In 2001, the world had 6.1 billion inhabitants. Compare this with the approximated 300 million inhabitants in A.D. 1, and the population growth rate is self-evident: 2000% in merely two millennia. Throughout the past 50 years, world population has grown faster than it has ever done before. Perhaps for this reason, we have seen advocates of population control among even the more conservative world leaders. Clearly, their arguments would hold water. The increasing world population has brought with it environmental degradation while the decreasing stockpile of Earth’s limited resources is worrying. Both coupled together imply a decreasing standard of living, especially in areas where the population growth rate is a high positive. By contrast, arguments from the opposition appear less tangible. It is argued that population control is not needed at all; that the world’s escalating population size is sustainable through more efficient utilisation of Mother Earth’s scarce resources. There is then also the view that the sanctity of life is untouchable while the more economic-minded maintain that the funding for population control could be better utilised.

Given Earth’s limited resources, population control seems to be a logical path to take. Our increasing numbers does, after all, imply more mouths to feed and more materialistic wants to satisfy. Production would then have to increase in tandem with the increasing demand for goods, which would result in greater utilisation of land, oil, coal, and practically every other known resource. Already the more pessimistic of analysts proclaim that Earth’s oil reserves will not last more than 50 years considering breakneck production from Saudi Arabia and Russia – the two largest oil exporters. As a result, it would generally be a good thing for oil production to remain stable right about now by limiting demand through population control measures. And oil is merely one of our many worries. More disconcerting is the increasing land utilisation for housing and industry. At the current population growth rate, we might end up with a shortage of land to the extent that future housing will become replicas of Hong Kong and Tokyo’s miniscule apartments. This is considering Hong Kong’s numerous land reclamation measures, each at exorbitant cost. The inevitable population densities of the two cities are perhaps then an indication of Earth’s prospects, if population control is non-existent. Therefore, population control in the form of contraceptives at the very least does seem quite inviting since there is then a much higher chance to avoid living in a tuna can.

Another argument for the control of population is the environmental destruction brought on by the increasing efforts of world industry to satisfy the needs of an escalating population. Raising 40-floor apartments in Shanghai and Beijing has required the country to import massive amounts of timber, with a large portion of that timber coming from Indonesia and South American countries like Brazil. Such exports of timber translate to the high deforestation rates in Indonesia – where experts estimate that a forest area the size of Switzerland is lost every year – and the Amazon forest. Without any curb on timber consumption, we could lose the Amazon forest in less than 50 years. The pollution arising from industry is equally painful on our biosphere. A rising air pollution index, caused by pollutants like carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide, is a fixture in any developing country with an increasing population. Water pollution due to toxic waste excretions from the paper-processing industry and industrial ports, just to name a few, is another disturbing threat. In fact, there has yet to be any developing country able to avoid the positive correlation between development and pollution. A low population growth rate, such as in Singapore, would therefore help sooth the nerves of environmentalists worldwide not least because of the correspondingly lower automobile count.

Individually, the decreasing stockpile of our scarce resources and the rising environmental threat from a growing population are bad enough. Together, they correspond to a lower standard of living, especially in the developing countries only recently elevated from Third World status. It is in these countries that the population growth rate is most likely to outstrip the economy’s capacity to provide goods and services. If we were then to measure an average African’s standard of living from the proportion of goods that he or she consumes, we would see a rather significant disparity with that of the industralised countries of the West (where population growth is very much lower). Of course, a primary reason for that would be the differences in the capital structure between the industralised and the developing countries. But, it cannot be denied that the larger population of certain developing countries plays a big part. Unfortunately, this decrease in standard of living is also present in non-material measures. For one, environmental pollution increases discomfort and increases human susceptibility to diseases. Take, for instance, the haze that results from industrial toxic particles floating in the air. Not only does it feel uncomfortable just breathing in dirty air, but the polluted air is also a major cause of lung inflammation and cancer – both potentially fatal ailments. If environmental deterioration due to an increasing population is allowed to persist, the result could be lower life expectancy – which incidentally is a critical measure used in many non-material standard of living indexes, such as the Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI) and the United Nations’ Human Development Index (HDI). In these circumstances, it is not surprising for advocates of population control to recommend the Chinese one-child policy.

