses ground agains the population and third-world countries grow poorer and can't afford to buy GM crops from the west. GM crops are very efficent when it comes to land usage, but they are also very expensive to grow. All of Monsanto's "Roundup Ready" crops (crops made tolerant to Roundup pesticide) are quite pricey, and you have to purchase new seed every year and plant a "stock" crop to make sure that pests and weeds that are resistant to Roundup and other pesticides get to breed with non-resistant varieties. Otherwise the GM seed would be useless in a matter of a few years. Third-world farmers can't afford that stuff, and even if they could, they lack the mechanization to apply it effectively.
True, the west often supplies food to the poorest and most overpopulated countries, but they can only do that for so long, and pressures on food surplus are mounting. The organic food craze and the ethanol fuel travesty are wasting untold hectares of good, arable land for very little return. Even worse, the food shipments only encourage the rampant population growth, and simply delay mass starvation. Furthermore, most prosperous countries have a very low or negative birth rate, which will eventually start to undermine the demand for food production, resulting in greater shortages in the third world.
Combine all this with other factors contributiing to high mortality rates like disease, resource and ethnic wars, poverty, lack of drinking water, and the nigh-universal presence of the corrupt and oppressive government in the third world, and you have a recipe for rapid population stabilization, and my guess would be at no more than 10 billion, if even that, the vast, vast majority of which will be impoverished. That's not even taking into account the damage that Western nations are doing to their own economies through wasteful government spending. At some point, that is going to produce a very severe economic backlash for them, resulting in even less food production. It already has, to some degree, and it isn't over yet. And the next one will be worse.
The brutal truth is that the world's population will be stabilized more by tremendous amounts of death than by anything else, and there is nothing we can do about it. Most attempts to reverse this trend thus far have been based on the "give a man a fish" policy, and even where they teach people to fish it will do no good if the state steals their catch and then kills them, or they die of disease. There is not enough wealth in the entire world to make a broken system work, no matter how it is distributed.
Overpopulation itself isn't actually a problem until you start talking about really,
really huge numbers of people. Hong Kong has a population density twenty times that of India, produces almost no food, has no resources to speak of, and is just fine. Tokyo is doing fine, albeit a bit cramped. New York City is a bastion of socialism by American standards and it's doing relatively ok, though those budget shortfalls and taxes are going to catch up with it at some point.
By comparison, India is full of starving, diseased, impoverished, dying people because it is a socialist democracy. It is a rich nation in terms of resources, but it has long been suffering from mass starvation and absurd mortality rates. Like Hong Kong, it was a British colony until recently. In fact, Hong Kong belonged to the British far longer, until 1999. Pretty much all of sub-saharan Africa is a hellhole, even though some nations have less population density than Texas and more natural resources. China is the most populated nation in the world, but the special economic zones, where free trade is permitted (to some degree) is fine, but the Communist part of the nation is desperately poor and hungry.
The key here is government and economic freedom. Until the harmfully overpopulated nations of the world figure that out, they are going to die in filthy heaps outside the door. Barring a sudden reversal of policy in China and India, or a continent-spanning reform movement in Africa, you'll see the population stabilize a lot more quickly and brutally than it otherwise would.