A very important world problem is the rapidly increasing pressure of population on land and on land resources.
It is not so much the actual population of the world but its rate of increase which is important. It works out to be about 1.6 per cent per annum net increase. In terms of numbers this means something like forty to fifty-five million additional people every year. Canada has a population of twenty million--rather less than six months. climb in world population. Take Australia. There are ten million people in Australia. So, it takes the world less than three months to add to itself a population which peoples that vast country. Let us take our own crowded country--England and Wales: forty-five to fifty million people--just about a year.s supply.
By this time tomorrow, and every day, there will be added to the earth about 120,000 extra people, just about the population of the city of York.
This enormous increase of population will create immense problems. By A.D. 2000, unless something desperate happens, there will be as many as 7,000,000,000 people on the surface of this earth! So this is a problem which you are going to see in your lifetime.
Why is this enormous increase in population taking place? It is really due to the spread of the knowledge and the practice of what is coming to be called Death Control. Death Control is something rather different from Birth Control. Death Control recognizes the work of the doctors and the nurses and the hospitals and the health services in keeping alive people who, a few years ago, would have died of some of the incredibly serious killing diseases, as they used to be. Squalid conditions, which we can remedy by an improved standard of living, caused a lot of disease and dirt. Medical examinations at school catch diseases early and ensure healthier school children. Scientists are at work stamping our malaria and other more deadly diseases. If you are seriously ill there is an ambulance to take you to a modern hospital. Medical care helps to keep people alive longer. We used to think seventy was a good age; now eighty, ninety, it may be, are coming to be recognized as a normal age for human beings. People are living longer because of this Death Control, and fewer children are dying, so the population of the world is shooting up.
Imagine the position if you and I and everyone else living on earth shared the surface between us. How much should we have each? It would be just over twelve acres--the sort of size of a small holding. But not all that is useful land which is going to produce food. We can cut out one-fifth of it, for example, as being too cold. That is land which is covered with ice and snow--Antarctica and Greenland and the great frozen areas of northern Canada. Then we can cut out another fifth as being too dry--the great deserts of the world like the Sahara and the heart of Australia and other areas where there is no known water supply to f