Ineluctable demographics

1 August 2011

Uganda

Uganda is the same size as the UK and is 40% Catholic and 40% Protestant: the population was 5 million in 1950; 10 million in 1975; 20 million in 1995; an estimated 40 million in 2016; and an estimated 80 million in 2042, when the population is expected to be increasing by almost two million every year. (United Nations 2010)

Uganda is a country with great advantages, but all these advantages have come to almost nothing, because the country has been uninterested in population control or family planning. The future looks bleak when it should look promising.

Africa and the Greater Middle East

Most countries of the world now have effective family planning and are prosperous or beginning to become prosperous. Lack of family planning and population control is now almost confined to Africa and the Middle East to Pakistan, a region that includes such countries as DR Congo, Ethiopia, Niger, Somalia, Palestine, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Even now, when that troubled region has added only 1000 million to its 1950 population of 300 million we can see wide spread extreme poverty, shortages of food, water, sanitation, and medical care, and sometimes civil disorder and conflict. When another 1000 million is added to the population in the next thirty to forty years, the suffering and turmoil will be so great and so wide spread and will involve such huge numbers that most people will conclude that it was unfortunate that this region has not had the same family planning and population control that we ourselves have had over the last fifty years or more.

The World

The World Fact Book 2011 puts first on its list of the long-standing challenges that the world faces, “the addition of 80 million people each year to an already overcrowded globe” which is “exacerbating the problems of underemployment, pollution, waste-disposal, epidemics, water-shortages, famine, over-fishing of oceans, deforestation, desertification, and depletion of non-renewable resources”.

These dramatic population increases interest almost no one, mainly because of political correctness, but partly because of religious opinions.