Most of the time our economic and political philosophy can seem so divorced from a looming reality check, for instance, economic prosperity is based on the idea that we need continual growth of about 2-3 percent in the world economy every year, which means a concurrent increase in consumption and production of goods and services every year, but something about this idea of an ever-increasing production of goods and services seems to avoid an obvious point.
Planet Earth is finite, there is only so much land, sea, oil, coal, clean water and air in absolute terms, how far away the limits are is debateable, but the fact that limits exist is self-evident. However, the dream seems to be that somehow everyone on the planet can reach levels of wealth and consumption equivalent to those of people in the West; thats what China is aiming for, and India. How is this going to achieved, at what point will the population and resource bubble burst?
What I am thinking is that at present, in 2009, we already have a world of 6.5 billion human beings, where about 2 billion live on the poverty line, and a billion under the risk of daily starvation. The major factor is the lack of clean water, and their inability to access sustainable food supplies. Yet, the population of Planet Earth is projected to be about 9 billion people by 2050. How on earth are all these people going to fed without ripping up whatever is left of the water and land resources we have available and creating a global totalitarian state to dole out our meagre resources to ever increasing numbers of hungry, scared, angry mouths? Its the malthusian nightmare.
How can the lives of people in the third world possibly be improved if the population of the third world doubles in 30 years? If every agricultural and medical advance made in the West, when translated to an African context doesn't result in better living standards but just more and more people? How are the other affluent countries going to cope with the consequences of where this is leading the world.
We are already starting to see the social and political consequences of mass immigration to Europe and America from third world countries, that problem is only going to get worse if this population pressure and resource depletion continues apace. Western countries generally have stable populations and can feed themselves at present (hopefully climate change won't impact agriculture past the point where Europeans and Americans can't produce enough food), we shall see. Asia, and Africa are however different stories, and these are the two continents where all of the population growth is occurring.
China and India already have unsustainable populations, which are increasing, they are destroying their resources in a scramble to Western style urbanized affluence; their water resources in particular are very very vunerable, and most people in these countries still live on subsistence farming. For example, India may have 300 million people who live relatively well by Asian standards, but it has 700 million who live in abject poverty and who rely on rice basically to live. Many of them live in the plain of the Ganges, a fertile region, that supports 450 million peasants who cultivate rice for their daily subsistence, but the glaciers that feed the Ganges are melting rapidly, and this river-based agricultural system may become unviable in 50 years.
Think about that for a moment, and what that one fact alone implies.
Africa is a population timebomb, that no one on the continent of Africa seems willing or able to address; and cultural and political factors mean that very little is being done to look at this issue in the cold light of day. A continent whose climate is already one that has never allowed a very large population to be viable, which is experiencing massive, almost exponential population growth.
In the West we look at Africa as a charity issue based on middle-class colonial guilt, and send money and food aid to countries whose governments are allowing their populations to grow way past the point where their lands are able to sustain them, and any serious climatic problem such as drought or soil erosion etc will lead to famines and other disasters where the loss of life will be on biblical, (and I mean biblical) scales.
Corrupt African governments play on this and instead of using aid to improve the lot of their people and make their nations more sustainable, use it to keep the mass of the population simply alive and fed (or not even that, on occasion); while enriching themselves by selling off whatever indigenous resources their countries have. The poor simply reproduce more children to ensure they have someone to look after them as they grow older (not that many get to be that old). The DRC is a prime example of this.
In a century where we are facing a rapidly destabilizing climate, where the poorest, climatically vunerable, and badly governed regions have exponentially growing populations who existence is mostly about trying to get food, what is going to be the end result? Africa already cannot feed itself, yet the population of Africa is set to double in 25 years. Can anyone else see where this is going?
o:o