Population control: Room – not doom – for everyone

For decades, it has been a great international unmentionable. Population growth is the ever expanding elephant in the room, wherever governments gather to address world poverty or environmental degradation. Though everyone knows its importance, it is little discussed and only referred to in passing, if that, in the conventions and communiqués that eventually emerge from the conferences.

Yet attend a public meeting – or strike up a conversation in a pub – and the issue quickly comes up. The astounding increase in the number of humans – which has tripled in the lifetime of anyone now over 70 to the present 6.9 billion – is, you will forcefully be told, the fundamental problem. Plenty in high places feel the same: the Duke of Edinburgh, for example, has long been an uncompromising advocate of population control, despite siring four extremely high-consuming children himself.

But isn’t that the point, the retort comes back. If you’re considering impact on the planet, it’s consumption that counts. When a citizen of an industrialised country uses, on average, 32 times as much of the world’s resources as his developing nation counterpart – and Americans emit 200 times as much carbon dioxide per head as Africans – is not focusing on the human population just shifting the blame to the poor? Besides, the argument continues, the world could manage even the nine billion or so due to inhabit it by 2050, so long as they lived sustainably, not wastefully.

Two authoritative reports published this week bear out the last point. One, the result of five years’ work by the official French agricultural and development research agencies, concludes that the world could feed all those people. The other, from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, adds that they could be supplied with homes, water and energy as well.

It’s true, too, that some early environmentalists’ prophecies of doom have turned out to be laughable. Paul Ehrlich – surely a contender for the most consistently wrong professor on the planet – forecast in the 1970s that “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death”, adding that “the cancer of population growth must be cut out” by “compulsion” if needs be. But, as it happened, the growth rate began to turn down dramatically even as he was writing; it has since fallen by more than 40 per cent.

Telegraph UK