David Attenborough (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I recently posted about Sir David Attenborough who warned that, “If we do not control population, the natural world will”. I suggested that we don’t need to be worried. Here’s some further thoughts on the matter:
Last week, Sir David Attenborough suggested suggested:
that getting the UN to send sacks of flour to famine regions was “barmy” and that famine in Ethiopia is about “too many people for too little piece of land.
This was an inexcusably silly comment as the connotation was that it’s tolerable to reduce population levels by effectively starving people to death! However, I think it deflected the debate away from Attenborough’s main argument that:
Our current population is estimated at 7.2 billion, and is predicted to rise to 9-10 billion by mid-century.
And it was this amount of overpopulation that couldn’t be supported. A point which I never made in my previous post was that clearly it’s not easy to feed such a vast amount of people, especially as you would need to get enough food in the right geographical regions; but there is a solution. In the UK we use the latest technology to farm which maximizes yields. But in third-world countries, because only basic low-tech equipment and methods are available, then farming is hard work, takes a substantial amount of time and is comparatively inefficient. So surely by making technology that we in the West take for granted available elsewhere enough food could be grown for everyone? Factor in the use of GM crops and pesticides and the perceived problem mentioned by Attenborough does not exist.
Additionally, Attenborough suggested on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that we should give women worldwide the rights over their own bodies (including contraception) which would make perfect sense if we want to deal with overpopulation.
So, perhaps Attenborough was right after all: don’t just chuck bags of flour at the poorest countries, rather technology and women’s rights just may be the solution the world needs?
What do you think? Leave a comment below:
Related articles
- David Attenborough’s Population Warning Against Large Families (contactmusic.com)
- David Attenborough: trying to tackle famine with bags of flour is ‘barmy’ (theguardian.com)
- David Attenborough: Stop Feeding Third World Nations to Reduce Population (oneworldchronicle.com)
- Sir David Attenborough: If we do not control population, the natural world will (telegraph.co.uk)
