The Numbers Keep Growing

11 JULY 2014 (original Patch post date)

TODAY IS WORLD POPULATION DAY

Today, World Population Day, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on all worldwide influencers “to prioritize youth in development plans, strengthen partnerships with youth-led organizations, and involve young people in all decisions that affect them.

“By empowering today’s youth, we will lay the groundwork for a more sustainable future for generations to come,” he said.

Large, aspirational goals are indeed required, because in the face of ever-growing human population and its many concomitant problems, Herculean efforts are needed. One billion people across the planet don’t have access to enough water for drinking, sanitation and agriculture, and on a daily basis, an estimated 25,000 people die of malnutrition and hunger-related disease – just to name a few of the crisis situations.

We can do better, and stabilizing our population is a very important part of the solution.

In recent years, our global population has been growing by about 80 million people annually, and our ability to provide for more people continues to be out of balance with the growth. In total, world population is at about 7.2 billion, and estimates point to another billion people in the next 12 to 14 years. For some perspective on 1 billion humans, it took more than 200,000 years for the world’s population to reach 1 billion – and only 120 years for that first billion to double.

If any situation spotlights the importance of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s message, it’s the surge of children, teens and young mothers pouring over the U.S.-Mexico border. Besides highlighting the massive failure of the U.S. government to enforce its borders, the human tsunami pounding our country spotlights the massive failure of many countries to take care of their youth.

Overpopulation, and economic and political pressures around the world are driving people to migrate – worldwide, there were an estimated 231 million migrants in 2013, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division.

The world’s largest corridor of international migration is between the United States and Mexico. In 2013, the U.S. hosted some 13 million persons born in Mexico. For Latin America and the Caribbean, international migrants from Central America were most likely to reside outside their region of birth (17 million). The majority of these migrants were living in the U.S. (16.5 million). Additionally, an estimated 2.2 million foreign-born from China, 2.1 million from India and 2 million from the Philippines were living in the U.S. Since 2000, the number of international migrants born in China or India and living in the U.S. has doubled.

In an overpopulated world, the ability of first-world countries to continue absorbing the impoverished of the world already is being challenged. Many Americans do not understand the U.S.-Mexico border surge of Central Americans and why the country is accepting tens of thousands of migrants when we are not meeting the needs of American citizens. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 45 million Americans, or almost 15 percent of the U.S. population, lived in poverty in 2010, up from nearly 34 million, or 12.4 percent, in 2000.

So if ever a message such as Ban Ki-moon’s needs to be heard and supported, it’s now.