Big families are not hard to find in Nigeria. With the growing discussion of “overpopulation” as an environmental economic problem, African countries are often looked upon as a place where there are too many people being born, and there are not enough resources to allow for everyone to live a fair life with food, water, education, housing, employment, etc. The UN predicts that the current 1.2 billion population in Africa will grow to 3.4 billion by 2100. Some predict that Africa will undergo the same fertility changes that happened in China in the early 2000’s when the one-child policy was introduced. For Nigeria, which has Africa’s biggest population numbering about 213m people, the UN has reduced its forecast for 2060 by more than 100m people (down to around 429m). By 2100 it expects the country to have about 550m people, more than 350m fewer than it was reckoned a decade ago.
The topic of overpopulation, for me, correlates with the topics that we have been learning in class about socialism. In socialism, there are resources in the economy that are not always efficiently allocated, and shortages happen often due to there not being enough resources allocated. In terms of overpopulation we have the same thing going on. Some places on Earth are too populated and those places probably don't have enough resources to hold more and more people which will cause shortages and a lower quality of life in those places. In my opinion, overpopulation can be solved by limiting birth rates in some parts of the world, and encouraging it in others. The world can handle a larger population. Africa might not be able to do this.
2 comments:
I think that any method of population control or claiming overpopulation is bad does not sit with me morally. I understand that our world leaders do claim it is a problem and a danger to the enviroment, but I think life is something that should not be controlled. Economically, overpopulation does lower standard of living, but again it is something that should not be controlled like it is today.
I think it's important to emphasize the fact that the estimates for population growth have decreased over the years and there is a general trend in most developed nations to have less children. In poorer, less developed countries there is an emphasis on having more children due to high levels of infant mortality and the nature of labor in these given country require more citizens to produce goods and services than do developed countries. I argue, instead, that population size is not the issue, but that there needs to be more investment into these countries so that they can rely less on manual labor and more on the education and wellbeing of its citizens.
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