I don't mind drawing a long bow every now and then but saying the conflicts in Somalia, Haiti, Iraq, Palestinian Territory, Afghanistan are due to over population is entirely silly and beggars a response.

Following this logic, reducing the population by bombing them back in to the stone age is improving their social welfare.

Cheryl,

Strangely enough, "bombing them back into the stone age" was the Bush administration's solution to ending Saddam Hussein's reign. It was under the guise of altruism that infrastructure was obliterated and an advanced middle-eastern country was brought to its knees. It was altruism also that bestowed all the years of sanctions preceding the invasion....all apparently for their own good.

Perhaps that logic isn't too far removed from hegemonic practice after all.

I can only agree with the author. One has to be extremely pessimistic that Egypt will ever see peace and welfare for all when they lack the resources for it and the situation becomes worse every day due to their rapid population growth. In cases like this I don't see much difference between the behaviour of humans and rabbits - both destroy their supporting enviroment if their numbers are not "kept under control".

Striving for a stable population is actually a peace issue. There can be no end to conflict while resources are insufficient to support all in a minimum standard of nutrition, shelter and health. When people become hungry they have "nothing left to lose" and they "lose it" (as Gerald Celente would put it). Some of us in Australia are trying to get our nation to stabilise its population so that we can avoid the inevitable future poverty that brings and also ameliorate the difficulties that are approaching due to declining resouces such as oil. Cheryl may mock us but even she stands to benefit if we succeed.

I congratulate Michael-in-Adelaide's on his recent article on urban design and population. It was the first I have read from the anti-growth lobby.

But Michael, surely you can see that ignoring the historial formation of all of these nations (especially Palestine), the role WW1 played, intertribal wars, corruption, gun running, religion, let alone being pawns in geopolitical politics, plays a far more significant role than population.

I put it to you that the horror that some of these nations has endured is due in large part to the kind of untutored responses of third parties (call them Israel, the UK, France, et al) meddling in their domestic affairs. The population response is so banal as to be irrelevant.

michael_in_adelaide,

No doubt, population has an effect in countries such as Egypt. However, don't underestimate the consequences of IMF and World Bank involvement with corrupt elite regimes. In Egypt, for example, structural adjustments were instituted which enriched the elite while further impoverishing the general population...not surprising, therefore, that revolution eventually came about.
http://anilnetto.com/corporate-led-globalisation/imfworld-bank/egypt-followed-imfworld-bank-ideas/

Unfortunately there are too many people in our parliament on both sides of the house with a mindset like Cheryl. They have been raised with the "populate or perish" mindset, driven by big business and the Catholic Church. The examples given in the article should be a wake up call, but I am afraid the message is falling on deaf ears and as always, their solution is to shoot the messenger. Now that we are being overrun by illegal immigrants who arrive mainly by air and not boats, the situation here will ultimately get out of hand too.

David

I agree with Cheryl. The author has drawn a very long bow suggesting that overpopulation is the cause of these conflicts. Its just nonsense but predictable nonsense.

Watch out for the tide of articles pressing for food restrictions and population control. Its the new far Left agenda. Carbon Tax is up, this is the next scare campaign to be instituted to exert control via media.

Shame on VK3AUU and michael_in_adelaide. Its been pointed out many times that the premise on which Brian's acticle is based in largely nonsense. In fact the arguement only succeeds if you ignore the counter examples, along with much of the discussion of poverty and growth in economics in recent years.

What about Hong Kong or Singapore for example? they are far more crowded than any of the examples Brian cites. What about Britain as an example of over crowding - you'll probably find that it has a higher person/land ratio than Pakistan. Bear in mind that England proper is about the same size as Victoria. What about Finland? Small population but also a small country with no resources to speak of and its dark most of the day for six months of the year. Yet the Fins have an extrmely high standard of living.

As you can see from even a brief glance at reality, poverty is only very weakly connected with population density, or resources. Nor is population density or birth rates as such connected with warfare. For warfare a much better fit is access to resources, particularly easily exploitable resources (the classic example is Zaire and diamond mines). A much better fit for poverty is government transparency. There are groups that produce transparency indexes for countries and these have been linked successful to poverty.. rule of law is far more important than population or birth rates in determining poverty.

Brian's argument clearly fails. Time to move on.

Curmudgeon,

All the high density but wealthy states like Hong Kong or the UK only maintain their populations through economic control of resources in other areas. Where would the UK be without the City or North Sea Oil/Gas? Where would Hong Kong be now without profits provided by control of manufacturing on mainland China? It is these activities that allow them to purchase and import sufficient food to maintain population health. Without such control Hong Kong would be in the same position as Haiti.

Finland produces an agricultural surplus during its summer and grows vegetables all year round in greenhouses powered by nuclear energy (fuelled with imported uranium). Nevertheless, the resources that supply its population with their relative wealth are sourced from all over the world. As you know, for all the world to live like Finland (or Australia) we would need the resouces of many Earths, not the only one we have.

Facile talk of population density is meaningless if one does not consider the real area that a population controls in order to access its resources. The industrial world is only "wealthy" because it exploits the resources of the poorer nations and the world's resource base is not large enough to provide for an entire world living as we do.

The comments here gave me a sense déjà vu. But it was just from yesterday. It occurred to me then that despite how obviousness it is now, Malthus theory on why mankind's history had been a unending cycle of famines must have been a hard sell. He postulated we have humans would have exponential grow if left unfettered, yet the population in his time was not growing exponentially. He postulated that starvation was the major limit to growth, yet I doubt many people were killed directly by starving to death.

