What I learned: The first pillar of population policy is the worldwide tendency on the topic of families is that poorer families are larger families. The second pillar is that poorer families means that you have to spend less on your children. Poorer families are unable to control fertility because of lack of access to birth control. This is important because these things are all considered when policies on family and population are created. There needs to be a way of controlling population and family size (sterilization, etc.) without forcefully sterilizing men (like happened in India) and forcing everybody to have one child like in China. It discusses Thomas Malthus' theory that the number of people would out compete the amount of food that we have on planet earth. Obviously this theory was incorrect. It discusses that his theory is still applicable in some ways, however, such as we only have so much land to use so eventually when it is all used up and the population is still growing by so much then we could run into food shortages, but not for a very long time. The main issue with Malthus' theory is that he left no space for innovation. With all of the innovation that has occurred, his theory coming true seems impossible. This goes for families and family planning... innovations could be the solution. Quality vs. Quantity of children is discussed. In having so many children, that is a lot of separate bodies competing within one family for resources, parental attention, money, time, etc. If one "quality" child was born, and had all of the families resources, parental attention, money, time, etc. wouldn't having that ONE child be much more helpful than having so many and hoping they all contribute? The question is, why do we care? We care because in the past, unsuccessful plans have been implemented to try to control growing family populations. China, Israel, and India, are all examples of failures (to one degree or another) in controlling population of families. Access to contraception, and again, innovation included in that could be a potential solution as well.
How it relate: This can strongly be related to my paper that I wrote about government and food security in Sudan. In Sudan, I suggested small scale governments to be implemented and strengthened. Once they can take care of the basic needs of food and water, overpopulation among families is a huge issue in Sudan. Outside of the capital city Khartoum the average family size is 6 to 7 people. Even inside the city it's 3 to 4. Assistance with lowering the amount of children that all of these Sudanese mothers are having could be a wonderful advance to be focused on, after the initial plans of restoring the government (to a certain degree) and making sure people are fed.
Zero population growth makes sense world wide. In Sudan is it an issue of birth control or does culture play a role too? Could education and health care play a role in population growth? If so, how could that be done in Sudan?
ReplyDeleteIn Sudan, the issue can be Atrributed to both education and cultural reasons. Education and health care could play a large role in Sudan as well. It could be done with increased education on the topic and improved nationwide health care. For obvious reasons this would provide tremendous help to the population growth. HOW that would be implemented is where the real challenge exists.
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