Food and Population Follow up - Plan A? Or Plan B?

Following my posting about Food shortages and Population growth, a rather interesting comment was made. Sometimes when I am writing about something I feel so passionately about, I can occasionally say something that is not as clear as intended. Often as I am writing a stream of conciousness, although many of my readers may say that is more a stream of unconsciousness, I don't always provide the clarity that I aim for.

Additionally, I do try to hard to be diplomatic at times. This posting and the comment are a classic example. Personally, I think that as a result of Climate Change, there will not be the projected increase in the global population. In fact I we will soon start to see population decline. That will be as a direct result of food shortages giving rise to famine and to put it bluntly, people starving to death. This is not alarmist as it is already happening. This occurs not from lack of food, but from poverty. As I stated in my previous posting, eight hundred and fifty million people will not get enough food today. That is nearly three times the population of the USA, or over fourteen time the population of the UK. The reason for choosing these two countries as examples is that in both enough food per day is thrown away that would feed the underfed the under nourished and the starving. I thank my contact in the UN for clarify the situation in the US.

Now if we cant feed the world now, how can we hope to feed the a growing population? Add in to that the difficulties of a changing climate and the whole concept of a population reaching nine billion looks impossible.

Put quite simply without the political will to distribute food fairly now, the population will not grow as fast as projections estimate. In the natural world food and water is the limiting factor regarding population size. Therefore without the food or the capacity to grow the food the human population will never reach the projected twelve billion humans on the planet. Personally, the way that we in the west are dealing with the problem will result in the global population falling. In nature, no population like ours can be sustained. Further in biology, any cell or group of cells that grows out of control is called a cancer. Is that the way humanity wants to be remembered, as a cancer on the planet?

That brings me on to the main are that I need to provide clarification on. Currently in the developing world there is a crisis brought about by HIV/AIDS. So many of the solutions that the western developed world has proposed or has been prepared to fund, involve preaching abstinence. I use the word preaching quite deliberately, as while intellectually I can see that if we got the whole world to stop having sex would stop HIV/AIDS, it is just not going to happen. Via this naïve and frankly ridiculous policy, inspired by religious morality, it has condemned millions in Africa alone to grow up with out parents. In some parts of Africa the HIV+ rate is as high as forty percent of the adult population. Had the religious busy bodies kept their noses out, we would have seen twenty years of good family planing, far lower rates of infection not just of HIV+ but of other STD and lower birth rates.

While I am not saying that family planning is the only solution here, for the last twenty years the interference from religious groups has done more harm than good in providing development to the countries of Africa. Yet where non judgemental healthcare and education has occurred, in Africa and Asia, it has not only helped stem the spread of HIV infections it has helped reduce the birth rate.

The one aspect that all of the NGOs (Non Governmental Organisations) agree on though is that educating women really helps. Even organisations like Oxfam, the UN Food and Health programmes and many others don't fully understand why, but it seems that by even teaching women something as basic as the ability to read and write, helps empower women to access information regarding women's health issues and in particular information regarding family planning. That helps reduce the size of the families. Put simply the fewer children the families have the lower the financial cost. Further, there is also lower child mortality rates in the families where the woman has been educated.

We in the Western developed world just don't realise just how easy we have it, and just how difficult it is in other parts of our planet. However the real point is, that had we not tried to impose our morality upon other people and cultures, it is possible that we would not now be facing the projected growth of planets population to such unsustainable levels.

While I am not advocating any form of forced population control, if people in the developing world were provided with the education and choice, most would use family planning as they see it as the most sustainable way out of poverty there is.

The trouble is so far we have not even tried plan A so no one has thought of a Plan B.