The Challenges of Poverty, Hunger, and Environmental Destruction - Essay Example

A few years ago AIDS and Cancer were the only concerns of mankind when it came to incurable epidemics. Recently new more terrible diseases like ‘Bird Flu’ and ‘Swine Flu’ have threatened human existence with their accelerated growth. More than half of piles of earth total population productivity has already been diverted towards human use (Brown, 2004; Green, 1992). This population continues to grow at an alarming pace. Only in the last fifty years, the human population had doubled from 2.

5 billion to 6.1 billion. Will our earth be able to support a population of 12.2 billion in 2050 (currently 76 million people are added to our population each year)? This is the question that needs to be asked. The Earth’s productive capacity will not be enough to sustain such a pace in population growth. Most of this population increase is fueled by developing nations with a lack of health care facilities. This contribution cannot be controlled by increasing awareness only because ‘most of the increase is by population momentum (49%), followed by unwanted pregnancies (33%)’.

Moreover, if we expand our focus to the entire world almost 80 million out of a total of 210 million is contributed by unwanted pregnancies. This is a clear target for mankind, healthcare facilities and birth control can help reduce the alarming rate of population growth. For this purpose financial help is needed to provide low cost and preferably free contraceptives to underdeveloped nations. ‘This would almost need approximately around $54.8 billion dollars’. The continuous increase in population is placing intense pressure on natural resources.

According to the world back currently approximately 2 billion people in the world are malnourished. This is more than thirty percent of the total world population.