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Tuesday, July 26, 2011
The politicians have certainly noticed, David Cameron said recently that "Britain is leading the way. We have provided over £90 million of aid which will help over 2 million people in the region, providing them with much needed food, drinking water and shelter...."
How can we not help them out, we see the horrifying pictures, our tax money goes on foreign aid to these people, we donate to charities and crisis appeals, to many it seems the right thing to do. Nobody likes to see anyone, especially children, suffer.
But is all of our money and support actually doing more harm than good?
A recent article by Joseph Chamie, former head of the UN Population Division, sheds some interesting light on Africa and highlights what could indeed be a worrying portent of things to come.
Africa's population currently stands at around the 1 billion mark, having grown from approximately 170 million in the 1920s. Upon current mid level fertility predictions, the population is expected to double again, hitting the 2.1 billion mark by 2050.
Assuming a drop in fertility levels which is factored into the UN predictions, Africa is still expected to reach an astounding 3.6 billion people, and make up 35% of the worlds population, by the end of the twenty first century.
High fertility models suggest a possible 5.2 billion people by the close of the century, and even the low fertility variants give a figure of 2.4 billion people.
Should fertility rates and life expectancy remain the same - the UN's constant model - then the estimated population is truly mind boggling. 3 billion by 2050 and, this is not a typo, 15 (fifteen) billion by 2100.
The reason for the staggering increases no matter which model is used is simple - high birth rates, and increasing life expectancy.
Whichever model is used, chronic overpopulation appears to be inevitable outcome, the only real question is just how badly overpopulated Africa will end up. Indeed, the whole world is fast heading towards chronic overpopulation.
Naturalist Chris Packham, speaking to The Radio Times, recently said that "There's no point bleating about the future of pandas, polar bears and tigers when we're not addressing the one single factor that’s putting more pressure on the ecosystem than any other – namely the ever increasing size of the world's population"
Over population represents a disaster for a world of finite resources, and, as we can see with existing famines, many parts of Africa already lack sufficient resources to support their existing local populations. Should the population increase vastly in these areas then the human disaster would be almost unimaginable, even global aid can support only so many people.
And yet, by our foreign aid and our charity appeals, we actually ensure that life expectancy is extended, and thus that the population of Africa will continue to increase at an astonishing rate.
We may mean to do good, but what we are ensuring is that the famine now will seem as nothing, in a few decades time the famines which parts of Africa will face will be on a scale which we cannot imagine. The number of people involved will be simply unmanageable.
All of our aid, which virtually guarantees catastrophic population growth, and Africa's already finite resources which are not even adequate for the number of people there currently, will create a perfect storm where future disasters will be of an unimaginable and unprecedented magnitude.
It may well be an unpalatable truth, but by meaning to do good we could well be sowing the seeds for a future African nightmare of truly terrifying proportions, a nightmare on such a scale that the world would quite simply not be able to cope and that no amount of aid would be able to avert.
Africa's Demographic Multiplication
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