World Population Day

It was World Population Day on Monday. The U.N. is making it official: the world population will cross the 7 billion mark on Oct. 31, 2011.

The map shows a representation of the entire world if they lived in one city with London's population density.

It took 200,000 years for the earth’s population to reach 1 billion people back in 1804. Population quadrupled in the 20th century, and despite the escalating demands that humanity was placing on the planet, food production quadrupled, mortality rates dropped dramatically, human longevity doubled and living standards soared. Today confidence is not so high in a world suffering from climate change, water scarcity and the rising price of food and energy. We live in a world afflicted by rising temperatures, increasing droughts and floods, shortages of arable land, water scarcity, loss of topsoil and the escalating costs of fertilizer and fuel.

Yet today’s world has all the physical resources and technical skills necessary to feed the present population of the planet or a much larger one and there are still massive potentialities for increasing the amount, the improvement of crop yields has by no means reached its ceiling.

SOYMB is not attempting to give the impression that everything is easy, that a massive expansion of food supplies is a simple matter. For one thing, there maybe environmental implications. But a socialist society is the best-equipped to handle these implications and to strike a balance between ecology and food production. Research on improving existing exploitation of renewable energy sources and developing new ones, would also have to be one of socialism’s priorities.Capitalism, with its ungovernable quest for profit, cannot do this. Today under capitalism, food is not produced to meet human needs since the resources of the world do not belong to mankind but only to a privileged few. Food is produced to be sold on a world market with a view to profit. The hungry and under-nourished millions of the world do not constitute a market as they cannot pay for the food they need. So they are left to starve. When things go wrong then we see capitalism at its most vicious. The stark fact is that capitalism is responsible for the starvation of millions of people. It is not overpopulation that is the problem but the chronic underproduction that is a built in feature of capitalism.

Only when the fetters which capitalism places on production have been removed by establishing the common ownership of the means of life can mankind set about ending the threat of famine. Not only is capitalism in effect a system of artificial scarcity, it is also a system of organised waste. Socialist society will use the resources of the earth to ensure that every man, woman and child is amply fed, clothed and sheltered. Capitalism cannot do this — it does not exist for this purpose!