Almost as far back as we can trace, people have worried about increasing population.  In the year 500 B.C. both Plato and Aristotle worried about over population in Greece and neighbouring countries.  In the same year Confucius worried about it in China and Terullian scratched his head about it in Carthage in the second century A.D.

In 1798, Robert Malthus startled England and eventually the whole world with his theory that the growth of population always outruns the growth of production.  Poverty and hunger are therefore man’s inescapable fate.  Un 1968, biologist Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb predicted that “in the 1970s the world will undergo famines- hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.”  And yet life goes on!

And now, in our own times, we have the Cairo Conference – a United Nations event that aimed to control the ‘population explosion’ through contraception, sterilization and abortion.  I believe – though I can’t prove it – that there is an insidious plan by the worldwide financiers to bring the developing countries “to heel” in the interests of the developed countries, especially the United States.

William Gairdner’s book, The War Against the Family, makes an excellent case against the theory of overpopulation.  Relying heavily on Professor Jacqueline Kasun’s The War Against Population, Gairdner sets out his argument:

  • “The world food output has continued to match or outstrip population growth since 1977, especially in some of the poorest nations.  Paul Ehrlich said in 1968, ‘Population is far outstripping food production’”
  • “There is very little real hunger in the world.  Only about 2% of the world’s population suffers from serious hunger, according to the Harvard Centre for Population Studies, Ehrlich said, ‘More than half the world is hungry’”
  • :Political tyranny, not people, is the problem. War, political despotism and socialism are the great destroyers of food in Africa and everywhere else, not climate or natural agriculture.”
  • “World Agriculture is underproductive.  The world’s farmers use only half of the arable land.  The world has vast, untapped productive capacities.”
  • “Professor Colin Clarke of Oxford University writes that, using current methods, the world could easily support 35.1 billion people.  (At present we are about 5.5 billion).”
  • “Roger Revelle of Harvard estimates Africa alone could support 10 billion.  Indian economist, Raj Krishna, says India’s arable land could be doubled and sufficient food grown there to feed the entire world.”
  • “Humans live on only a tiny portion of the earth.  Scholars Doxiadis and Papainnou calculate that only three tenths of one percent of the land surface of the earth is used for human settlements.”
  • “All basic resources are abundant and increasing.  None of the predictions of resource exhaustion has come about and the world basic resource prices (the best indicator of scarcity) have fallen, not risen.

In April, 1994, the U.S. Census Bureau in Washington D.C., released its World Population Profile 1994. It revealed the following facts that only add to Gairdner’s argument.

  • The world’s current population growth rate is 1.5 percent, the lowest in some 40years.
  • Eighty-six countries have low rates of 20 or fewer births per 1000 population.
  • More than 20 developing countries have achieved such low rates.  Together these low fertility rate countries represent nearly half of the world’s population.
  • Fertility levels have fallen so low in some countries (mainly Europe) that no return to the replacement level is expected in the foreseeable future.
  • In the year 2020, 121 million fewer people are expected in the 16 countries with the highest rates of AIDS.

The June issue of Population Today published by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) says that no fewer than nine countries in Europe have a natural population decrease, which means that there are more deaths than births.  The nine countries are: identified Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Romania, Russia and Ukraine.

According to the PRB publication, Russia’s birth rate has just fallen below death rate.  Russia’s 1993 birth rate was just 9.7 per 1000 population – probably the lowest ever recorded in any country.

Up to a few years ago my own country of Ireland was the only country in Europe that was replacing its population. But alas, with the selling of contraceptives and more than 2000 Irish women going over to England each year to have their babies murdered by English doctors, Ireland has now joined the rest of Europe in having a lower than replacement birth rate.

In The Story of Civilization, historian Will Durant traces the fall of the Roman Empire. “In Alexandria, which had boasted of its numbers, Dionysus calculated that the population had, in his time, (250 A.D.) been halved.  He mourned to see the human race wasting away.  What caused this fall in population?  Above all, family limitation.  Practices first by the educated classes, it seeped down to the proletariat, named for its fertility.  By A.D. 100 it had reached the agricultural classes, as shown y the use of imperial alimenta (hand outs) to encourage rural parentage. By the third century it had overrun the western provinces and was lowering manpower in Gaul.  Though branded a crime, infanticide flourished as poverty grew.  Sexual excesses had reduced human fertility.”

I believe it was the philosopher George Santayana who said, “Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them.”