The Cheryl's and Curmudgeon's of his day would have had a field day pointing out the recurring famines are obviously caused by poor harvests, wars, disease outbreaks of whatnot, and ergo population growth had nothing to do with it.

Problems in developing countries regarding overpopulation and food scarcity are often exacerbated by interference by the IMF and World Bank structural adjustments, however, michael_in_adelaide is correct in his assertion that it would take many earths to furnish the world's entire population with a first world living standard.
Interestingly, the U.S., utilises approximately 7 times the resources per hectare per capita as do developing countries - in effect using the equivalent resources for 300 million people as would support 2.1 billion people in an undeveloped country.

It was 2 years ago, but I remember this:

@michael_in_adelaide: Don't worry Curmudgeon - I wont bother you again.
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=9435#150735

Ahh, how we are all sucked in despite our best intentions. It makes the Monty Python's Argument Sketch look less like a joke and more like a serious comment about human nature.

Throwaway lines like this are the way history becomes distorted over time, Poirot, as people pick them up and pass them on as being "true".

>>Cheryl, Strangely enough, "bombing them back into the stone age" was the Bush administration's solution to ending Saddam Hussein's reign.<<

The phrase first came into public usage during the Vietnam War. Wikipedia tells us that:

"...in his 1965 autobiography, co-written with MacKinlay Kantor, [General Curtis] LeMay is quoted as saying his response to North Vietnam would be to demand that 'they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age. And we would shove them back into the Stone Age with Air power or Naval power—not with ground forces.'"

According to Professor Nick Cullather of Indiana University however, the phrase originated with humourist Art Buchwald, to caricature Barry Goldwater's approach to solving the problem of recalcitrant foreigners:

"LeMay, however, had cribbed it from a June 1967 column by humorist Art Buchwald, who used the phrase to caricature the Goldwater Republican attitude toward Vietnam."

http://hnn.us/articles/30347.html

No-one yet has been able to pin the use of the phrase on anyone else. Attempts have been made in relation to Pakistan...

"The intelligence director told me that Mr Armitage said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age'," he said."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/5369198.stm

But the source is just a tad suspect, given the phrase's propaganda value, and the "plausible deniability" of reported speech.

Afghanistan too:

"Last week I heard a lot of talk about 'bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.'"

http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0919-02.htm

So there you have it. The phrase has become a cliché, true enough.

But there's nothing particularly credible to support the idea that it was "the Bush administration's solution to ending Saddam Hussein's reign"

rstuart - you've shown me up! Yes, I seem to have a poor memory and obviously like beating my head against a wall - or should that be being bludgeoned by Curmudgeon.

Pericles,

"But there's nothing particularly credible to support the idea that it was "the Bush administration's solution to ending Saddam Hussein's reign""

Except for the bit where they ended Saddam Hussein's reign by bombing the crap out of Iraq. Did you sleep through 'Operation Iraqi Freedom', AKA the 2nd Gulf War?

michael_in_adelaide

the earlier encounter is of no account.. In this encounter your counter argument underlines my point.. people in those countries are able to live in tolerable comfort so why can't the people in Pakistan or Nigeria, where they have loads and loads of resources, notably oil?

To pound the point home the wealth of individual countries has nothing to do with resources.. or population.. the main factor remains rule of law and government transparency.. once we get that, then we can see whether there are any of these limits which you see everywhere.. If these limits exist, then we can work out how they can be overcome??

You are right Curmudgeon but also wrong. Certainly the wealth and peace of a nation has a lot to do with societal education and organisation - the will to distribute resources equitably rather than have them acculate in the hands of a few (or even a "1%"). But wealth must also depend on ACCESS to resources. The former industrial might of the USA was built on possession of the world's largest area of good farming land and very bountiful resources - formerly crude oil and the USA is still the world's largest coal province. Currently the US military guarantees access for the USA to the resources of other areas in the world. My point is that, if you are not educated and equitable but, instead, have a massive poor population breeding like rabbits - then what hope is there of ever becoming better off? The dramatic population growth of Pakistan and Afghanistan is now the driver of increased poverty and conflict which undermines efforts to e.g. educate women, distribute resources etc. There is a nasty positive feedback there. Pakistan is not resource rich, especially when it comes to water - just go to Google Trends and so a search for "water crisis" and you will see that there are more hits from Pakistan than anywhere else in the world.

Michael,

You wrote, quite correctly: "The industrial world is only "wealthy" because it exploits the resources of the poorer nations and the world's resource base is not large enough to provide for an entire world living as we do."

But your 'solution' - to wipe out excess populations, mainly in the Third World, so that we happy few can maintain our income level - may not be the only one: what might actually occur, thanks to the GFC, is that after a period of civil and international wars, there may be an evening-out of incomes internationally, a forced 'sharing' of resources and incomes, at a lower level but for far more people, over the next few decades.

I hope that this evening-out can be achieved more peacefully, but inequitable standards of living may be your culprit, Michael, not Third World populations.

Joe

Excuse me Loudmouth - did I ever say that my solution was, "to wipe out excess populations, mainly in the Third World, so that we happy few can maintain our income level"?

No, I certainly did not!

Redistribution usually occurs through conflict - either wars between nations or revolution within. Owners are ever reluctant to relinquish their privileges/wealth/lifestyle.

Sorry Michael, I was misled by your comment about "a massive poor population breeding like rabbits".

Sad how obvious yet under-reported this is.

STABLE POPULATION PARTY policy:
Tie foreign aid wherever possible to the improvement of governance and economic and environmental sustainability, with a particular focus on women's rights and education and on opportunities for couples to access family planning services.

www.PopulationParty.com