Genesis of EdenFor an updated account of Biodiversity Holocaust with more recent population figures please refer to:
The Rape of the Planet
and Genetic Holocaust
in our 2006 work Sexual
Paradox
The Exploding Population
Although world population growth is now beginning to slow as a result of social factors associated with the media, increasing education and role of women in society, the exploding population and its consequences in inevitable human impact on all aspects of the biosphere has been described as the most serious crisis ever to face the planet. Indeed Anne and Paul Ehrlich, authors of "Population, Resources and Environment" and "The Population Explosion" have described population as the issue around which all the others pivot, without which saving the environment cannot be seriously achieved:
"People can learn to treat growth as the cancer-like disease it is and move towards a sustainable society. The rich can make helping the poor an urgent goal instead of seeking more wealth and useless military advantage over one another. Then humanity might have a chance to deal with all those other seemingly intractable problems. We shouldn't delude ourselves: the population explosion will come to an end before very long. The only remaining question is whether it will be halted through the humane method of birth control, or by nature wiping out the surplus" - Anne and Paul Ehrlich (Porritt 119)
Although population growth has complex sources in the industrial revolution, and improvements in medical technology which have reduced the infant mortality rate in underdeveloped countries, many of which have cultures which have traditionally sought large families, both to compensate for early deaths and to provide additional family help with traditional labour-sharing, the ultimate source of the population explosion is gender-based - the desire by men to secure their fertility rights over women to ensure they can control a fertility process in which they are less secure than the female according to the adage: "Momma's baby - Poppa's maybe."
Indeed reproductive insecurity appears to be at the root of a major social shift which accompanied the social epoch of urban culture and the rise of patriarchal religious monotheism across the world. Ultimately correcting this 'spermatogenic imperative' which we can see manifested, not only in population but also the the exponential growth principle which drives utopian vistas of endless economic growth and the dominion over nature and woman alike founding the Judeo-Christian-Islamic beliefs and aspects of Indian philosophy can only be corrected by the patriarchal religions coming to terms with their own errors and mending their ways, some of which have been adopted holus bolus by world political leaders in their pursuit of economic growth at the expense of the environment and our natural resources:
"If we are honest there is only one root cause of the disaster facing the planet, and that is the appalling rate at which our human species has increased its population in recent centuries. ... Who is to blame for the crisis we face? First and foremost, I accuse the religious leaders of the world. They have fed mankind with the dangerous myth that humanity is somehow above nature and that it is our god-given right to hold dominion over the Earth and subdue it. In many cases, they have actively encouraged over-population and have gone out of their way to prevent family-planning schemes. They are a disgrace. Secondly, I accuse political leaders, almost all of whom follow a policy of national growth, regardless of the consequences. ... But we are not designed as a high-quantity species. We are a high-quality species, and all our social thinking should be directed to this thought" - Desmond Morris (Porritt 115).
This conflict of views is illustrated by the Nov 1996 criticism expressed by Nafis Sadik, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund, at Pope John Paul's statement that hunger is not linked to over-population, saying the world's future food needs would be inextricably linked to demographic changes.
The world's population is now about 5.9 billion and it is still expanding very rapidly, despite a marginal slowing over the last couple of years. Every day we share the Earth and its resources with 250,000 more people than the day before; every year, there are about another 90 million mouths to feed. It is the equivalent of adding a Philadelphia to the world population every week; a Los Angeles every two weeks; a Mexico every year; and a US and Canada every three years.
Though fertility rates are dropping, the sheer momentum of population growth ensures that at least another 3 billion people will be added to the planet between now and the year 2025; it could be as high as 4 billion taking it close to 10 billion total. At present growth rates, 1 billion people are added to the human ark every 11 years. There will be 6 billion mouths to feed by mid-1999. If current trends are not reversed, or at least slowed down, we could be facing a global population of close to 14 billion by the year 2100. But the problem is not population growth per se. It is that over 90 per cent of births now take place in the countries least able to cope with the resource and environmental consequences of burgeoning populations. Between now and the turn of the century, the number of people in the Third World will grow by over 900 million, or 24.6 per cent. Meanwhile the population of industrialized countries will grow by only 56 million, or 5.2 per cent.
