In the spirit of Amartya Sen I wanted to respond to Comrade Nash and Pippa with their earlier thoughts on population growth.
I want to pick up where the controversy ‘rears its ugly head’ as you aptly put it. When you talk about these vast hordes in Africa and Asia you don’t seem to take into account the relative share of the global population. So as 63.7% of the worlds population in 1950 was from Asia/Africa, which rose to 71.2% in 1990 and is estimated to reach roughly 78.5% in 2050. This would mean that by 2050 Africa/Asias share of the worlds population would just be reverting to what it was in 1650. In fact the only reason why Europe/North America grew as a greater proportion of the worlds population was owing to the Industrial Revolution. This means that prior to Industrialisation when we might be able to view things as ‘all things being equal,’ the population levels resembled what they are becoming rather than what they are now. This leads us to believe that the population growth is merely a case of the worlds share of population ‘righting’ itself.
We must also take into account that the rate of world population growth is declining overall with its rate of growth falling from 2.2% per year between 1970 and 1980 to 1.7% from 1980 to 1992. It further likely that this will level off in the future.
You then talk about Chinas One Child policy as possibly being a solution, when there are far better solutions and policies than the one child solution, which hasn’t even been proven to be effective and diverts money from policies that are. The best solution to general population growth I would argue is development. When we look closer at India and China we can see an example of this. While in general education levels in India are lower than China, in those places in India that have a comparable levels of health and education the population growth is less than that in China. The low levels do not require state coercion. There are a number of reasons why those places in India grow less (womens education etc) but it still shows that the One Child Policy is not the answer.
When we look at which countries have the highest levels of population growth it is those least developed in sub-Saharan Africa, (with 3-4% increases) and that in those countries that are experiencing higher development rates such as India and China they have a declining growth rate, this also the case in Latin America.
In relation to Pippas Malthus-esq point, I would argue that he was wrong 200 years ago and the ideas are likely to be wrong today. Firstly we find that in general there is a growth of food production (per person as well as total) so this idea that we are running out of food is a fallacy.
In fact as well as having a growth in food production while the prices are cheap (relatively speaking when we compare it to the past – inc when Malthus was alive) and the incentive to grow thereby being less, we also see that much of the growth in food production is from areas that have a high (absolute) population growth, so we see that the per capita food production rose by 39% in China and roughly 23% in India.
This tends to lead us to the conclusion that those areas that do experience famine tend to be as a result of wider political and economic structures and have little bearing on whether people are having babies or not.
The Guardian has a 