Nevertheless, there will always be those against the implementation and perhaps to a lesser extent, the concept of population control. Central to their arguments is the notion of continuously sustainable population growth. Yes, history supports such a proposition. The Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions of the past allowed relentless growth in human population, with the discovery and application of new technology a mainstay of those periods. Examples include the discovery of chemical fertilizer and automation lines. Both served as tools to improve the efficiency of resource utilisation and thus, allowed production to keep in step with demand. Drawing similarities with the Agricultural Revolution of the past is the modern science of genetic modification. Scientists point out that Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) can provide yields that are many times that of their predecessors. And animals are no exception, with the cloning of the sheep, Dolly, as a notable example. While commercial animal cloning has yet to take off, genetic modification to improve yields has long been seen in the agricultural sector. Conglomerates such as Monsanto and Syngenta have reaped the profits from the provision of such technology, whether in the form of modified seeds or fertilizer, to developing countries who believe in GMO as the way to satisfy the food needs of their large populations. Such technology might actually solve the problem of limited land in agricultural production and hence, actually permit continuous population growth. It would also make full use of our scarce mineral resources. In this case, population control would be downright redundant.

The question of the sanctity of life is another heavily debated issue regarding population control; a conundrum with many cogent arguments but of course, little data to fall back upon. Not that such an important point would require any. Most opposition to population control anchored about the sanctity of life is rooted in religion. Catholics – a nine million strong “family” – firmly place contraceptives, which are by far the most effective population control measure, as sinful. This is emphasised by the landmark encyclical letter by Pope Paul VI, the Humanae Vitae, which states that it is always intrinsically wrong to use contraception to prevent new life from coming into the world because it is a deliberate violation of the design built by God into the human race. While most other religions, whether Islam, non-Catholic Christianity, Buddhism or Hinduism, do not exclusively express birth and hence, population control as sinful, most religions at the very least, consider the prevention of birth as undesirable. Yet, like all other issues regarding the sanctity of life, the devil is in the slippery slope argument. In particular, the use of contraceptives is deemed as the first step to many more serious infringements on the sanctity of life. Allegedly, we might find ourselves indifferent to issues like euthanasia in the near future if we were to tolerate population control in the form of birth control now. It is of little doubt then that the intangible, yet holistically important argument of the sanctity of life is deemed more important than the tangible effects of increasing human population

So, who wins? Neither might be the best answer. While population control seems to be a viable solution to the devastating effects of increasing industrial and day-to-day activity on Earth’s environment and limited physical resources, inherent population control measures might already be sufficient. Here, I mean events such as accidents and natural disasters, which naturally result in the loss of life (of course, there is death due to old age). Every now and then, these events serve to trim our increasing world population. Furthermore, some experts predict a fall in population growth in 50 years time. They attest to the materialistic nature of human beings, and argue that the modernisation brought by development will soon reduce the incentive to raise a child, or even marry in the first place. Today, we can observe this in certain Western cultures and even Singapore, where birth rates are now under replacement levels. But, this line of argument assumes that Earth’s scarce resources will be sufficient to bring modernisation to the “population farms” of today. The lack of government funding in the less developed countries to educate their citizens on natural birth control measures also serves to ensure that birth rates will continue exceeding death rates for a long time to come.

In any case, the issue of population control is a spider web of conflicting arguments: Tangible limitations against more idealistic theory. At this point in time, there is a lack of evidence to fully advocate population control. Yet, it is most apparent that something must be done about our ever-increasing population, even if world population growth no longer follows the exponential growth model raised by Thomas Malthus.

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