According to the International Data Base there are about 6,706,992,932 people in the world, and China is at the 1st place on their top 100 most populated countries with over 1,330,044,605 in population. The Philippines is at the 12th place with over 96,061,683 in population.
Is the Philippines overpopulated? Is overpopulation only determined by the number of people living in a country? But before we could answer that what does overpopulation exactly mean? Overpopulation is determined by more than just population density. It is determined by the number of people in an area in relation to the resources available and the ability of the environment to sustain the activities in that area (in other words, the carrying capacity of the area).
By this, yes we may say that China is overpopulated with a total area estimated to be 9,596,960 km² minus 1,330,044,605 people, and so does the Philippines (specially the Philippines). With 300,000 km² land area and over 96,061,683 people we really are over populated.
So what is the real cause of overpopulation? Others say its lack of sex education, or lack of knowledge about contraceptives and/or family planning. Even religion has its contribution in the increasing population. Some religious groups (specially Catholic's) rebuke the use of contraceptives because according to them its against morality; and there’s poverty.
So how can poverty cause overpopulation? For me it’s like this: With no food on the table, you can't afford entertainment, and you can't even pay the electricity bills, so what’s left to do but to have sexual gratification. That’s the only thing to do, and that’s the reason why the poor people have more children than those richer people.
How about Education? Yes education is a factor in overpopulation. But what is the cost of lack of education? It’s still poverty because people cannot afford the cost of education. And the effect of it would be lack of knowledge about sex education and lack of knowledge about family planning and contraceptives.
Migration? Migration from rural area to urban area also contributes to the overpopulation of our country; and not only that, when a rural resident transfer to the urban we also lose are food supply. The farmer’s family, especially their children are moving to the urban area to look for greener pastures. But what is the effect of it? The effect of it is that, there will be no future farmer. If there isn’t going to be a future farmer then no one will produce our foods; and less resources will contribute to overpopulation. But then again, what causes the migration? It's still poverty. They migrate for the hope of a better life and to fight poverty in their province.
If poverty is the cause of overpopulation, what can we do about it? We must bring education to the people. The government should give more efforts in sending social workers to educate the masses about safe sex and family planning. I mean, yes there are social workers but are they enough?
The government should promote a more specific education for the people in the rural area. The government must focus its attention to giving education concentrating to agriculture. Promote education that is related to farming, encouraging the youths that there is future in agriculture. Create more opportunities in agriculture, so that no one will be forced to go the urban again so that they could find a job and have something to eat.
If we can't fight the biological aspect of overpopulation we could fight the scarcity of resources. More resources can eliminate overpopulation.
We can also take into consideration about a maximum number of children a family should have. We can do a two child policy. But instead of having an abortion after the second child, we could imply vasectomy for men or ligation for women.
And we, us, the citizens must also do our part in sharing and giving efforts to spread the knowledge that we learned from our schools. We can help as a community, working together for the betterment of our society.
3 comments:
I don't live in the live in your nation but I wanted to mention a few things.
Don't be so eager to embrace population control as a solution to your problem or attack cities as a bad thing.
Agriculture is something that is utterly necessary for a society in this day and age and thus it makes sense to make sure education reflects that (so people can do a better job with this vital activity). However, cities are often places where a large number of other types of businesses (and thus jobs) are possible. Once a farm has enough people to run it may be sensible for people to move to the city (which may have an easier time providing electricity, entertainment, and organized education) than rural areas.
Thus farms are necessary and rural agriculture should continue but the argument that moving to a city is bad should be reexamined.
I think other nations have been pointed to (Taiwan) as having less resources and a bigger economy than yours. If this is true then it means your county may have more than enough resources to make a better future for itself and how it uses them is the problem.
Last, I've heard that your nation has a great deal of corruption and wealth inequality. These are both problems as it means the government (which frequently provides education for a large number of people in many nations) doesn't do the things it should as well as it should. And wealth inequality means there is higher social tension and also the possibility of greater problems because many people who have some money may end up using it better than just a few people how have most of it. Note that it is easier for many different people to come up with ideas and identify problems that should be fixed than it is for a small group, yet if the small group controls all the money that means only it has the resources to fix the problems that everyone else sees and doesn't notice all of them.
Thus "overpopulation" may get blamed while other issues may be the real problem.
thank you for your comment nathaniel....
while i like the ideas that you stated...but you're missing the point...what I am pointing is our problem of over population and its roots...
and lastly...this is a speech I made assigned to me...the topic was anything that is all about poverty..
Philippines is damn overpopulated already! And what makes this worse is that no one seems to consider this to be a serious problem. Overpopulation causes pollution, poverty, starvation, crimes, and what-have-you’s. Government has to conduct some program and tell the people the effects of overpopulation. Mother Nature does not need more babies so people should stop breeding!
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