The eight billionth person was born this past November. The earth has gained one billion more people in the past eleven years alone. The worldwide population has been growing at an exponential rate due to increased access to medical care, and it shows few signs of stopping anytime soon. At the same time, most studies show that women will choose to have fewer children if given the liberty to do so through increased living standards. Therefore, given increasing access to health care and education, the population may eventually stop growing, but unequal resource distribution will not — and this is the main problem.
In 1950, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime. The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation showed the global fertility rate almost halved to 2.4 by 2017—and their study, published in The Lancet, projects it will fall below 1.7 by 2100. This not only shows that the rising population will naturally cap off, but it also shows that women are getting more educated and empowered. Time and time again it has been proven that when given a choice, women will choose to have fewer children. The dropping fertility rates have benefited women and counteracted overpopulation.
The fear of running out of resources comes from the Malthusian Theory, which is that the population grows exponentially while our resources remain linear. This means that we will eventually run out of resources while the population continues to grow. While this might have made sense in the 1700s when his statement was made, it simply does not apply given the advancement of modern-day technology. At that time, America was still relying on tobacco as its main source of income and couldn’t have even dreamed of the large-scale farming done today. Global food production is very efficient. According to research done by UC Berkeley, the world’s farmers combined produce enough food to feed a number 1.5 times greater than the global population. That is enough to feed 10 billion people. We have enough food for everyone; that is not the problem.
One example of an overpopulated country is China. This has caused many issues throughout the country, such as increased crime and poverty rates, according to EduBirdie. The Chinese government tried to counteract this by establishing a One-Child Policy where each family was only allowed one child. While on paper this seemed like it would work, it has had a hugely negative impact on the country: it caused the now greatly unbalanced sex ratio. In Chinese culture it is preferable to have a son, and if you can only have one child that preference is even stronger. So there are reports that say people have been aborting their daughters, putting them in orphanages, and sometimes killing them after birth. While not only is this horrible for the individual girls, over time it has led to many more boys than girls in the population. This might not be a problem now but when they grow up there will not be enough women to have children, causing the exact opposite problem 50 years down the road. But the government saw this and disbanded the policy in 2016. The Chinese government was forced to acknowledge the truth that population control is rarely successful and can lead to unforeseen consequences.
So if overpopulation isn’t why so many people in our world go hungry, then what is the problem? It is and has always been the unfair distribution of resources. When people try to control the population, it just creates more problems, so we should focus on the real problem. Instead of establishing harmful government policies, we should focus on getting healthy food and water throughout the entire world. We don’t need fewer people, we don’t need more food; we just need it to get the people to need it most.
Written by Margaret McLaughlin of Richard Montgomery High School