This Planet Is N0T Full

A couple with one son in Ho Chi Minh City.
Photo Nghia Pham/ Thanh Nien

A lot of people are scared that the growing world population is about to overwhelm us. These people are typically of two kinds: the first are older people of the Population Bomb era (published in 1968), and typically in developed countries; the second group are those in developing countries where the population is still growing and who see the difficulties of poor countries trying to accommodate millions moving from farms to cities.

From the views expressed in both parts of the world it is clear that there is widespread ignorance about what world and local statistics are showing us about what is really happening with regards population. It may seem amazing to many that in a highly populated (and still growing) country like Vietnam, government officials are calling on couples to have more children because the birth rate in major cities is as low as 1.3 children per woman, far below the  2.1 replacement rate, and they fear adverse economic consequences in the decades ahead.
Similarly, in Bangladesh, which has repeatedly been used as an example of a population basket case, the total fertility rate is near the simple replacement level, but lower in better-off areas. The drop in births has come despite big gaps in the use of contraception, especially with low use among the higher-income groups.

A rigorous view of how the world’s population, food supplies, and quality of life stack up is given in a book edited by Ian Goldin of Oxford University called Is The Planet Full? The collegial assessment by the scholars included in that text is that the expected peak population of about 10 billion people should be able to “equitably exist on a finite planet”. There are conditions to this optimism, however, conditions that have been the focus of those who have engaged on the world debate in previous decades to oppose the panic-stricken calls of “abort (or contracept) the savages”!
Those who have tried to defend human dignity have argued in the same way that Goldin and his colleagues do when they conclude that, given the finite planet, there must be a  deliberate redistribution of resources. Further, optimism is possible “only if our exploitative relationships between population, consumption and the environment are simultaneously addressed”, as Rebecca Jarvis observes in a London School of Economics Review of Books blog.