Poverty and Population

Re Poverty Focus, October
The author states that Canada is a signatory to the UN Millenium Development goal to reduce the proportion of people affected by extreme poverty and hunger by half by 2015. That's only seven years away. Presbyterian congregations and individuals were urged to participate in the Week to End Poverty (Oct. 12-19) through prayer, education and communication with MPs.
These are commendable goals and aspirations. But we should perhaps consider what are the causes of poverty and hunger worldwide and whether the above-stated goal for 2015 bears any relation to reality. Countries sign all kinds of international agreements and then make little or no effort to fulfill their commitments – look at Canada's pathetic failure with respect to the Kyoto agreement on greenhouse gases and global warming.
Many causes of poverty are widely acknowledged – domination of the world economy by a few rich nations and corporations, social structures and wide class distinctions within nations, lack of access to education and health care, and so on. But one cause that is seldom acknowledged in recent years is rapid population growth. Many of the most poverty-stricken countries are those where the population is increasing rapidly, particularly among the poor. Since infant death rates were greatly reduced by the introduction of antibiotics some 60 years ago, some countries have been doubling their populations in two or three decades, and are having to cope with huge numbers of children and young people who have little hope for a tolerable future unless they can escape to Europe or the Americas, and perhaps not even then.
Where high rates of population growth continue, efforts to reduce the proportion of people living in poverty are probably doomed to fail. Also, even present world populations are straining the Earth's ability to provide enough food, water and other resources. Yet it is a sad fact that important branches of Christianity have set their faces against population control and fall back on literalist interpretations of Biblical passages that were written thousands of years ago to address entirely different circumstances. So one could argue that those churches, while calling for an end to poverty, are in fact assisting its spread.
Because of the nature of population dynamics, the growth problem and its effect on poverty and hunger will not be solved quickly, but a necessary first step is to get it into the open and talk about it. At the moment there seems to be almost a conspiracy of silence that seeks to deny its role in human misery. China was widely condemned when it adopted policies to stave off economic and social disaster threatened by uncontrolled population growth, but one result seems to have been a huge increase in national wealth and a substantial reduction in poverty. There is surely nothing Christian about bringing large numbers of children into the world to face a life of poverty.