Dear Ram
Please find it here below.
Regards
bhuban
Too many people for our overburdened planet
Sean O'Grady's "The more people come to the UK, the better it is for us all" (1
July) beggars belief.
Why would we think it better to create energy shortages, resource shortages,
lowered quality of life, a housing crisis, lowered standard of living, more air
pollution, grid-locked traffic, bio-diversity loss, and a dozen other
calamities caused by increasing population pressures?
For many decades there has been a wilful blindness – almost a taboo – in
recognising that relentless human-population growth is one of the pre-eminent
problems we face. In 1950 world population was barely over 2 billion; in
October this year it will hit 7 billion.
In most countries today existing populations are not living environmentally
sustainably, yet if current birth rates persist, the United Nations Population
Division warned in March 2009, our population will exceed 11bn by 2050.
Governments will be struggling with millions of unemployed and hungry people
attracted to violence and extremism.
Most environmental organisations tell us that if only we each reduced our
environmental demand, population growth would not be a problem. But our
economic system, predicated on growth, is driving us in the opposite direction.
If governments won't talk population, then they are not serious about cutting
emissions or managing food and water supplies.
The more crowded we become, the more governments will police our behaviour and
restrict our activities. We still have a choice; the world badly needs a
grown-up, rational discussion of the population issue.
Brian McGavin, Wilmslow, Cheshire
Sean O'Grady gives a classic example of just what is wrong with economic
thought today.
Economists, the high priests of modern political discourse, cannot escape the
fantasy world they have created. First he sneers at countries with "lousy
demographics", by which he means those with the gently declining populations
which optimists hope will contribute to a levelling off of the suicidal level
of human numbers by the middle of the century.
He then states that the bigger our future generations are, the better it will
be as they will pay more taxes and therefore be better able to service our
debts. Under such logic this new generation as it ages will need an even larger
one to follow and this in its turn will have greater numbers yet to contend
with.
Just how many such exponentially increasing generations can this stubbornly
finite, resource-poor and ecologically damaged planet cope with? You do the
maths, Sean, you're the economist.
Steve Edwards
Haywards Heath, West SussexEthiopia faces its worst drought for a decade
(report, 4 July). The UN now classifies large areas of Somalia, Ethiopia,
Djibouti and Kenya as in a crisis or an emergency.
The International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell is right in saying:
"Through no fault of its own, the Horn of Africa is experiencing a severe
drought caused by the failed rains".
But according to the World Bank, since 1960 the population of Somalia has grown
threefold to 9 million; Ethiopia fourfold to 80 million; and Kenya a massive
fivefold to 40 million.
Such increases are clearly unsustainable, especially in the face of the climate
change now occurring.
Those major charities that have refused to acknowledge the need to accompany
their food-aid programmes with family-planning initiatives have conspired in
creating the scale of the tragedies now unfolding in the poorest parts of the
world.
These are the fruits of past political reticence to recognise the need to
restrain and reverse population growth in both the (poor) developing and the
(high-consumption) developed worlds alike.
Alan Stedall, Birmingham
Sean O'Grady's "the more, the better" paean to immigration begs the question
why bother with border controls ("Migrants can put the Great back in Britain",
4 July).
Admittedly, O'Grady and his fellow globalists would keep controls, of a sort,
as long as the CBI is allowed to continue to dictate a lax immigration policy.
Hoovering up expensively trained professionals from poorer countries via a
points-based system is nothing to be proud of, nor is the creation of a
low-wage economy via an influx of unskilled immigrants.
Mass immigration is less an inevitable feature of modern life and more an
addiction.
Yugo Kovach, Winterborne Houghton, Dorset
Sean O'Grady would be well advised to consider the fate of Bernie Madoff,
currently languishing in an American jail for defrauding investors, when he
tries to convince us that we need more and more people coming into the world to
support more and more people requiring pensions as the get older.
Sir David Attenborough, in his speech to the Royal Society of Arts earlier this
year, masterfully described such flawed thinking as "an ecological Ponzi
scheme".
Katherine Scholfield, Roborough, Devo
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