RobP

Re your comment: "As I understand it, the main reason people in third world countries have lots of kids is to compensate for the fact that a lot of them die young and the more kids parents have, the more help they have in older age. Pretty reasonable from their point of view."

Another reason why "people in third world countries have lots of kids" is because women are expected to have sexual intercourse with their partners. Sexual intercourse without contraception often equals pregnancy which may not always be the woman's (or man's) desired outcome. And I don't think women in many of these countries are often in the sort of relationship which allows them to follow "abstention".

Why shouldn't women and men in developing countries be given the opportunity to control their own fertility, just like people in developed countries?

Re your comment about the "open economy" etc. Note this quote from the internet edition of Bangladesh's The New Nation (4 April 08):

Government officials are calling "upon the people to check population growth and help ensure development of the national economy. The current trend of population increase must be checked, otherwise it may pose a threat to the healthy growth of the country’s socio-economic uplift programmes…” http://nation.ittefaq.com/issues/2008/04/04/news0579.htm

Elizabeth,

Fair point. The lack of contraception issue you raise is allied to, and nested in with, the fact that people are poor. I guess my argument was that no progress will be made until the big issue of lack of development opportunities was addressed. I suspect that when that happens you'll see movement on a lot of different fronts, contraception included.

Agriculture has been described as the process of converting oil into food. As we approach peak oil and the price skyrockets, I can't see agriculture being the answer to food shortages. Growing and using biofuels is just going to limit food production.

As other posters have pointed out, the real problem is over-population, and Australia and Europe are well placed to lead the way here, if our politicians have the courage to do so. Without immigration, our populations are in natural decline, so we have an opportunity to develop a new style of economy based on a stable or declining population. It will take a lot of ingenuity, and we'd have to abandon the mantra of endless growth but I'm sure it can be done and I'd much rather we had a softish landing under our own control than a catastrophe at the hands of self-interested global corporations.

*How does government subsidisation on the production of ethanol and biodiesel from grain fit into your thoughts?*

If you crunch the numbers Goeff, then right now its cheaper to
use canola oil in your diesel engine, rather then diesel. So its
going to happen, subsidies or no subsidies.

But then please stop subsidising the oil industry. The war in Iraq,
to try and secure oil supplies, cost Australians a bleeding fortune!

As to population growth, sadly our politicians are too lilly livered
to take on the hugely powerfull lobby group encouraging population growth, ie. the Vatican.

Perhaps poor countries should send them the bill, to feed the
starving masses. They certainly are not short of a quid, look at
the pomp and splendor of the Vatican.

Fact is, send the third world more boatloads of food, without
more family planning, you will land up with another 80 million
a year more to feed, as we have now.

Increasing land degradation without any end in sight,widespread and prolonged droughts in all food-producing countries and charity-hungry non-producers, putting more and more land into bio fuel production to combat the earth-warming that threatens the earth and the spiralling cost of foodstuffs that will result wil bring about a culling of the earth's population.The elephant in the room is undoubtedly the main cause of millions having to die.Nothing can stop this. The earth was never meant to support the exploding population that has resulted as a natural process.Now nature has to correct the problem and we will call this cruel.
Accept it as inevitable and plan for a good life for those who can and will eventually survive.I am not being a prophet of doom.These are merely cold facts objectively stated. The history of the world will prove me right.

socratease

GET REAL!

There won't be another 1.7 billion people.

The human species is on the edge of extinction.

The price of petrol will be around $2 by 2009. That's next year in case you hadn't noticed! Already you will have noticed people queued up at bowsers. That little panic is just the start. By 2011 it will be around $5 per litre & bowsers will be closing down & so too will our lives..
Why? Anyone with the slightest interest in THERMODYNAMICS will tell you that biological organisms live along energy gradients or more precisely along ENTROPY gradients..
Jelly fishfor example live along the thermocline between the ocean surface and about 50 metres and will live forever because of that perennial entropy gradient.
The elephant in the room here for Modern humans is that our life sustaining entropy gradient is between the petrol bowser and our living rooms. Cheap oil has underwritten our staggering economic, scientific and population explosions since the beginning of the 20th century.We all now depend on oil for everything we do. Even if you don't drive a car, ekectricity, water and all other life sustaining essentials are run by people who do. If oil becomes NOT CHEAP we are all dead.

The mechanics of that death are irrelevent. Just as the humiliating, bloody, twitching gasps, the horrors of the death of a man brutally stabbed through the heart seem to go on forever, he is dead & cold at day's end. It will seem to go on forever in all its mathematically defined dynamic war, famine and disease horror for humans, but by the end of about 2025 we homo spiens will also be just as cold & dead.

So in answer to the question "How will we feed 1.7 billion more people in 2030?" Its like a suicide off a cliff saying on the way down: "I wonder what I will do for lunch tomorrow?"

But the REAL answer to the question is: "" Unless we perfect drilling operations for hot-rock-GEOTHERMAL, the ONLY adequate replacement for cheap oil ... who gives a f##K!"