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.