Lexi,
All I can do is again refer to what Iran did and there the government with the help of religous leaders lowered the birthrate from 6.5 per woman to less than 2 per woman. All by education and the provission of the means.

I maintain that if Iran can do that there is no reason why other countries cannot do the same.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_planning_in_Iran

This is a wikipedia link, but you can google quite a few others.

The UN would be better off concentrating their efforts in this way and presure put on leaders of all religions to change their stance on contraception.

Poirot propaganda is not science.

http://oldarchive.godspy.com/life/Gandhi-on-Sex-Marriage-and-Birth-Control-by-Daniel-Vitz.cfm.html

Lexi, according to the above article, Gandhi was actually against
artificial birth control and abortion, perhaps not the wisest
belief in a country that was already then overpopulated.

Poirot, I read your url on the green revolution with some interest.
The problem with agronomy is that its extremely complicated with
many variables, unlike say engineering, where you can read a table
and work with a fixed value. So it can be a can of worms with top
argonomists commonly argueing between themselves, as they look at
different perspectives of a problem.

The thing is, agriculture is essentially mining, unless you replace
what you have removed. Look at the fertile Cresent, not so fertile
anymore.

It could well be that something like permaculture is more suitable
for parts of the third world, for people to feed their families.
But in the 1960s, the Indian population was much smaller, plot sizes
much larger and famines common. The green revolution fed people not
fed before, fairly quickly.

It is wrong to say that fertiliser, irrigation, better genetics,
insecticides etc, are all evil. They can do massive good but they
are also easily misused, with disasterous consequences

Western man is very clever.
Poirot,
that may or may not be the case. In my view the westerner is rather short-sighted but there are a handful of westerners who have more vision than most.
I'm unsure as to the exact number of Indians but I'm guessing that India now has an equal, if not greater number of westerners. To that add all the other non-white westerners & you're arriving at the real blame-game show gates.
Monkey see, monkey do.

There's a simple question of self-interest here. If we assume the world has a finite capacity to produce food, even with every technological trick in the book and we also assume that this maximisation is dependent on large amounts of energy we start to get some picture of the consequences of overbreeding.

Further, how much less food are we in Australia prepared to give our children so that children in other parts of the world might do better? To even suggest reducing the single-parent pension or removing some of the less-essential handouts paid ostensibly for children is to invite howls of outrage, so imagine the noise if it was government policy to send food offshore and even one Australian child went hungry for even one meal!

The fact is that OUR children are far more important to US than someone else's kids. A whinge from OUR child is much more urgent than the cries of a child in some other country who's dying of starvation. This is the human reality and it's a tough one. It's been masked for the past generation by the green Revolution, but it's always been there.

While I feel very sorry for the people in Somalia, if their country cannot sustain life then they either have to find somewhere else or starve regularly. This is also part of the human reality that brought us to this point in our history. It's not pretty, but it's a fact and no amount of wishful thinking will change it.

I've come to realise that humanity is just a series of families - the state is an agreement between those families to allow someone to speak on behalf of all to save the hassle of having to get everyone together. Sometimes, as in a democracy, the agreement is a free one, although to a greater or lesser degree in different states. Sometimes the agreement is coerced by force, as in authoritarian or military regimes, or monarchies. But the basic unit is still "me and the missus/old man and my kids".

Somali parents need to look after their kids better.

Yabby,

I agree with your last paragraph particularly and, yes, I think the Green Revolution was another instance of man taking a reasonable idea and flogging it to death. Mankind has a penchant for overstepping the mark. That is what he's done in India - conveniently forgetting that in order for the environment to sustain itself, it's necessary to maintain a balance in its ecology.
Apparently there was devastating famine in Bengal in the forties, and it was reasonable for technologically advancing man to see if he could turn the tide - which he did. There seems to be no middle ground or moderation once profits are being made. The situation in India is complex - thousands of dams have been built to water thirsty crops like cotton, but have also resulted in the deviation of water from ordinary subsistence farmers who have then packed up and moved to the cities.

Individual and Kerryanne,

I'm simply pointing out that mankind, for all his cleverness, seems to be devoid of a "moderation" gene.....and that Western man is never in more need of one than when he stands to make a profit from his ingenuity and entrepreneurship.