The Crowded earth : people and the politics of population
- New York W.W.Norton 1984
- 349p.
Is the world headed for yet another population explosion? What works in population control, and what doesn't? Between 1974 and 1984 the United States and other Western nations spent several billion dollars on population and related programs in different parts of the developing world. How good an investment was it? How was this money spent, and did it change the lives of the people for whom it was meant? Pranay Gupte, a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, set out to find the answers to these questions. His journey, sponsored by a grant from the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, took him to five continents and dozens of countries. He interviewed presidents and peasants, guerrillas and demographers. This book, combining narrative and analysis, tells how people live and how they see their own lives being shaped by population pressures and the related issues of health care, aging, migration, and urbanization. For the first time ever, the world's population growth rate is slowing down, but we are still adding 90 million people to our planer each year. Unless we understand the problem and commit adequate resources to its solution, we will surely witness a new explosion of the "population bomb," with the attendant evils of illegal immigration, widespread starvation, and genocidal wars.