Healing Population:
World population is a very significant factor in both poverty and hunger and in habitat destruction and loss of biodiversity. There is urgent need to realize an abatement of population growth before we all suffer the consequences severely next century. However the population problem is complicated by severe economic and energy-consumption inequities. While population growth in much of the developed world has declined or even reversed as a result of the "demographic transition" accompanying higher living standards and better education, the developing world is caught in a vicious cycle of exploitation which results in poverty, hunger, lack of education, population growth and habitat destruction. Population cannot be addressed without addressing educational, gender, and economic inequity between the developed and developing world.
Enforced population control measures, including sterilization often act selectively against women and have also resulted in atrocious rates of female abortion and infanticide, particularly in China, India and Korea. Education, and empowerment of women are the key to informed, voluntary non-destructive population abatement.
Proposals:
Sept 1996: The world's
population is expected to increase by about 72% between 1995 and
2050, from 5,700 million to 9,800 million. Because the population
densities are substantially lower outside Asia it should be possible
to limit the loss of diversity in most continents (NZ Herald).
FOCUS Gloom about a population explosion is probably misplaced, say demographers. Next century we may have to worry about failing birth rates, not rising ones
Aug 98 Observer "The State of the World Population 1998" report of the United Nations Population Fund shows a slowing of population growth, but still predicts population rising to 9.8 billion by 2050. It is however not clear how well these people are going to be fed. Lester Browm, president ofthe Worldwatch Institute is not optimistic "both the area of cropland and the amount of irrigation water per person are shrinking, threatening to drop below the level needed to provide minimal levels of food security". Some people have suggested that reducing meat production could release grain areas currently devoted to animal feed. However meat-eating trends in China could have a reverse effect. But even sufficient food production in theory is not necessary going to solve malnutrition problems. The United Nations Childrens Fund notes: "For most families the real food problem is not lack of food on the table but the inordinate costs in moeny time and energy putting it there".
World Population Growth Eases A December 1997 report of The Population Institute shows there is a slowing in the rate of population growth. The world's population grew more slowly in 1997 than in other years and the population of about 5.9 billion will reach 6 billion by mid-1999. The growth rate has slowed because of lower fertility rates in countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the Population Institute said. In Bangladesh the fertility rate, a measure of the number of children born per woman, dropped to 3.57 from 6.2. In Turkey the fertility rate fell to 2.5 from 4.1; and in Kenya it dropped to 4.4 from 7.5, the report said. The global average is 4.96. Increased use of contraceptives, delayed marriages and a rise in death rates in many countries contributed to lower fertility rates. From the mid-1980s through the mid 1990s, world population rose by 85 to 100 million people per year. The population grew more than 80 million people in 1997. Over-population is a problem particularly in less developed countries, with almost 98 per cent of the increase in population occurring there. Environmental degradation, stagnant economies, hunger, malnutrition and child-deaths plague poorer countries experiencing runaway growth. About 80 per cent of the world population lives in less developed countries and 74 of these countries are on a course to double their populations over the next 30 years. The Population Institute estimates that about 1.3 billion people more than the combined population of Europe and North America live in absolute poverty on the equivalent of $US1 ($NZ1.7) or less a day. China, India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil and Russia are the five populous countries in the world. Paul Ehrlich [author of "Population, Resources, Environment"] said "This is welcome news, but we aren't out of the woods yet"
Given these easing trends, the world's population will probably never double again, according to the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna in 1996 (New Scientist 17 Feb 1996 p8). For the first time, fertility rates appear to have declined in every region of the world. Unlike most previous population estimates, the IIAS's new numbers consider not only the effect of future changes in the number of children per family, but also the possibility that death rates may change in the future because of changes in the rates of starvation or disease and in the quality of medical care.
This study also tried to estimate the uncertainty surrounding its predictions. "Wolfgang Lutz and his colleagues divided the world into 13 regions and asked 12 population experts to predict the most likely rates of fertility and mortality for each one in 2050 and 2100. The experts were also asked to choose high and low extremes that were 90 per cent certain to embrace the true value. Their predictions were then combined statistically into an approximately bell-shaped curve, and these aggregate predictions were used to project the world's population. The institute's best estimate is now that the world's population will grow from its present 5.75 billion to 10 billion by 2050, reach a peak of around 11 billion by 2075, and remain almost level or decline slightly towards 2100. There is a 95 per cent probability that the population will be between 6 and 17 billion in 2100, says Lutz. And there is a 64 per cent chance that the global population will never reach double its present level." (New Scientist 17 Feb 1996 p8).
