A Growing Crisis

Sometime this week we will supposedly reach an unprecedented milestone. According to the United Nations, the world’s population is about to reach seven billion people. We’ll never know for certain because it’s hardly an exact science, but it’s been clear for the last few years that the seven billion mark was imminent. And because we’ve been inching toward it for some time, many will ignore its larger implications.Since the beginning, approximately 100 billion people have lived and died on this planet. From that earliest moment until 1800 only one billion had accumulated. By 1920 the two billion mark had been reached. Things were changing fast. Scientific advances, better diet, and a lower rate of child mortality were having their effect. The UN reports that the human race reached three billion by 1959, four billion by 1974, five billion by 1987 and then quickly got to six billion in 1998. That means we have added another one billion in just a little over a decade. Our world is transforming.How will we handle all this extra demand for resources? Three billion more people will be added by the end of this century, many of them in countries that face crushing poverty. That reality presents governments, NGOs and international organizations like the UN and the World Bank with a diabolical dilemma. In a time of diminishing returns, governments and funding institutions continue to cut back on their contributions to foreign aid and international development at the very time that a global crisis of poverty is staring us in the face. It is proving to be a direct challenge, not only to global prosperity, but to the survival of the human race.As globalization and an overpowering capitalism continue to pursue profit over quality of life, the ability to address the growing population crisis continues to go unaddressed by the very forces that could bring about concrete solutions. Decades of research have revealed that the more prosperous a nation becomes, the lower the birthrate. The opposite also happens – more poverty, more children. By selecting zones of enterprise in which to seek their wealth, corporations are unknowingly creating a scenario where burgeoning poverty will cripple future growth. Governments are doing the same thing, as they continue to cut back in an era of deficits and financial crises.On the positive side, more and more families in the developing world are using family planning methods which ultimately reduces the heavy climb of population growth in many countries. But such developments remain linked to growing family income and access to medical and educational services. As you'd expect, there is a severely limiting negative side. Almost one-half of the world lives on less than $2 a day. Food insecurity is now growing at an alarming pace, with almost one billion people suffering from such a challenge every day. Clearly, as long as poverty remains at such levels, or even grows, our ability to limit the explosion of population becomes more limited year by year.Then there is the formidable environmental challenge, across a vast array of fronts, that confronts the globe at almost every turn. Presently, one billion people live without adequate or clean water. Most of the water is used for agriculture. Something similar is happening with grain crops, where only 46 per cent of grain crops go into human mouths – the rest goes to animals. As deserts grow at the same time as flooding continues to submerge even main city streets, the declining ability of the planet to absorb the pollution created by human activity is becoming more pronounced. At a time when humans need to live more sustainably, the huge increase in population sizes is curtailing our ability to react.The United Nations Population Division expects 8 billion people by 2025, 9 billion by 2043, and, finally, 10 billion by 2083. India will have more people than China sometime around 2020.And what to do about sub-Saharan Africa? Covering 20% of the world's land surface, by 2040 it is expected to have more people than India, a great many of the Africans living in abject poverty. The world community is quickly becoming aware of the heavy challenge this will provide to all of us. Why then are we cutting back on international development? Why the reticence to assist the 48 sub-Saharan nations to expand their educational, health, productivity and economic potential to stave of the crisis? Countries like Canada have either frozen or reduced their development dollars in an effort to cut deficits, but this is merely a short-sighted response. Unless a more robust global effort is amassed to the assist the sub-Saharan region, our own fragile economic recovery and hoped-for future prosperity will eventually be swallowed up by that one global force we refused to competently address – abject poverty.There is enough food to feed this planet and there can be a necessary amount of water for all should we start living more responsibly. But by cutting aid and development we have failed to marshal the world’s political, environmental, humanitarian and economic forces in a manner that can responsibly guarantee necessary results. By ignoring Africa we are denying ourselves a more prosperous future. The two are linked and the growing crisis requires visionary and intelligent leadership rather than the mind-numbing self-preservation ideologies running through the western world at present.