One in eight billion

The world’s top demographers believe that by the year 2025 or thereabouts the population of our planet can be expected to reach the figure of eight billion. It is enough to give one the creeps. Just imagine one morning, one wakes up to the sudden realisation that one’s status had all of a sudden jumped up from being one in seven billion to one in eight billion!

Before one goes into the whys and wherefores, it may be relevant to pause and ponder over how these demographers come up with these staggering figures.

A lot of confusing statistics obviously comes into it and it may be subject to a lot of manipulation. The obvious outcome is that the powers that be are ever in the enviable position to juggle the results. And at the receiving end is the wretched man in the street.

The number of people inhabiting the planet has been a big issue since the end of the Second World War. With ‘economic development’ linked to ‘population control’, the latter became the buzzword for the whizz-kids at economic forums.

The people of the developing world were singled out as the guinea pigs. It was authoritatively given out that controlling the population of the Third World was the sine qua non of economic progress. Any nation wishing to move up the economic ladder was ‘advised’ to take steps to control the growth of its population.

All this led to the rich countries setting aside millions of dollars as ‘aid’ to the Third World for what were termed ‘population control projects’. The only snag was that the whole issue was blown out of proportion and used as a handy stick to chastise the developing countries with. It also served as a pretext to stop the world’s poor to cast a covetous eye on the abundant food and other surpluses of the First World.

Planners put their hearts and souls into these projects. As expected, unscrupulous individuals made a pretty penny out of the whole hullabaloo. Economists of developed nations rested easy in the understanding that the haves could continue with their extravagant existence. ‘Experts’ in poor countries revelled in their newfound virtual prosperity courtesy of the ‘aid’ dollars. Everyone involved had a rollicking good time.

When the world’s population touched the six billion mark, doomsday scenarios were still the order of the day. The Third World was still being warned of a ‘population explosion’ of some sort. Then, apparently, ‘experts’ discovered that they had been wrong all along. Statistics in this field were all found to be awry. It was given out that UN demographers who once predicted the earth’s population would ‘peak at 12 billion over the next century or two’ were scaling back their estimates. Instead they cautiously predicted that the world’s population will peak at 10 billion before 2200, when it may begin declining.

The foregoing should give the reader ample food for thought. For years on end the blame for the world’s ills was put squarely on the poor people’s propensity to reproduce. The rich nations were outside the equation since they not only had ample to eat but lots left over to hoard or dump into the sea. The haves’ principal concern was nothing more than not having to share their bounty with the have-nots. Their whizz-kids argued that if only the world’s deprived lot could be coerced into resisting the urge to add to their number, their own ‘have’ status would not risk being dented.

The ‘upper classes’ of this world found it expedient to ignore the laws of nature. Nature has its own balancing mechanism that does not need to depend on theories propounded by the whizz-kids of this world. And whosoever chooses to defy the laws of nature does so at his or her own peril.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 5^th, 2017.

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