On the vast and rich continent of Africa, of which Rwanda is a small but representative part, I must add the following statements of fact:

1. Africa is actually UNDER-populated by standards of modern civilization and when viewed against its under-developed means of food production and infrastructure. Properly developed and freed from ruthless exploitation, Africa's population should more than double to exceed two billion.

2. Starting in infancy, Africans generally suffer much higher effects of malnutrition than people on other continents. I certainly make no claim that such crippling and often lethal effects did not apply to Rwanda's Ruriganiza Famine from 1989. However, that local famine did not register as anything like the scale of full-blown starvation catastrophe like such events as the Biafran or Ethiopian famines.

3. The main cause of Africa's stunted growth is the western-based debt-farming from such monetarist agencies as the IMF and World Bank. The effects of such usurers' onerous debt on Africa have been more or less "genocidal" for the past fifty years, in a process that can be seen to standardize and centralize similar effects from a preceding century of European colonialism.

Therefore, to qualify my previous background account of Rwanda's genocidal war in 1994, it is fair to assert that any local "Malthusian" policy by African leadership may have certain mitigating factors of local political circumstance: such particular pressures cannot be said to apply to the usurious regimes of monetarist empire. In that respect, the Malthusian policies of British leadership over Ireland can be compared to Rwandan President Habyarimana's calculated and callous decisions of non-relief and non-assistance to Ruriganiza's famine-stricken Tutsis. Nonetheless, Habyarimana confronted also the related pressure of armed Tutsi threat and its foreign, imperialist backing.

Cheryl, Rhian,

Those who assure us that demographic transition will fix everything would have us ignore the serious resources shortages crises that are happening now.

How about this story:

"Mexico City shuts off water supply to millions" of 10 April 2009 http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/americas/news/article_1470255.php/Mexico_City_shuts_off_water_supply_to_millions_

"Up to 5 million residents in Mexico City will be completely or partially without water over the weekend, after authorities shut down a main water pipe to preserve the scarce resource.

"The capital city's water authority, Conagua, was forced to shut off the supply for two days after the Cutzamala water system hit an historic low amid an ongoing dry spell. ..."

... or:

"Dry Taps in Mexico City: A Water Crisis Gets Worse" of 3 May 09 at http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1890623,00.html

"The reek of unwashed toilets spilled into the street in the neighborhood of unpainted cinder block houses. Out on the main road, hundreds of residents banged plastic buckets and blocked the path of irate drivers while children scoured the surrounding area for government trucks. Finally, the impatient crowd launched into a high-pitched chant, repeating one word at fever pitch: "Water, Water, Water!"

"About five million people, or a quarter of the population of Mexico City's urban sprawl, woke up Thursday with dry taps. ..."

Given that the water crisis predated the swine flu out break, it seems highly to me that the former.would have contributed to the latter.

Mexico City got this way because the population was allowed to grow unsustainably on the assumption that its underground aquifers were infinite when anyone should have been able to see that they were not. Many other regions of the world are similarly unsustainably dependent upon underground water. These include the West of the United States and India much of the agricultural system of which is dependent upon underground aquifers which must eventually run dry.

Even if it can be argued that demographic transition will lead to a sufficiently low birth rate, much of humankind appears to be headed towards dying of starvation or thirst long before it takes effect unless we act with a sense of utmost urgency now.

(tobecontinued)

(continuedfromabove)

I commend Brian MacGavin's article "Why is the UN so complacent in the face of over-population peril?" of 3 July 2008 at http://candobetter.org/node/631

More recently Brian McGavin has written "Where's the big debate we really need on the (economy?" at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8818&page=0 http://candobetter.org/node/1209)

---

I note mil-ob has avoided answering Moronslayer's essential arguments.

mil-ob,

1. Do you or don't you insist that, unless people are literally dying of malnutrition, a resource shortage problem does not exist?

2. If Rwanda had a perfect means of distributing food and other resources, that has never yet been established for any significant period of time anywhere in the world in modern times, by how much more do you believe that Rwanda's population could have grown before people began to starve?

---

mil-ob wrote, "Africa is actually UNDER-populated by standards of modern civilization and when viewed against its under-developed means of food production and infrastructure."

This a sweeping generalisation that ignores the fact that 'developed' means of food production and infrastructure are unsustainably dependant upon fossil fuels and other finite non-renewable resources such as metals.

Of course, mil-ob, just happens to know that all conceivable resource shortages can be overcome with technological fixes that have yet to be demonstrated and implemented on the necessary scale. As an example, mil-ob has no doubt whatsoever that India will be able to replace the fresh water upon which much of its agricultural system depends, when the underground aquifers, from which it is pumped, run dry, by nuclear-powered desalination plants, pipes and pumping stations. (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8326&page=31#135445)

Others, who don't share mil-ob's boundless technological optimism, believe it would be far more prudent to limit human numbers, at least until such time as we can be certain that these techno-fixes will work.

Someone needs to tell mil-observer the difference between explaining something and excusing it. There have been collapses without genocides and genocides without collapses. No one has claimed that population pressure was the sole cause of the Rwanda genocide or that some of the factors mentioned by mil-ob were not also significant.

For the significance of declining land per person, see this link to the "Malthus in Africa" chapter of Jared Diamond's 'Collapse'. Diamond discusses districts where there were few Tutsis and Hutus killed other Hutus.

http://72.14.235.132/search?q=cache:dB-005UbcxwJ:www.ditext.com/diamond/10.html+Rwanda+genocide+land+per+person&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au

Another source is this paper: Paul J. Magnarella, International Journal of Criminal Justice 3 (2005) 801. "In short, the ultimate cause of Rwandan genocide was the increasing imbalance in land, food and people that led to malnutrition, hunger, periodic famine and fierce competition for land to farm. Too many people were relying on rapidly diminishing amounts of arable land per capita for their subsistence level existences."

http://jicj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/3/4/801

This conference presentation by van Ginneken and Wiegers has a number of very informative graphs at the end. Mil-ob might take a look at what happened to calories per person after 1984.

http://paa2005.princeton.edu/download.aspx?submissionId=51066

"Properly developed and freed from ruthless exploitation, Africa's population should more than double to exceed two billion."

This underlies a problem of population growth. The fact is that in order to provide a modern living standard for a population, you need to have the infrastructure in place and a skilled workforce to build it. Grow you population at a huge rate and the cost becomes prohibitive and education suffers, making the task of developing far harder. Testament to this in Australia in recent years is the huge accumulation of government debt, all resultant from infrastructure costs. Without a rapidly growing population you do not have this infrastructure burden. As a comparison you might look at a country like Japan, which is able to provide its citizens with a far higher level of amenities and services without incurring huge debt.

"The main cause of Africa's stunted growth is the western-based debt-farming from such monetarist agencies as the IMF and World Bank."

Here is a list of per capita foreign debt of the world's nations:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_deb_ext_percap-economy-debt-external-per-capita

You might note that Ethiopia has a per capita debt of about $50, which is less than one percent of the per capita debt in Australia.

The question of what benefit is derived from a growing population forms the basis of my opinion.

*The question of what benefit is derived from a growing population forms the basis of my opinion.*

A wise question and it will be interesting to see if MO can answer
it. I still think that he is little more then a bit of a troll,
against everything but not prepared to say what he actually
stands for.

Fester's question goes further. Why should the other species of
Africa, not have a right to a bit of their planet too? Why just
ever more humans, when it can be shown that many mothers simply
lack effective family planning?

People in say Zimbabwe, are not starving because of the World Bank
or IMF. They are starving due to Mugabe and his policies.

MO, its time to finally come clean and not just act like a regular
troll on OLO.