Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
South Korea’s Birth Rate Falls Through the Floor
The BBC’s Caroline Gluck recently reported on some astounding birth statistics from South Korea. That country may have the lowest birth rate in the world as new figures suggest the average South Korean woman has less than 1.2 children — well below the 2.1 level needed to maintain a stable population.
South Korea’s population is still growing, albeit at less than 1 percent annually, and will continue to grow for another decade or two, followed by a period of population decline. The United Nations estimated that by 2050 South Korea’s population could be declining by 1 percent annually, and that was before these newer figures were released.
South Korea is leading the way, but Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong are also facing rapidly declining birth rates and the prospect of future declines in population. Many Asian nations are discussing plans to encourage more births. One village head in South Korea, for example, is offering couples US$80 for each additional baby they have, but this doesn’t offset the main reason that couples seem to be avoiding having more children — they’re just too darn expensive. According to the BBC,
More working couples are thinking twice before having a baby.
They are put off by the high costs of raising children and the lack of adequate childcare and social welfare facilities.
Think about this for a second, because it is extremely odd. South Korea today has a per capita income of around US$12,000. But back in 1970, per capita income in South Korea was a mere $248 and the birth rate was an average of 4.5 children per woman.
Now it’s understandable that very poor people would have lots of children, but why would those same people begin to dramatically reduce childbirths as their income exploded. This is the exact opposite of the convention wisdom of overpopulation scaremongers, who insisted that as available resources went up, population would obviously follow. And in some respects, the extreme drop off in births is a bit odd — a couple with $12,000 in income is certainly better able to provide for 4 children than is a couple making $248 and yet the birth rates at those income levels are the reverse of what the population experts like Paul Ehrlich insisted they should be.
The obvious answer to this puzzle is that as people’s income increases their perception of what counts as the “good life” expands as well. This is most obvious in an extremely wealthy nation such as the United States where what counted for luxurious living just a few decades ago would be frowned upon as downright Spartan today. A car in every garage and a chicken in every pot has been replaced with an SUV for every family member over 16 and more calories than you can shake a stick at.
Which is the true irony of the overblown population crisis. Ehrlich and others who claimed the world would soon face its doom constantly cited the tragedy of the commons problem — that each individual acting for his own selfish interest in having more children was imposing externalities that were borne by everyone else. Today, however, the opposite is true — sheer materialistic greed has us limiting the number of children we have so that we can wallow in luxury.
Greed, it turns out, really is good after all.
Source:
South Korea’s dwindling population. Caroline Gluck, BBC, May 2, 2003.
Tags: Uncategorized
Genetically Engineering Cassava
Researchers at Ohio State University have produced a genetically modified form of cassava that has a major advantage over its naturally occurring brethren — the risk of cyanide poisoning from ingesting the genetically modified plant is significantly less.
Cassava is a major staple in the diet of as many as 500 million people, mostly in Africa. The plant is successful there because it requires little water and is highly resistant to pests. The downside to cassava is that it maintains that resistance by producing cyanide producing substances.
In order to avoid poisoning that can lead to chronic health problems and in some cases paralysis and even death, the cassava plant must be carefully and quickly processed. In the rush to get their cassava to market, however, inevitably some farmers do not properly process all of their cassava and both short and long term exposure to cyanide as a result of eating cassava is a serious public health problem in Africa.
Enter Ohio State University professor of plant biology Richard Sayre. Along with his colleague Dimuth Siritunga, a postdoctoral research in plant biology at OSU, Sayre produced a genetically modified cassava plant that is absent the gene responsible for the cyanide producing substances. In an OSU article on his research, Sayre said,
If we could eliminate the cyanogens in cassava, the plant wouldn’t need to be processed before it’s eaten. In Africa, improperly processed cassava is a major problem. it’s associated with a number of cyanide-related health disorders, particularly among people who are already malnourished.
The next big test will be to see how well the genetically modified cassava plant grows compared to the naturally occurring version. Since cassava uses its cyanide-producing qualities to deter and kill pests, it is an open question as to whether a version with minimal cyanide will be able to achieve the same sort of yields. That will require field trials to test.
Source:
Researchers get to the root of cassava’s cyanide-producing abilities. Ohio State University, May 12, 2003.
Tags: Uncategorized
World Health Organization: TB Control in Africa Improving, But Not Fast Enough
The World Health Organization recently issued a press release stating that the detection and treatment of tuberculosis in Africa has show improvement in recent years but still falls far short of global targets for controlling the disease.
Dr. Eugene Nyarko, WHO Adviser for TB in the African Region, said that over the last decade the detection rate of TB has increased in Africa from 32 percent to 52 percent and that successful treatment of the disease had increased from 59 percent to 70 percent.
