OVERPOPULATION CASE STUDY: BANGLADESH
My first article about overpopulation, posted April 24th, concerned Nigeria, the most populous nation in Africa, situated on Africa's western coast. It appeared in 1987 in the German newspaper Die Zeit, authored by staff writer Ansgar Skriver.
My second article about overpopulation, titled "The Future of the Earth is in the Hands of the Mothers," appeared in Die Zeit three years later and concerns overpopulation in Bangladesh, authored by Michael Sontheimer.
Like the Skriver article, no one paid much attention to Sontheimer's article officially, until the reality of overpopulation came crashing in on people's consciences. The population of India, for example, has risen so fast, India's commercial and industrial infrastructure doesn't have enough jobs for its people. Thousands of unemployed young men protest their inability to find work and a steady income.
As bad as India's overpopulation is,however, it does not come close to Bangladesh's. Sontheimer explains the problem this way. The German state of Bavaria has perhaps 13 million citizens. Bangladesh, about twice the size of Bavaria, is home to 115 million. Bavarians live in fairly crowded circumstances, about 249 people per square-kilometre. Bangladesh has over 800 per square-kilometre. It mostly exports people and lives on assistance from the United Nations.
As in the case of Nigeria, scientists lament the deterioration of the physical environment of Bangladesh, the loss of forest cover, the pollution in streams and rivers, and the loss of adequate living space. Like Skriver, Sontheimer worries over the "Flüchtlingsströme" of Bangladeshis headed to Europe to find work. The lack of living space contributes to a rise of violence in the country.
But Bangladesh is a conservative, Muslim country. When Planned Parenthood tried to set up clinics in Dhaka, the capital city, conservative Muslims stoned them and sacked the clinic. I can hardly blame them for driving off a bunch of interfering do-gooders from the West.
Sontheimer writes that the UN made overpopulation an issue at a meeting in 1974, for 136 of the World's nations. First of all, only 36 nations declared overpopulation a problem. The majority of the Third World nations blamed Imperialism and Racism as the problem. They blamed the "Egotism of the Rich," rather than the "fruitfulness" of the Third World.
Really, nations like America, Germany, and Japan couldn't care less what happens in the Third World. They only care when the problem of overpopulation of the Third World becomes their problem--when the overpopulation leads to famine, and the famine leads to millions fleeing to Europe and America--as happened in undeniable fashion in 2016. The image of thousands of people trekking across Europe in search of food and shelter seared it into the public's memory.
Silly Americans, accustomed to "saving" dogs and cats in shelters can see only the human tragedy; but no one should overlook the underlying cause, that the famines, the civil wars, and relocations have grown out of severely overpopulated countries trying to get by with primitive economies--that leads to pollution, the loss of arable land, and deforestation.
We can keep accepting their excess humanity, with the resulting loss of space for our people. Eventually that has to stop, too, or our nation's value system and culture becomes their nation, their culture. No sense for them to cause the same problems in our country.
So we can only wait until they cry out for help, and we will institute our measures to resolve the problem. With the World's population at eight billion, we may not have to wait long, in any case.