We don't accept the right of impoverished families in Afghanistan and India growing opium poppies and illegally exporting opium to the west in order for them to feed their starving children.

Why should we accept their right to breed as they see fit when the excess population they collectively generate spills over into Australia etc and threatens our social and political stability and our environmental sustainability.

If the west has the responsibility to cut its consumption and share wealth more equitably across the globe then the third world has the responsibility to cut its fertility and stop adding more mouths to the world than can be comfortably fed.

GregaryB
I tend to agree that we could reduce or population. The real question is should we and especially can we? If our emigration continues to trend up as people flee an unaffordable country that we have become, especially in housing and cost of living, then our NOM may also become neutral.
It is not a 'demographic correction' is is as a result of our demographic momentum. We are growing, despite our less than replacement fertility rates.

Perhaps read..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_momentum

http://www.atcbiz.com.au/financial_planning_investment_smsf_articles.php?new=fsuqqyw9pr

Slash the annual immigration intake and abolish the baby bonus and we can live with a short period of demographic momentum.

Because the opposite demographic momentum, of the baby boomers dieing off on mass, is not far away either.

GregaryB
Quite correct.
2011 to 2025 - the retiring economy
2026 to 2035 - the grey economy
2036 to 2050 - the death economy and possible population decline as the boomers, all 5.17 million of them, begin to die on mass
2051 to 2300 - the green economy, sustainable, technological and looking forward

Poirot,

I am curious as to where you get that 86% of resources that is supposedly consumed by the top billion and how it is calculated. If you go to the Global Footprint Network site and look at the tables in their atlas, it is easy to work out that the top billion are responsible for about 35% of consumption.

Pericles,

The West actually has done a great deal for the Third World. It is safe to say that most of the people there who rail against the West and the US in particular wouldn't even be here without us. The Germans started it with the Haber-Bosch process for making nitrogen fertiliser from the nitrogen in the air, removing limitations due to natural sources of nitrogen. It is the source of about 40% of the nitrogen in your body, and billions of people would starve without it.

http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/haberbosch.html

Then there was the Green Revolution after World War II, which doubled, or even tripled grain yields. A number of governments and agencies were involved, but this work really started with varieties developed by the American agricultural scientist and Nobel prize winner Norman Borlaug. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the US government were heavily involved in supporting it. Without the Green Revolution, there really would have been horrific famines in the 1970s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

Some countries, such as Taiwan and South Korea, used these gains and their own ingenuity to pull themselves out of poverty. Others put the gains into more and more babies and the Swiss bank accounts of their elite. Their main problem is their cultures, or rather their unwillingness to let go of cultural patterns that have become dysfunctional, not Western imperialism. Australia is still a good place to live, not just because we were lucky enough to inherit it, but because we have made most of the right choices to keep it that way. It is quite possible for a rich country to mismanage itself into poverty. Argentina is a good example.

Divergance,

Regarding the saving of the World with the Haber-Bosch process and the Green Revolution, I would ask have you heard of Jevons Paradox?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
And if maybe these efforts have not made the problems worse?