Belly, I am afraid I am very pessimistic.
In some African countries they would not let the medical people give
anti polio injections because they said it was to sterilise them.
It was a western plot !
Any area has to be able to support its people through drought.
So it is Somalia this week and there has to be a die off to reduce the
population to that survival level.
They have, because they have been trying to keep a too large a
population in the area, they have not built up the resources to
import food. Therefore they must walk away or die.

So to prolong the agony the UN jumps in and feeds them until they
either die in the camps or go home and wait for the next drought.
The world is up against a soil and population and energy clash.
The UN would be better off before the drought flying over those
countries dropping condoms from the air.
It would be a lot cheaper than what they are doing now.
Safer also, they wouldn't get shot by the Islamists.

Belly, you've got to be kidding mate. Let the UN into anything & it will cost twice as much, & twice as many will die.

They are bad enough as it is, real yes prime minister stuff with the selection of the Secretary General, & many others, so we must get idiots.

Lets face it, they could put someone like the red headed twit up there, & surround her with idiots, like we have.

Are you sick mate? this is your second bleeding heart type post.

Worth the read.

But will there be too many of us? At the PAA meeting, in the Dallas Hyatt Regency, I learned that the current population of the planet could fit into the state of Texas, if Texas were settled as densely as New York City.

The goal in India should not be reducing fertility or population, Almas Ali of the Population Foundation told me when I spoke to him a few days later. “The goal should be to make the villages livable,”

If in 2045 there are nine billion people living on the six habitable continents, the world population density will be a little more than half that of France today.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2011/01/seven-billion/kunzig-...

Dear Belly,

Much of this topic has been covered in my Somalia thread.
However, here goes again...

As I've stated in the past - political, religious,
and other ideological influences affect social
attitudes concerning population limitation.
Of course family planning is an essential element in
population limitation, but the strategy is not
sufficient in itself.

The family planning efforts,
in many less developed nations fail, it seems
because the resources of poorer societies are
unfairly shared: typically, a tiny elite enjoys a
disproportinate share (and its birth rate drops),
but the mass of the people remain in hopeless
poverty (and maintain high birth rates).

Policies that focus on a sharing of resources,
rather than exclusively on economic development
that may only benefit a minority, may be a
promising way to reduce global population growth.

Shadow Minister,

We were saved from the mass famines predicted by Paul Ehrlich and others for the 1970s by the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution effectively represented a bargain between humans and their grain crops. The crops could put more energy into grain and less energy into stems, leaves, roots, and chemical defences because the humans would worry about spacing, controlling weeds and other pests, and supplying water and nutrients. All of the human side of the bargain is dependent on cheap fossil fuels and abundant fresh water. Grain prices closely track crude oil prices. See Graph 2 in

http://www.ifad.org/events/gc/32/roundtables/1.pdf

Grain prices are even higher now than in 2008 when there were food riots in 34 countries. Thanks to population growth, grain production per person peaked in 1984. Bazz is right. We are running out of cheap oil and running out of enough fresh water in many places, including Somalia.

It would take the resources of three Earths to give everyone in even the existing global population a modest Western European standard of living, as shown in this graph from New Scientist

http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/archive/2624/26243101.jpg

We might be able to feed everyone adequately, just, for the present, if we had a world government with a command economy that could stop grain from being turned into ethanol or fed to Chinese pigs and send it to the Somalis and Yemenis. However, the global population is growing at 75 million to 80 million a year, about the same as in the 1970s. The growth rate has fallen, but the base is larger.

Lexi,

Sharing resources would do no more than spread the misery everywhere. The West effectively did share resources with the world's poor with the Haber-Bosch process and the Green Revolution, which greatly increased food production. Most of the the Third World people who rail at Western countries wouldn't be here without them. Some poor countries took advantage of these advances to develop and become part of the First World. South Korea was tied with Senegal for poorest country on earth in 1960. Others just put the gains into bigger families.

You and Belly might consider whether the pronatalist religions, kleptocratic elites, etc. are not all just expressions of local cultures. If anything, development should be easier for the latecomers than for our own ancestors. After all, they know that development is possible and know what policies are needed to achieve it. Furthermore, they can learn from our mistakes and leapfrog over obsolete, dirty technology. If they can find out about and often get access to cigarettes, mobile phones, soccer, mass entertainment via radio and television, and migration to developed countries, then they can find out about clean water and sanitation, contraceptives, universal primary education, equality for women, and the rule of law. Much of this can be implemented from the bottom up. Ultimately, only they can decide to fix their problems, and help is futile otherwise.

Landrights4all,

The issue isn't how many people can be fitted into a telephone box, as students used to do in the 1960s, but of the resources needed to support them. See

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/ecological_footprint_atlas_2010