The level of reporting of tuberculosis in Africa had almost doubled from 83 cases per 100,000 population a decade ago to 164 cases per 100,000 population in 2001.
But despite that success, Nyarko said, Africa is still short of world targets,
According to WHO’s latest estimates, almost two million Africans contract TB every year, and 600,000 people die as a result of the disease.
Source:
Indicators for TB Control in Africa Improve, But Still Fall Short of Global Targets. World Health Organization, Press Release, April 7, 2003.
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New Meningitis Vaccine Could Save Lives in Developing World
The Meningitis Vaccine Project recently announced that it will soon begin clinical trials of a vaccine for Meningitis A that is designed to be commercially viable in the developing world where the disease has reached near-epidemic proportions in some countries.
A number of vaccine candidates for Meningitis A have been produced in the past but along with being too expensive for developing countries, they tended to offer only short term protection from the disease and did not work at all in the most vulnerable population — young children.
The newly developed vaccine candidate would likely cost under $1 per dose and researchers believe it will provide long term protection even when give to young children.
Dr. F. Marc LaForce of the Meningitis Vaccine Project told the BBC,
Clinical trials for the new vaccine could start as early as 2004 and the new vaccine could be ready for wide use in sub-Saharan Africa within the next four to five years . . . Our goal is to eliminate epidemic meningitis as a public health problem in sub-Saharan Africa, thereby alleviating the social, human and economic disasters these epidemics cost.
In sub-Sharan Africa, Meningitis A kills 5,000 people in non-epidemic years, and epidemic outbreaks have claimed upwards of 20,000 dead annually.
Sources:
Meningitis A vaccine hope. The BBC, March 18, 2003.
Milestone Reached in 100-Year War Against Meningitis. Press Release, Meningitis Vaccine Project, March 17, 2003.
Hib meningitis vaccine. Research Defence Society.
Vaccine to Fight Meningitis in Africa Ready To Be Tested. David McAlary, Voice of America, March 18, 2003.
Vaccine hope for meningitis A. Rebecca Oppenheim, HMG, March 20, 2003.
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European Population Shrinking
You’ve probably heard the overpopulation cant — in the presence of abundant resources, populations will increase in size until they overwhelm their environment and then crash, regardless of whether the species is rabbits or deer or human beings. So why is Europe’s population declining?
Europe is certainly one of the richest parts of the world, and yet its population is currently projected to decline for decades even if Europeans should suddenly start having significantly more children. Europe’s population hit the point where it began declining sometime in 2000.
Currently there are only 1.5 children born for each woman of child bearing age — far below the 2.1 replacement level. Why so few children? Largely because women are waiting longer and longer to get married, on average, in Europe.
As of 2000 the European population was about 375 million. If current marriage and birth trends continue, Europe’s population fall below 300 million by the end of the century.
Source:
Europe shrinking as birthrates decline. Mark Henderson, The Times (UK), March 28, 2003.
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Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire
In the late 1960s and early 1970s the big fear was that the developing world was doomed to perpetual poverty with attendant famines. Today the problem in many countries — including developing ones — is just the opposite: obesity is a growing health problem around the world.
The BBC reported this month that the International Obesity Taskforce estimates as many as 1.7 billion people worldwide may be obese. Other estimates put this number close to 800 million, but the International Obesity Taskforce’s Philip James argues that such numbers underestimate obesity among Asian people.
At issue is the body mass index. A body mass index of over 25 is usually considered overweight, but James argues that Asians show negative health impacts from BMI’s over 23.3. Frankly the links between BMIs of 25 or so and health effects are pretty tenuous, and James’ leap to claim that a 23.3 might be dangerous in Asians seems like a lot of grasping for straws.
Still it is fascinating that at the beginning of the 21st century, obesity is in many parts of the world a much bigger risk than hunger.
Source:
Obesity epidemic tops $1.7bn. The BBC, March 17, 2003.
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New Scientist on ‘The Greening of Hate’
New Scientist recently ran an interview with Betsy Hartmann saying what anyone who has read some mainstream environmentalists could have told you 30 years ago — a significant part of them cross over into misanthropy (which Hartmann incorrectly ascribes simply to a right wing tendency).
That this comes as some sort of shock to Hartmann or New Scientist and that is passed off as some sort of brand new “right wing” tendency is simply ridiculous. For example, consider this exchange between Hartmann and New Scientist’s Fred Pearce,
Pearce: Aren’t these just political games?
Hartmann: It’s more than just that. There is an academic journal called Population and Environment, published by Kluwer, which is edited by Kevin MacDonald, an evolutionary psychologist who writes about a Jewish plot to liberalize immigration policies. In 1999, MacDonald appeared in court in Britain to defend the historical and holocaust denier David Irving. The journal’s advisory editorial board includes famous environmental scientists such as Paul Ehrlich, who wrote The Population Bomb, Pimental again, and Vaclav Smil, a professor at the University of Manitoba in Canada. Sitting beside hem on the board is J. Philippe Rushton, a psychology professor from the University of Western Ontario in Canada, who has a theory about how black people have small brains, low IQ, large sex organs and high aggression. What are environmental scholars doing getting mixed up with these kinds of people?
