The theorizing about population population size and change have remained an important subject since time immemorial.
Population growth does not, therefore, inherently increase soil erosion.
In fact, high rural population densities are frequently advantageous for resource conservation. Not only does increased rural density increase the market value of land and, therefore, the economic incentive to maintain and protect the landbut denser populations are also better able to provide the labor required to perform the many tasks needed to conserve the land, including soil preparation, mulching, weeding, terrace preservation and the maintenance of irrigation systems.
Decreases in rural density have on several occasions been associated A neo malthusian increased soil erosion, due to the inability of reduced populations to continue to perform essential resource conservation tasks see Turner, Hyden and Kates ; Furedi The rate of global population growth peaked at nearly 2 percent in the early s, and absolute annual population increase peaked at nearly 90 million in see Lomborg Today, the majority of countries in the world maintain below-replacement fertility levels.
Many countries, including Japan and most European countries, face the real prospect of absolute population decline. However, despite the fact that the rate of global population growth has been steadily declining for nearly four decades and that predictions of future world population size have had to be repeatedly revised downward, both the concern with overpopulation and the funding for family planning has continued unabated.
While many population control advocates have claimed that this decline has resulted from the work of population control programs, the reality is that such declines have frequently occurred in the absence of population control programs including historically in the U. Given the fact that population growth has been slowing for several decades, it is reasonable to ask why the concern for and funding of population control programs has continued to increase.
Furthermore, given the fact that the U. In other words, why are population control programs primarily directed at people and populations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America? To understand this, we need to consider the political economy underlying population policies. Population policies illustrate what Furedi The underlying demographic concern is with the competitive implications of differences in reproduction and population growth.
Thus, just as many whites in the U. For the same reason, census data becomes a volatile political issue in multiethnic countries such as Nigeria, where the Yoruba and Ibo fear the growing Hausa population in the North see Kokole France dreads prolific Germany.
Germany trembles before yet more prolific Russia. Europe fears the awakening of the teeming yellow race. In South Africa, the whites stand aghast at the rabbit-like increase of the blacks.
Concerns over competitive fertility and differential population growth exist in all stratified political economies and give rise to strategic demographic considerations and to the development of population policies and programs that address such concerns.
Thus, where unequal power relations exist, those social groups, or political entities, with greater power will direct population policies and programs against those groups with less power whose population growth is considered a threat to existing power relations. Malthusian population theory must, therefore, be understood not as an environmentalist treatise, as it is so frequently presented, but rather as a sociopolitical product of the political economy of England in the early 19th century.
Malthus, like many others of his day, was genuinely concerned with the social, economic, and political consequences of the growing number of poor people crowding into London, Birmingham and the other urban areas of England.
Malthus, a member of the social upper class, attributed poverty to irresponsible reproduction by the poor rather than to the changing structure of economic and political relations brought about by the industrial revolution.
He, therefore, argued against remedial social policies; he believed such policies were counterproductive, because they would encourage the poor to breed and, thus, perpetuate both their poverty and their drain on public resources.
A concern with competitive fertility and a belief in the necessity of implementing strategic demographic policies designed to combat the reproduction of the poor are as central to contemporary neo-Malthusians as they were to the Malthusians before them.
Frank Notestein, the initial head of the United Nations Population Commission, expressed what he believed was the need to provide population control in the Third World.According to both Malthusian and neo-Malthusian population theory, it is the Japanese, not Africans, who should be suffering and living in abject poverty.
Indeed, if we compare the countries of Africa (the poorest countries in the world) with the U.S., Japan and the other G7 Countries (the wealthiest countries in the world), the Malthusian.
Famous examples of this neo-Malthusian thinking are the The Population Bomb (), written by Paul R. Ehrlich and the report for the Club of Rome, Limits to Growth (), written by a team of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Both works predicted disaster for humanity due to rapid population growth outstripping resource supply. A Malthusian catastrophe (also known as Malthusian check, Malthusian spectre or Malthusian crunch) is a prediction that population growth will outpace agricultural production – that there will be too many people and not enough food.
The neo-Malthusian, analogously apocalyptic, beliefs of today extend the very “checks” Malthus spoke of to incorporate governmental checks.
The current ZPG movement can be considered a neo-Malthusian movement in the form of its execution. Psychology Definition of NEO-MALTHUSIAN: the idea that family planning and the effective use of contraception can support population control and without these restrictions, populations can balloon.
The Neo-Malthusian League was founded to campaign for the right to publish information about contraceptive methods without fear of prosecution, and to advocate for the reduction of the birth rate by limitation of family size.