Previously, sub-Saharan Africa had lagged behind the rest of the world in this critical component of population control, but in this study Africa had joined the trend. Nevertheless, Africa's population is still forecast to triple before it starts to decline. However some resources, such as fuel for heating depend in a more complex way on whole families, so one has to take into account more than the raw figures to estimate how the impact is accommodating. With increasing divorce rates and more elderly people living alone, the trend is towards smaller, more numerous households, especially in the developed world.
Demographic Transition
The population explosion began in the West, around the middle of the 17th century. "Until then the numbers of people in the world had grown, but slowly,from about 150 million at the time of Christ to somewhere around 500 million (see first figure above). Births and deaths had more or less cancelled each other out, but then the rate of increase quickened dramatically: by 1850 there were some 1,200 million people on earth and the growth rate continued to rise." (Lean 17). Birth rates stayed much the same as before, but death rates fell, causing population to grow. People had no more babies but that they lived longer, as food supplies increased, public health improved and, eventually, proper sanitation spread.
"Its not that people suddenly started breeding like rabbits: it is just that they stopped dying like flies" (Peter Adamson, a consultant to the United Nations Children's Fund - Lean 17).
As people in industrialized countries became more prosperous, birth rates fell until once again they virtually matched the number of deaths, slowing the population growth again in the developed world. Populations in Europe and North America have all but stabilized. In almost every country they are growing by less than 1 per cent. Sweden, Denmark, West Germany, Austria and Hungary actually have a declining population. Industrialized countries have thus completed the "demographic transition".
Third World nations are only beginning to do so, and it is this that is fuelling the world's current prodigious growth. Since the Second World War, death rates in developing countries have fallen dramatically, partly as a result of the reductions in killer diseases like smallpox and malaria, much faster than they had done during Europe's population explosion.
But the fall in death rates has not been preceded by an equivalent agricultural revolution, nor accompanied by similar economic development. Migration is not an answer as it may have appeared in colonial times. Birth rates have declined somewhat, but they remain high, and may not fall enough to complete the demographic transition before other constraints such as malnutrition and the costs of environmental damage become limiting factors.
Higher Third World Birth Rates
The populations of most developing countries have been growing at well over 2 per cent a year, many have topped 3 per cent - which means that their numbers will double in less than 23 years: In 1990, Kenya's population was growing at about 4 per cent annually. This rate would double it in 17 years and quadruple it in 35. The average woman in the Middle East and Africa bears between six and eight children, while her equivalent in industrialized countries bears only two.
In developing countries, children are regarded as economic assets, who perform useful work for the family from the age of six or seven. By the time they reach 10 or 12 they often produce more for the family than they consume. Children provide security in old age, and while infant mortality remains high, parents need to have a lot of babies to make sure that enough survive.
However although having many children may sometimes make sense for individual families, it is ruinous to the societies in which they live. Rapidly growing populations hamper economic development. Many Third World countries simply cannot provide for their burgeoning numbers. The results are evident in mounting poverty, unemployment, slums and squatter settlements; lack of access to education, health care, drinking water and sanitation, and family planning services. As poverty deepens, more people are pushed to the edge of survival.
"According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), in 1985 around 37 per cent of the total population in the developing world were children below the age of 15. In Africa, children make up 45 per cent of the population." (Lean 17). Having to cater for such a disproportionate younger population puts added strain on the productive members of society.
High fertility and High Mortality
The extreme contrasts between the rich and poor worlds is dramatized by comparisons of life expectancy at birth and infant mortality rates. "Even after the improvements of the last 40 years, Africans can expect to live, on average, only 52 years, Asians 62 years and South Americans 65 years. Gambians are lucky if they reach the age of 43 and half of all Angolans die before reaching 45. Europeans, on the other hand, live on average to 74, Americans to 75 and Canadians to 77. Infant mortality is, perhaps, an even more revealing indicator. In Africa, the average number of infant deaths per 1,000 live births is 106, reaching a peak at 169 in Mali and 154 in Sierra Leone. The infant mortality rate for South America is 58 and for Asia 73. In Western Europe, North America and Japan infant mortality is 10 or less per 1,000 live births. Every year some 14 million children die in developing countries before they reach their fifth birthday. Every year, too, half a million mothers die in pregnancy or childbirth - all but 1 per cent of them in the Third World. An African woman is 500 times more likely to die from giving birth than her counterpart in one of the richer developed countries. Another 100,000 to 200,000 women die each year as a result of illegal abortions, and again the great majority are from developing countries" (Lean 20).
