Overpopulation: How It Came To Be
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The world’s human population has a net gain of one person every 13 seconds. Thats 4.6 people every minute, 276.9 every hour and 3322.8 every day. At this rate our population is looking to raise from seven billion to nine billion by the year 2038. According to Carolyn Kinder, a leader of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute and award-winning teacher, this overwhelming population growth can be attributed mainly to declining death rate as a result of increased food production distribution and conquest of disease..
Over the last 150 years farmers around the globe have been able to increase food production exponentially due to new technology such as new kinds of seed, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and more sophisticated machinery. For example, between 1950 and 1985 the amount of grain harvested worldwide increased from 631 million tons to 1.65 billion tons. This represents a gain of 2.6 times when during the same time period the world population increased by only 1.9 times. Additionally, during the past 10 years, the world's food production has increased by 24 per cent, outpacing the rate of population growth. This increase in food production and the improvement in food distribution, which allows agriculture regions to ship food across the world, has ended the fear of starvation in most parts of the world. Hence, decreasing the the death rate and increasing the population.
Another factor that has decreased the death rate is the conquest of disease. New technology, such as vaccinations and antibiotics, have almost entirely eliminated the threat of some diseases that were once deadly like smallpox and polio. Better public health practices, such as sewage control and water purification, after finding out the effect of germs has also led to a decrease in the spread of disease. Progress in medical science has, therefore, has had a great effect on the population of most nations of the world. Nearly everywhere death rates have fallen. At the same time, birth rates have remained high. This combination of high birth rates and low death rates have led to the population explosion in many countries throughout the world.
While both of these factors have greatly improved the well being for a majority of the world's population, the consequences of our actions lie in the numbers. The rate that our population is growing at means humans will continue resource depletion at rapid speed in order to keep up, jeopardizing the stability of our planet. While we can’t morally increase the death rate, what actions can be taken to reduce the birth rate?
FUTURE RESEARCH: I will explore what actions are currently in place to effectively control population growth and which are successful and which are not.
