Seven Billion and Counting

The United Nations announced today that the world population has reached seven billion.  In a neo-Malthusian fashion, the UN proclaimed worries about enough food and resources to provide a decent lifestyle for all, especially when their projections predict that global population will eventually reach ten billion.  Are we to be scared about overpopulation?

In the short-term, I'm more preoccupied not with a lack of resources, but that a primary issue with developing countries developing is the lack of infrastructure that is to insure that people require that which they need.  

For more developed areas such as Europe, their issue is not overpopulation, but underpopulation.  Nations such as France and Italy are well below the replacement fertility rate of 2.1.  If Europe does not implement policy to encourage increasing birth rates, it will mimic Japan's demographic demise.  And the United States is slightly below the replacement rate, so even American policymakers might want to start considering slight encouragement in the direction of birth encouragement, or at least make its immigration policy a bit more lax.

Western nations have fertility rate issues now because lowered infant mortality and increased reproductive rights (e.g., increased access to contraceptives), which is why their demographic issues are more urgent than that of the rest of the world.  Developing nations such as China and India have a little more time before they come upon this trend.

Although the sense of urgency varies from nation to nation, one thing for sure is that the real, long-term scare is in the declining fertility rate, not in overpopulation.