Almost all such women and children die unnecessarily. Basic health and sanitation, from breast-feeding, immunization programs and simple mixtures of salts to prevent dehydration from diarrhea through basic health care, education on health and family planning, to clean water and enough food, would prevent most of the infant and child deaths. Maternal health care, and spacing and reducing the numbers of births would help reduce maternal mortality. Many of these are inexpensive educational measures. All should be available as a basic human right.
The World Fertility Survey of 1984 revealed that many mothers in developing countries did not want any more children, but were not able to get contraceptive aids or information. Birth rates would fall heavily if all the women who said they wanted no more children actually succeeded in stopping their childbearing: the number of births would be cut by about a quarter in Africa and about a third in Asia and Latin America. There is clearly a great unfulfilled need for family planning, but it, alone, is not enough.
Such situations are matched by other schemes in various countries from India through South Korea to Peru to institute forcible population control through sterilization or regulation. Often these measures fail, or undermine confidence in the initiative by using clandestine methods of deception to lure or entrap people into sterilization procedures without fully explaining the implications. Such population methods have been particularly suspect when applied without consent to people deemed retarded or undesirable by state eugenics programs. They also frequently result in killing or abortion of female offspring in countries where boys are prized. Leading to severe gender demographic differences, indicative of mass gendercide.
If people want to have children, even the best contraceptive is of no avail. Rapid population growth is linked to poverty, and the education of women and all must be tackled together. Family planning programs that ignore social conditions rarely succeed. "Nations as diverse as Burma, Colombia, China, Sri Lanka, Chile and Cuba - and the Indian state of Kerala - which have addressed poverty, have achieved massive declines, cutting fertility by a third to half between 1960 and 1985" (Lean 19).
The position of many religious leaders concerning contraception is little short of criminal. The Pope has emphatically declared condoms are not to be tolerated, even if a person has HIV. Cardinal Sin of the Philippines recently called condoms "only fit for animals". The position that men whether layman or pope can pass infallible judgement on the reproductive rights of women is indefensible. To enforce male fertility upon all women in the Christian dogma that all sex necessarily must result in procreation of life is a runaway form of male dominion. Significantly the rise of television dramas which portray women as independent career-seeking businesswomen and creative artists and models seems to have had a specifically moderating impact on Brazilian population growth, despite the heavy impact of Catholic opposition.
The status of women is crucial to solving the population problem. Women's bodies are the gateway to each new birth. It is essential that the women of the world be given the ethical freedom to make basic decisions about their own fertility. Women's education appears to be the biggest factor in reducing fertility. "In Thailand, where women have exceptional opportunities for a Third World country, a vigorous family planning program has helped cut fertility by half between 1960 and 1985. Costa Rica achieved an even greater decline, 53 per cent, over the same period; 66 per cent of its women - three times the proportion in the rest of Latin America - use contraceptives despite little effort to spread family planning. The reason seems to be that it has a good record in promoting health and education and in tackling poverty" (Lean 20).
Taslima Nasrin the authoress and doctor who was given a death fatwah for suggesting shariat should be revised, advocates 'freedom of the womb' and states that women must control whether they bear children or not.
"Feminism and the power of non-violence are to me the very essential concepts of green politics. Male-led revolutions have so often and so tragically been mere power exchanges in a basically unaltered structure. ... These revolutions have often been about dying for a cause. Feminist-conceived transformation is all the more about daring to live for a cause .. in struggling for a truly demilitarized society that preserves the ecological basis of life" - Petra Kelly (Porritt 115).
One way or another, population growth will slow down because many developing countries simply cannot sustain their escalating numbers. It will either happen through family planning and development, or by famine, disease and war brought about by collapsing economies.
Feeding a Peaking Population in an Over-exploited World
As the world population grows, so more efforts are made to bring in new productive areas to feed the unsustainable human populations that are burgeoning forth. By overstressing soils and ecosystems through application of artificial fertilizers, and pesticides, many of the best productive areas of the planet are slowly being reduced to marginal lands. Some of the best regions are close to major populations and are appropriated for urban and industrial development. Lack of long-term sustainable productivity will lead to continuing crises in food production as populations crest in the early 21-st century.
Billions go Hungry
On average, people in the richest developed nations eat between 30 and 40 per cent more calories than they need, while the people of the poorest nations on average get 10 per cent less than this basic minimum. There are however wide differences: Kenyans on average get 92 per cent of what they need, but the poorest 40 per cent of the rural people suffer serious malnutrition, attempting to subsist on less than three quarters of their requirements.
