You identify the problems, the challenges, but what are your solutions? And when you have listed the solutions, how prepared are you to go about - rolling up your sleeves - to implement them?

Because we need action now and fast to stop at 7b and come dowm from there.

Marie Stopes, the first step in slowing population momenum, is reducing unsustainable high fertility. period.

Marg, Look at what Thailand has achieved, quietly, in reducing it's poverty-inducing population growth of twenty years ago, down to sustainable, replacement levels.

It's simple... not the massive education of women, and pushing feminist prnciples upon unwilling people... but much simpler... simply offering women simple, free slow-release contraceptive implants, locally, for free. Each lasts from several months to several years... and are fully reversable.

By doing this, they now have a the means to supply their population with education, clean water, food and opportunities for advancement. A massive change from the collapsing social and physical infrastructure they were facing only a few years ago.

Over the next couple of decades, Thailand's quality of life and wealth per head of population is set to skyrocket, as they reap the demographic benefits, just as we in the west are suffering from the demographic tragedies.

*simply offering women simple, free slow-release contraceptive implants, locally, for free. Each lasts from several months to several years... and are fully reversable.*

At last a sensible suggestion on this topic. Give women in
the third world that choice and be amazed how they respond!

One factor that was not raised in the article is the effect climate change is likely to have on populations around the world i.e. more deaths as sea levels rise, increased storm events etc. These events kill off both young (reproductive) and old people. Add to this starvation as food and fresh water sources decline and desertification advances. And what about AIDS? This issue seems to have dropped off the radar screens lately. Previously we heard about many millions dying after becoming HIV positive. In Africa many villages are populated by the elderly who raise children orphaned as their AIDS infected parents die. They in turn can potentially be infected. How are demographers factoring this in?

Yabby is right. The Gutmacher Institute estimates that if people in developing countries had good access to contraception, 23 million births a year could be prevented, as well as millions of abortions and half a million children losing their mothers due to complications of unsafe abortion, pregnancy, and childbirth under conditions of poverty. Better spacing of births would also help child survival, reducing the pressure to have extra children for insurance.

http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/gpr/11/3/gpr110313.html

Marie Stopes is right about demographic momentum, but it is unrealistic to think that ordinary people in the developed countries would be willing to accept drastic cuts in living standards for themselves and their children (but not, of course, for politicians and other members of the elite) to deal with the consequences of bad reproductive and other decisions and policies in foreign countries. Any politician who tried to force such cuts on them would be thrown out at the next election, if not lynched. The real choice for the badly overpopulated poor countries is between following China's lead and adopting a one child policy for one or two generations, or collapse.

1. Many years ago, John Caldwell showed clearly that fertility rates in Western Europe had fallen dramatically in the late nineteenth century soon after compulsory education was introduced - instead of being economic assets around the home and farm, children suddenly became economic costs as well as non-contributors.

2. The education of women is correlated with fertility rates. Countries such as Singapore have demonstrated that a well-educated female work-force leads to slow or no population growth.

Clearly, these factors would indicate that far more resources should be put into the education of girls and women around the world. It is no coincidence that Australia's natural fertility rate is low while the female contribution to Australia's university student population has been around 56 - 60 % for a couple of decades.

3. Systems of aged pensions and public health services reduce the need for people to have many children in order to support and provide for them in their old age. But such systems depend on the ability of a state to collect revenue from income taxes, which in turn depend on liveable wages.

Divergence, what will be China's age-structure in thirty or forty years from now ? Won't it be massively top-heavy ? One-child families doesn't just mean that there are two parents for each child while it is growing up, but in the more distant future, perhaps two ageing parents and perhaps four elderly grand-parents for each young working person, i.e. each tax-payer. Not to mention a rapidly declining population after about 2030-2040.