Is the real problem food crisis or families of 8 and more? Leslie

"...solutions are within reach."

If you do not address the issue of population growth the solution will always be moving further out of reach at an accelerating rate.

It's like putting a bandaid on a skin cancer - it may cover up the problem for a little while but ignoring it just ensures a fatal outcome.

Difficult to argue as the comments have done that it is simply population size that is the problem, given we produce enough food to feed the world's people now and there are hundreds of millions of obese people in the developed world. It is how the food is distributed more than the size of the demand.

With all due respects J.A.M., the argument about how food is distributed is becoming a bit tired and even facile. People in a region can grow beyond their capacity to feed themselves if they have something to trade for food. Unless vast mineral wealth is found in the Sahel, then the people don't have much to trade, if anything. And Niger has the highest birth-rate in the world - the other Sahelian nations are close behind. It is totally unsustainable. I'm glad the author does mention population growth as aggravating the situation but it is much more profound than that. The Red Cross and other agencies are going to have to make food aid conditional on their agreeing to hold family sizes down - with help of course. What is happening in the Sahel is a mere preview of what will happen in the rest of the world unless there is a concerted campaign to get all communities living within their resource capacity.

Are we running out of food? This is an anti-population favourite.

According to the National Farmers Federation, there are approximately 134,000 farm businesses in Australia, 99 per cent of which are family owned and operated. Each Australian farmer produces enough food to feed 600 people, 150 at home and 450 overseas. Australian farmers produce almost 93 percent of Australia’s daily domestic food supply.

Australia’s farm exports earned the country $32.5 billion in 2010-11, up from $32.1 billion in 2008-09, while the wider agriculture, fisheries and forestry sectors earn the country another $36.2 billion in exports. About 70 per cent of arable land is currently under crops. Of that 70 per cent, farmers keep about 10 per cent fallow for rotation.

Australian live cattle exports totaled 694,429 head in 2011 (down 21 per cent on 2010 due to Indonesia cattle ban), valued at A$629.4 million, according to ABARE (2012). According to Australian livestock export industry statistics review (2011) the nation exported 2,458,448 sheep in 2011, valued at A$328 million.

We import about a little under $10 billion in foodstuffs per year – mainly packaged goods - and about one third is due to reciprocal trade agreements with New Zealand and other nations.

The anti-people faction say that we are running out of food or that we will run out of food. This is blatantly false. If in a moment of madness we decided to drive our exports on to the domestic market, every man, woman and child would be required to eat about $500,000 of meat, grain and vegetables per year, every year. Bon apetite.

With all due respect to popnperish, all He/She seems to be saying that population control, is simply not assisting with food aid? Which in turn will lead to a seriously downsized populations in areas too arid to sustain anything more that a nomadic follow the rain existence?
The northern mountainous region of Ethiopia was once covered in verdant forest.
The people there lived as they have for millennia, mostly from small rural vegetable gardens. It was man-made climate change that brought in unseasonable drought, which in turn compelled the starving to forage for food and firewood.
The end result, starving masses and a lunar landscape, where once there was forest.
Starvation induces infertility and ends the monthly cycle.
Babies suckling on bone dry breasts die within days.
So all we need do is turn our backs and over population will solve itself?
Somewhere it is writ large, that for evil to prosper, good men only need stand and do nothing.
We need to assist people to re-vegetate their former forests.
We also need to assist them to conserve the water, with sustainable highland dam projects that force as much of the rainfall into the landscape, as it will hold. Which in turn will slowly release water, keeping the waterways flowing and environmentally healthy, until the then more reliable rains return.
This will also double or treble soil fertility and food production.
Give a man a fish and ,you feed him for a day, give him a boat/plough and teach him how to fish/farm sustainably; and you feed him and his family for life.
If we truly want to exert population controls in the third or impoverished world, then we need to ensure that the female demographic are reasonably well educated.
This is almost exclusively the only approach that has been shown to work; given educated women understand they have a right to say no!
And indeed, with their own careers prospects and or dream realisation to serve, have a lot less time or inclination for baby making! Rhrosty.