"Over 1 billion people - about one in every five on earth - do not get enough food to lead fully productive lives. At least 400 million of them get less than 80 per cent of their basic needs, and are condemned to stunted growth and constant danger of serious illness. Two thirds live in Asia, another fifth in Africa. Two thirds are probably under 15 years old. And their numbers are growing. Every year about 11 million children under the age of five die from hunger or hunger-related diseases. Those that survive may never reach their full potential. One third of Peru's children are so underfed that their growth is stunted. And if a child does not get enough to eat in its first years of life, its brain will not develop properly. One study followed up malnourished Indian children under five for the next 17 years of their lives - and found that their capacity for work was 30 per cent less than that of children from the same class and the same villages who had had enough to eat" (Lean 25).
Poverty, not lack of Food causes Hunger
People go hungry in a world that produces more than enough. They cannot get food because they are too poor to buy or grow the food they need. Increasing food production by itself does not tackle hunger. Consumption also has to rise. The food which is grown has to actually reach those in hunger. "India is a production success story - and a consumption disaster. Its wheat harvest more than doubled under the impact of the Green Revolution between 1965 and 1972; one of the most spectacular increases in history. It provided food aid to the newly-emergent Bangladesh and for a while became the world's second biggest donor after the United States. By the mid-1980s, it had a grain surplus of 24 billion metric tons. Nevertheless, it still has about half of all the hungry people on earth. Consumption of grain per head failed to increase over the period of the production "miracle" and nearly half its people are too poor to buy enough to eat" (Lean 25). This raises significant questions about private enterprise and the ethics of 'free' financial markets.
If their own country people cannot afford to buy food, landowners divert their efforts to growing more cash crops - such as cotton, coffee, tea, sugar or tobacco - for export. Governments, saddled with huge debt burdens, will tend to encourage this to earn foreign exchange. There is vigorous debate as to whether the growth of cash crops has reduced food production; but there is little doubt that they tend to take up the best land, pushing subsistence farmers onto areas with poorer soil and rainfall; yields are lower on this marginal land, so the farmers have to exploit more of it, increasing the spread of deserts. Cash crops also receive most of the Third World's credit, fertilizers and pesticides, and agricultural advice. As food production has fallen, particularly in Africa, more and more has had to be imported. "In 1984, 140 million Africans - more than a quarter of the continent's population - were fed with grain from overseas; though neither they nor their countries could afford to buy enough to prevent widespread hunger" (Lean 25). Both the demand for imports and the inability to pay for enough of them will worsen over the next decades. Food aid is no answer, even if surplus countries are prepared to give it. Although it is essential to relieve short-term famine, food aid undermines local production in more normal circumstances.
The Green Revolution and the Falling harvests
From 1945 to 1985, food production outstripped demand. The Green Revolution helped boost grain production in the Third World and technological advances improved yields in developed countries. Developed regions and Asia have greatly increased their per capita food production since the 1960s. Western Europe, where population growth has stabilized, now produces about 30 per cent more food for each of its people than in the mid-1960s. Africa has also increased its food production in absolute terms, but not enough to keep up with population growth; it now produces 27 per cent less food for each African than in 1967.
"Grain production - which provides about half the world's calories - increased from around 700 million metric tons in 1950 to over 1.8 billion metric tons in 1986. It grew at around 3 per cent a year, outstripping population growth. Similarly, meat, milk and fish production rose by 2 per cent annually between 1965 and 1986, while the harvest of vegetables, pulses and fruit grew by 2.5 per cent a year. The World Commission on Environment and Development, reporting in 1987, attributed the increase mainly to the development of high-yielding new seed varieties, a ninefold increase in the use of chemical fertilizers, a 32-fold rise in pesticide applications and a doubling of the world's irrigated cropland, from 135 million hectares in the 1960s to 271 million hectares in 1985. Distributed evenly, the 1986 harvest could support 6 billion people - the projected population of the earth for the year 1998" (Lean 25).
But this agricultural boom may be ending. Ominously, after four decades of growth, the global harvest began to falter in the second half of the 1980s. "Per capita grain production, which grew from 246 kilograms to 345 kilograms between 1950 and 1984, fell back to 296 kilograms by 1988 - around the level that it had been in the mid-1970s. In 1988, for the first time in history, the United States produced less grain than it needed for its own people. In 1989, for the third successive year, the world as a whole produced too little to satisfy demand. World grain stocks fell from a record high in 1986 to approaching their lowest levels ever. Prices rose by 48 per cent between 1986 and 1989, compounding the problems of countries and families that already could not afford to buy enough to eat" (Lean 28).
