Jefferson Van Wagenen

Farmer presents a swathe of issues important to both the American people and the
citizens of the world as a whole, from healthcare availability to food supply to genocide. But
what I would argue as perhaps the worlds most serious issue, one which could in fact be seen as
a principal cause of many if not all of Farmers issues and whose solution could thus ease some
of the stress contributing to them. That issue is overpopulation.
Overpopulation has in fact been an issue for perhaps a century, if not longer. We can
quickly recall some actions that have already been taken to manage the issue, the most obvious
of which being Chinas one-child policy. But though the policy has been seen to slow Chinas
birth rate, it has more than one serious probleman unfortunately high incidence of infanticide,
primarily when a family has a daughter. China itself has recently recognized this as an
unacceptable problem when officially modifying the policy to two-child.
But there are certainly other less drastic and inhumane measures we can take as a whole
to control population growth. Perhaps the best would simply be to provide affordable birth
control across the world. This targets in large part those countries with the highest birth rates,
most of whom are in Africa or the already population-stressed states of China and India. Of
course, a large proportion of the populations of those nations are impoverished, so where birth
control even is available, it is unaffordable. To overcome this challenge may require more than
just innovatively engineering cheaper contraceptives and mass-producing them; it may also
require people, and the corporations doing the mass-producing, to help finance the effort to make
these contraceptives available to the impoverished people of the world.
But affordability is not the only obstacle against motivating people to use contraception.
Education and a willingness within those people to use that contraception are two equally
important obstacles as well. Many of the people most involved in spurring overpopulation,
especially in the aforementioned countries, simply do not know about birth control or understand
how it works. Once again, efforts to change that for the better require others to come in and help
those people, to teach them about contraception so that they do not have to have so many
children, a circumstance that both obviously impedes efforts to control the population and as
well exacerbates the parents problems with poverty.
Finally, a lot of peopleand regimes as a wholeare averse to the idea of contraception.
Many of the African nations hardest hit by overpopulation have a very patriarchal structure, in
which the man asserts a dominant level of authority over his wife, with whom his goal is
principally to sire children. Either the women do not have much of a say in this structure of
whether or when they want children, or the society as a whole rejects the idea of birth control.
Regardless of the reason, this needs to change as well so that people can be more cognizant of
the populations affects upon the economic and social environment at home and around the
world. This may mean improving the process by which that country becomes more developed (a
less-developed nation is generally quite agrarian, and an agrarian family is most likely to want
more children so as to be able to use them in labor), which is not simple but requires teamwork
and motivation by many across the globe.