Yahoo Wrote:WASHINGTON (AFP) – A growing, more affluent population competing for ever scarcer resources could make for an "unrecognizable" world by 2050, researchers warned at a major US science conference Sunday.

The United Nations has predicted the global population will reach seven billion this year, and climb to nine billion by 2050, "with almost all of the growth occurring in poor countries, particularly Africa and South Asia," said John Bongaarts of the non-profit Population Council.

To feed all those mouths, "we will need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000," said Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

"By 2050 we will not have a planet left that is recognizable" if current trends continue, Clay said.

The swelling population will exacerbate problems, such as resource depletion, said John Casterline, director of the Initiative in Population Research at Ohio State University.

But incomes are also expected to rise over the next 40 years -- tripling globally and quintupling in developing nations -- and add more strain to global food supplies.

People tend to move up the food chain as their incomes rise, consuming more meat than they might have when they made less money, the experts said.

It takes around seven pounds (3.4 kilograms) of grain to produce a pound of meat, and around three to four pounds of grain to produce a pound of cheese or eggs, experts told AFP.

"More people, more money, more consumption, but the same planet," Clay told AFP, urging scientists and governments to start making changes now to how food is produced.

Population experts, meanwhile, called for more funding for family planning programs to help control the growth in the number of humans, especially in developing nations.

"For 20 years, there's been very little investment in family planning, but there's a return of interest now, partly because of the environmental factors like global warming and food prices," said Bongaarts.

"We want to minimize population growth, and the only viable way to do that is through more effective family planning," said Casterline.

kanevaldier Wrote:Yet more propoganda to control the population. The resources of this planet are only low due to government control and regulation of said resources. This planet is more than capable of supporting a human population of more than 9 billion. Global warming has already been proven to be a farse because carbon produced by humans is not causing the earth to heat up. The sun is causing that and earth is not the only planetary body feeling the effects. Many other planetary bodies are also heating up.

Moonlapse Wrote::f6: Do you have ay studies to back those claims up?

kanevaldier Wrote:Ask and you shall recieve. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html

I have more if you require it but this one backs up my claims just the same.

yoosergio Wrote:Interesting.

Though people should stop having babies like crazies. 1 or 2 kids are more than fine.

kanevaldier Wrote:I would say no more than 4 kids is fine. Though some people should not have any at all...lol.

Words Wrote:I hate when people say "developing nations", we're not developing anything: people still lives in crappy conditions and will live in crappy conditions who knows for how long. The only things that's developing is rich people's wallet and political life.

kanevaldier Wrote:The term "developing nation" is kind of a general term. It usually signifies a nation that is growing into the western style economy by way of imports and exports. This is something that China did very rapidly and is fast becomming the world leader in that respect. That is just one use for the term. You are right about it developing rich peoples wallets and political life though...seems to go hand in hand.