Bad weather accounts for part of the stump. "Drought hit India in 1987, and the United States, Canada and China - the world's three biggest food producers - in 1988. In June 1988, at the height of the drought in the American Midwest, Dr James Hansen, Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told a Congressional hearing that he was "99 per cent certain" that the greenhouse effect was to blame" (Lean 28). Climatic conditions were almost normal in 1989; so that year's failure must have had other causes. However since these reports we have had increasingly graphic evidence of climatic disruption of production. In 1997 temperatures rose to 0.6 deg C above the norn for the 20th century and were accompanied by a large-scale El Nino oscillation.
Another cause of falling harvests is overuse, causing erosion and desertification. "Every year, the world's farmers lose about 24 billion metric tons of topsoil, about the same amount as covers the entire Australian wheatlands. At one stage, in the 1970s, American farmers lost six tons of soil for every ton of grain grown. The world has some spare capacity; 20 million hectares of US farmland were held in reserve in 1988, and bringing them back into production would increase the world's cropland by 2 per cent. But the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that soil degradation could take 65 per cent of all the Third World's rainfed (non-irrigated) land out of production by the year 2000. And every year the world also loses 1.5 million hectares of irrigated fields to salinization" (Lean 28).
Pollution is also thought to be cutting yields. A US government survey suggests that ozone, may have reduced American harvests by 5-10 per cent during the 1980s. Sulfur dioxide and other nitrous oxides will also have done damage. So does the depletion of the ozone layer in the strato- sphere. All these trends are likely to worsen, and population will certainly grow.
Reducing hunger
The most important priority is to increase both production and consumption in developing countries. In the past, Third World governments have usually concentrated resources on the cities and on industry, neglecting farming and the countryside; food prices have been kept low to please city dwellers, to the ruination of agriculture. Governments increasingly accept that this bias must end, but that will not in itself address the problem adequately. Increasing food prices may benefit the middleman rather than the farmer; concentrating attention on the richer landowners, as during the Green Revolution, will do little, or nothing, to help the poor or reduce hunger. It is much more effective to focus on small farmers, who both make up the bulk of the poor in many countries and have the greatest potential for raising production.
"After Independence in 1980, Zimbabwe switched attention away from the richer whites - who comprised only 1 per cent of the farmers but owned half the land, received 87 per cent of the credit, and got preferential prices for their produce - towards black subsistence farmers. Their maize production doubled by 1981 and more than trebled by 1985 - a bad year in the rest of Africa" (Lean 28).
Where small farmers have been encouraged and given credit, harvests have increased and hunger has fallen. Land reform is particularly important. It splits up big estates, which are usually much less intensively farmed, and gives poor farmers and landless people the means to grow enough food to feed their families. The World Bank has estimated that such a "patchwork revolution" could increase yields even faster than the Green Revolution, with much more success in reducing hunger.
The solutions of the developed world are more high-tech, particularly the development of genetically-engineered varieties with even higher yields than the newer productive hybrids and with additional features such as pest-resistance and herbicide resistance. While these may help significantly in specific cases, the potential problems of epidemic disease of such monoclones, the loss of wild diversity upon which new vigour depends andthe release of disruptive genes into wild ecosystems and natural varieties remain little-explored problems..
Population Articles:
International Planned Parenthood Federation
"The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) is the world's largest voluntary family planning organization, working in 134 different countries. Set up in 1952, it is made up of autonomous associations in each country, run by local people for local people, implementing programmes of their own making. Although it does important work through influencing public opinion at the national and international level (for instance, persuading governments to include population policies in their constitutions), it is this grass-roots approach that has allowed it to achieve such impressive results. One of the best-known member associations is Pro Familia in Colombia, which won a special award from the United Nations in 1988. With little direct support from the government, Pro Familia operates 43 family planning centres, and over the course of 23 years has seen the population growth rate reduced from 3 to 1.7 per cent. The key to their success has been the recruitment of local women to run community workshops and to make house-to-house visits, dealing not just with family planning, but with health care of all kinds. The main education tool is a health guide with diagrams and a calendar, directed principally at women with small children, to remind them of the dates for vaccinations, dental check-ups, and other medical appointments. The instructors and health teams often have to operate in areas ravaged by guerrilla war, drug trafficking, and extreme poverty. In spite of this, the services they offer are wide-reaching and highly efficient: two in every three couples now plan their families responsibly, using contraceptive methods recommended by Pro Familia" (Porritt 118).
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