A chara, – I was astonished to read Carter Dillard (August 28th) defending China's one child policy by solemnly quoting a UN estimate of a world population of 256 billion by 2050 based on 1995 fertility rates. I remember the report; and I also remember being told as a child that if all the offspring and descendants of one breeding pair of flies were to survive and breed themselves, the Earth would be knee deep in flies at the end of a year. Both may have been put forward as theoretical possibilities, but no one thought them in any way likely to happen.
Under the doomsday scenario Mr Dillard mentions, the population of Africa would have been rocketing towards 169 billion. The present population of that continent is around 1.1 billion, up from 719 million in 1995. At that rate of growth we don’t have to worry about reaching the doomsday number anytime soon. And no country in Africa has employed China’s draconian measures to curb growth.
Ever since Thomas Malthus produced his An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, people have been scare-mongering about the dangers of population growth and how the world is going to run out of resources. Over 200 years of lived experience should serve to put those fears to rest. It's time to accept the reality that the Earth's population, while it is rising, is doing so at a rate we have shown we can cope with. – Is mise,
Rev PATRICK G BURKE,
Castlecomer, Co Kilkenny.