Scrubby wrote:I think it's more correct to say that population control treats the cause and food production treats the effect (if we agree that the effect is increasing population). It's also a lot more humane to not have many children than to let the poorest starve to death. Unfortunately a very large portion of the world is controlled by religious extremists so we'll probably end up with the starving solution, even if it won't be intentionally.
If you increase the amount of food available to any species, they will grow to match it. That is accepted as an ecological principle. So for example, let's say you have a lot of deer in one location. The deer overgraze the area and are now faced with a shortage in available food. Their population thus decreases. Daniel Quinn states in the book (quite humorously I might add. And his example was with mice) that the species doesn't go on strike, protest government or start riots, it just happens. Now with the deer population declining, their food source will in turn revitalize which leads to the deer population growing. The process repeats itself.
So what I'm saying is that you may try population control by contraceptive methods but it won't work because it'll still violate the ecological principle. When more food is made available, the population will increase.
In that manner, one can see how birth or population control is treating the effect and not the cause.
Regarding the starving children and others, I'll quote two paragraphs from the book here because he says it more succinctly than I could. (Note: the book was published in 1996.)
And of course I have to deal with the starving millions. Don't we have to continue to increase food production in order to feed the starving millions? There are two things to understand here. The first is that the excess that we produce each year does not go to feed the starving millions. It didn't go to feed the starving millions in 1995, it didn't go to feed the starving millions in 1994, it didn't go to feed the starving millions in 1993, it didn't go to feed the starving millions in 1992- and it won't go to feed the starving millions in 1996. Where did it go? It went to fuel our population explosion.
That's the first thing. The second thing is that everyone involved in the problem of world hunger knows that the problem is not a shortage of food. Producing more food does not solve the problem, because that's simply not the problem. Producing more food just produces more people.
If you were to look at the numbers. You would see that we already have enough to feed all the people in the world and we will have even more next year. If you maintain the current food levels, we will have around the same 7 billion people here next year, and the year after that and on and on and on. The number will slightly fluctuate up and down but it'll remain in the same area.
Now if the food available was to decrease, would we have even more starving children, famine or riots? No, the population would simply decrease as it does with all other species. The old die off and the population decreases to match the availability of food.
