VHEMT

One of our CanDoBetter commenters, 'RichB', has highlighted the site Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. This is a visionary site! The movement seems to have gone to some considered endeavour to explore the issues. I like the question toward the bottom of the site:

'What will the world be like when our population starts getting smaller?'

As more globally-aware people begin to question the 20th Century 'growth-only' tenet, alternative ideals such a 'Low Population Planet', deserve to be considered and debated. But where to start?

One practical moral campaign that would immediately start curbing the out-of-control human birth explosion would be to lobby against the funding requests of charities supporting countries that have high birth rates. Now before readers jump to questionning the morality of this, this is not to stop funding emergency life support needs, but to make non-life-support funding conditional on recipient self-change.

These are some dominant charities in this field.

* UNICEF

* World Vision
* Feed the Children

* Save the Children

* Food4Africa

While it would be callous to allow people to die from hunger and malnutrition, the charity donation system seems to only perpetuate welfare subsistence and not address overpopulation poverty in undeveloped countries. For time immemorial, the starving of Africa and India have been dumped on our television screens to make us feel guilty.

Why has the problem not been resolved since television was invented and before?
The starving message has become a cliché to the point that it has become a permanent human condition. This is unacceptable. The charity system needs overhaul.

Charities need to be held accountable for fixing the problem not perpetuating it.
Donations need to be channelled through independent organisations that require conditional offerings. Donations can end up anywhere and do, like in arms purchases. The charity donations must stop and be replaced with:

1. Physical shipments of emergency food, shelter and medical supplies

2. Conditional relief funding linked to population control measures - family planning and birth control measures should be advocated - female education, contraception, changing cultural traditions of excess children (more than 2), and UNHCR funded free and professional male vasectomies. Perhaps even a free dwelling could be offered to male heads of families that undertake vasectomy and have only two children. Think of this as an incentive in impoverished countries!

On issues of fundamental cultural change, financial carrots seem more effective and ethical than punitive sticks.

Until then those donating should boycott charities until donations are conditional on and accountable for birth control.

As for wealthy developed nations with high birth rates, they have the financial means to address their own population excesses. Any country over 3% annual growth rate is irresponsible and so a target priority.

According to Nation Master website, the top 20 highest ranked developed countries by population growth rate are:

We should refer to them as the G20 - 'The Greedy 20'.

Rank Country Growth Rate (2008)
1 Maldives: 5.566%
2 United Arab Emirates: 3.833%
69 Saudi Arabia: 1.954%
81 Malaysia: 1.742%
82 Israel: 1.713%
107 Bahrain: 1.337%
114 Australia: 1.221%
116 Luxembourg: 1.188%
124 Ireland: 1.133%
131 New Zealand: 0.971%
137 United States: 0.883%
139 Canada: 0.83%
140 South Africa: 0.828%
144 Iceland: 0.783%
151 Liechtenstein: 0.713%
153 Thailand: 0.64%
154 China: 0.629%
156 France: 0.574%
160 Hong Kong: 0.532%
165 Netherlands: 0.436%

These wealthy countries extravagantly impose a selfish disproportionate burden on the planet's capacity. They have wealth capacity and as global citizens and members of the UN, have an obligation to pay a Greedy Population Levy to fund underdeveloped countries in controlling their excess population growth. The wealthy with an excess problem need to be supporting the poor with am excess problem, because the poor do not have the means to do it themselves. Let's make it means tested and charge say 0.01% of each countries GDP.

As for those poor displaced peoples caused by civil unrest and arms conflict, why does not the UN with the support of developed nations impose a 10% levy on each item of weaponry sold globally, so that the revenue is channelled to allow the UNHCR manage humanitarian and peace-keeping operations for the civilians affected?

International arms sales is the world's largest and richest discretionary industry. It can easily afford such a levy.

A case in point is the plight of millions of Yemeni refugees having fled civil conflict and currently starving in al-Mazraq camp, Yemen:

'Millions of Yemenis starving as donors fail to meet pledges, says UN'

• £70m needed this year and next to feed poor and hungry
• Traditional donors, including Britain, have yet to offer aid