To which the best response is simply: well, duh!! Take Ehrlich. Ehrlich has never hidden his agenda. He wrote in The Population Bomb more than 30 years ago that,
A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. Treating only the symptoms of cancer may make the victim more comfortable at first, but eventually he dies — often horribly. A similar fate awaits a world with a population explosion if only the symptoms are treated. We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense. But the disease is so far advanced that only with radical surgery does the patient have a chance of survival.
And Hartmann would have us believe that it is just now that it is becoming apparent that some of these environmentalists have political views that are just this side of fascism? Give me a break.
Someone also needs to point out that while her fellow feminists and left wingers were putting Ehrlich and those like him on a pedestal and viciously attacking anyone such as Julian Simon who dared disagree, it was the right wing conservatives and libertarians who were telling anyone who would listen that these folks were dangerous statists. Hartmann admits this was the case with what she calls the “liberal” population establishment, but it was also the case with the Left that she is a part of which blindly latched on to this view because of its pro-state, anti-market features.
Hartmann portrays this as right wingers trying to infiltrate the mainstream environmental movement, but the mainstream environmental movement has always had it share of top down control freaks who see people as merely means to a greater environmental end. What she might better ask is why such an odious view of the world is so popular with liberals and leftists.
Source:
The greening of hate. New Scientist, 2003.
Tags: Uncategorized
AIDS, Declining Fertility Lead UN to Revise Downward Population Estimates
The United Nations recently released revised estimates of world population which reduced previous estimates based on a higher than expected increase in AIDS deaths as well as a faster-than-anticipated decline in fertility worldwide.
The UN had previously estimated that world population would grow to 9.3 billion by the year 2050. The latest revision moves that estimate down to 8.9 billion.
The latest estimate puts likely deaths from AIDS by 2050 at 278 million. Even that estimate, however, is likely to be high since the UN still projects a decline in new AIDS cases after 2010. Given that health authorities seem no closer to a vaccine or other cheap, effective remedy for the disease, that assumption seems highly optimistic.
Meanwhile, total fertility rates continue to drop faster than anticipated in the developing world. The UN now predicts that most developing countries will reach fertility levels that are below the replacement level before the end of the 21st century. In fact, the medium variant of its population projects predicts that by 2050 seventy-five percent of developing countries will be at or below replacement fertility levels.
Sources:
World Population Prospects. The 2002 Revision Highlights. United Nations, February 26, 2003.
Grim global toll of AIDS. The BBC, February 26, 2003.
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World Conservation Union Report Claims Alien Species Cost Africa’s Economy Billions of Dollars
The World Conservation Union recently released a report, Alien Invasive Species in Africa’s Wetlands, claiming that invasive alien species are costing Africa billions of dollars annually. Such species include water hyacinth, water lettuce, water fern, Louisiana crayfish, and common carp.
The water hyacinth, for example, grows extremely quickly and harms wetland ecosystems by blocking sunlight and oxygen from bodies of water. Similarly, the water fern is a haven for mosquitoes and snails that carry bilharzia (a tropical disease that infects up to 300 million people annually).
Most of the invasive species were introduced accidentally through tourism and trade. Worldwide, the World Conservation estimate total economic costs of invasive alien species at $400 billion.
Source:
Alien species ‘cost Africa billions’. Alex Kirby, The BBC, February 5, 2003.
IUCN launches new publication on alien invasive species. Ramsar.Org, February 2003.
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Fair Trade Coffee?
On election day, voters in Berkeley defeated a measure that would have made it a crime punishable by up to 6 months in jail to sell coffee that was not labeled as Fair Trade. Fair Trade Coffee is offered by activists as a way to help out third world farmers and save the environment, but it likely has the opposite effect.
The main problem with coffee is that there’s simply too much of it. World coffee markets are currently glutted with product, and as such farmers receive only about U.S. 24 cents per pound. That is the lowest price for coffee in a century according to an Oxfam report.
Fair Trade Coffee, on the other hand, guarantees farmers at small cooperatives $1.25 per pound for coffee beans.
Talk about perverse incentives. Farmers should be looking at the low price of coffee, conclude that there is a glut, and move on to other crops. But if Fair Trade Coffee were to take off, it would send a price signal to farmers to grow even more coffee, further glutting the world market.
And they call that fair?
Source:
Global issues flow into America’s coffee. Kim Bendheim, The New York Times, November 3, 2002.
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