Population prophets of gloom and doom
Thursday, March 7, 2002
By Jane Chastain© 2002 WorldNetDaily.com
Argh! Save me from the world's population prophets and doomsday dimwits!
After my column on China's eugenics program, they were out in force: "One-child policy brutal? Jane, at least they can have one. Please consider whether there are any problems in the world that are not directly related to OVERPOPULATION."
Where have these people been? Lost in a time warp? Did they just crawl out from under a rock? It was over 200 years ago that Thomas Malthus began ranting about how the world was going to collapse under a sea of people, with no food to eat and nowhere to go. With the help of recent disciples like Paul Ehrlich, who in 1968 wrote "The Population Bomb," and Steven Hackett, a professor at Humboldt State University who in 1998 wrote the textbook, "Environmental and Natural Resources Economics: Theory, Policy, and the Sustainable Society," the ghost of Malthus lives on.
Thirty-three years ago, Ehrlich claimed that the world's population was growing faster than its food supply. He has been proven wrong! Hackett keeps the myth alive, grossly misleading the nation's college students into believing that we are running out of farmland, forests and natural resources, and that our only hope is a benevolent but controlling government that will redistribute our wealth and regulate our population. Although Hackett gives himself a lot of wiggle room and relies on flawed predictions and hyperbole, he too, is wrong.
Dr. Jacqueline R. Kasun, professor emeritus at Humboldt State and the editorial director of the Center for Economic Education, Bayside, Calif., took Hackett to task in the Summer 1999, Independent Review. Dr. Kasun pointed out that Ehrlich and more reliable sources estimate that human beings occupy between one and three percent of the world's land area. Hardly a cause for alarm!
Furthermore, the entire world population could be put into the state of Texas, leaving the rest of the world devoid of people. With the world's six and a quarter billion people, there would be 22,400 people per square mile. If all men, women, children, even babies lived separately, they could each have a home of about 1200 square feet, which is bigger than the average home in the world.
But are we running out of natural resources? No, long-term prices (an indication of scarcity) of the primary commodities that human beings extract or harvest from the earth are far lower than 100 years ago.
The Food and Agriculture Organization data show that forests occupy 30 percent of the world's land area, a fraction that has not declined since 1950. Also, the world's food supply has increased a great deal faster than population. Farmers use less than half of the world's arable land. Furthermore, recent studies at the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology show that farmers could feed a future population of 10 billion by using less cropland, leaving more land for nature. However, the prospects for the world population ever reaching 10 billion are growing dimmer.
The 20th-century population explosion was a result of improvements in health and the expansion of life expectancy. That should be a cause for celebration and is more than enough to prove my case against Malthus and his modern-day prophets of doom.
Conversely, fertility levels for the world as a whole fell by more than 40 percent between early 1950s and the end of the century. Presently, 83 countries and territories are thought to exhibit below-replacement fertility patterns. This no longer is a European phenomenon. The largest concentration of sub-replacement populations is in East Asia. In the late 1950s, the fertility rate in Japan fell below replacement. Hong Kong, the Republic of Korea, Singapore and Taiwan followed suit.
The largest sub-replacement population is in China, where the government's stringent population control policy has been in place for more than two decades. With China, like the rest of the world, the problem is not so much one of population but one of distribution. A quarter of the population of China is in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River where population density reaches 663 people per square kilometer. However, this is less than the population density of New Jersey, which has 750 people per square kilometer.
Due to improved living standards and decreasing birth rates, the world now is facing a problem never envisioned by Malthus – that of a graying population. The Population Research Institute reports that China's harsh one-child policy is expected to exacerbate the aging crisis in that country. By 2050, 650 million of China's projected population of 1.25 billion will be 50 years old and older. That will be more than half of the population, which will be virtually an impossible imbalance to sustain.
Jane Chastain is a WorldNetDaily columnist and a co-host of the Judicial Watch Report radio show, heard daily from 12 to 2 p.m. EST on the USA Radio Network.
