Is the earth full?

On July 11th we celebrate World Population Day. We are currently with over 7.6 billion people on this planet. Even though that number keeps rising, the growth has slowed. And it is believed that the total population will stop growing in the coming decennia.

The theme of this year is “Family Planning is a Human Right”. This means parents have the right to decide freely on how many children they want. 50 years ago, that meant that women had the right to limit the number of pregnancies, to avoid the danger of having too many children close together.

I strongly believe that every woman and man should be able to decide how many times they want to embrace parenthood. But I also see the danger of our growing population. With China still being the number 1 country with the largest population, it lifted its controversial “one-child” policy a few years ago. Fearing that their growing numbers of elderly people would impact their economy negatively in the years to come. The policy however was a violation of our human rights.

It is argued that the “ticking time bomb” of overpopulation is not the problem that we used to think it was. Since the world population didn’t keep growing as it did 50 years ago. The problem therefore became a myth. And we are currently close to a “replacement rate”, where every death is replaced with a newborn.

So the question might remain. Is our earth full? Do we still need to worry? Our earth can produce more than enough food for everyone to eat. Starvation might be a problem of distribution and not production. But that’s a whole other discussion.

#earth #family #humanrace #humanrights #parenthood #population #un