There are an estimated 27 million slaves in the world, according to Free the Slaves. This is more than at any time in history, even including during the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

In Haiti, the only nation ever to host a successful slave revolution, 225,000 to 300,000 children live in servitude in a system known as restavèk. The numbers may rise dramatically due to the hundreds of thousands of children who lost their parents or were abandoned after the earthquake. In addition to likely trauma, hunger and health problems, these children usually do unpaid labor. Unprotected girls are also at risk of what amounts to sex slavery.

Parents, usually from the countryside, where poverty is unrelenting, give up their child to a better-off relative, neighbor or stranger who promises to provide care and schooling. The children are as young as three, with girls between six and 14 years old comprising 65%.

Restavèk children toil long hours and rarely go to school. They are regularly abused. They usually eat table scraps or have to scavenge in the streets for their own food, sleep on the floor and wear cast-off rags.

The children usually stay because of the threat of severe punishment if they are caught trying to escape. Another reason is that they have no other source of food and shelter. Survival and safety options for street children in Haiti are not good.

The system has long been widely socially accepted, but efforts are underway to change this.

Egypt in 2003 adopted a new national strategy for the protection and rehabilitation of street children, which tasked the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood (NCCM) with coordinating the efforts of NGOs and relevant governmental organizations. But the national strategy has yet to become operational in the form of an action plan.

Some say the number of births in Egypt is increasing because of illegal marriages, involving underage girls, which in turn fueled the existence of street children and child labor, adding to a national population growing by 1.5 million every year. But another said: "We don't have early marriage in Egypt because the age has risen. Many don't marry until their 30s because of the economic circumstances."

The minister said fighting school dropouts was one of the most effective ways to deal with the problem.

"If you don't eliminate poverty, you will always have street children," another said. “No number of governmental agencies and NGOs will be able to look out for this number of children."

“If you talk about one million street children in Egypt, who will marry and have children, they will send them to the streets with completely different norms and values to the society," Tibe explained. “It will cause a conflict in society itself, because the rehabilitation institution does not develop alternatives for these children to become respected people in the community. There is no way but crime."

Save the Children in Egypt said that in the past, thousands of such children were arrested, by virtue of being on the street alone, and were sent to detention centers without appropriate protection. But now the police sometimes demand money from the homeless children who are lucky enough to earn some money and even save some of it.

A UNICEF spokesman for the MENA region told said the factors include "poverty, rural migration, bad housing, school dropout, violence against children and others. Children living in the street are affected by a combination of mutually reinforcing protection risks such as child labor, trafficking, conflict with the law and abuse."

A government survey in 2009 suggested that 42% of street children in Egypt are school dropouts, and 30% had never attended school at all. Many are ignorant about health, hygiene, and nutrition and deprived of services. As children living on the fringe subsist on an inadequate diet, they are often malnourished and most of them are illiterate.

“The phenomenon is, by its nature, extremely difficult to measure," he explained, “as classical information gathering exercises such as households surveys, are not designed to capture their situation. Moreover, being in the street is a status offence for children in several countries in the region."   Karen Gaia says: there are only 80.5 million people in Egypt. 1 million street kids is an amazingly high proportion!

The proposed law is to give protection to people who are abused at home and it received overwhelming support. Children who are brought up in abusive families end up being abusers. Once the bill is law, there will be a need to educate members of the public about it.

Once the bill becomes law, a police officer can accompany an abused person to his or her home to take his or her clothing to seek refuge elsewhere.

An applicant may make an application for an interim or restraining order. An interim order may direct a police officer or deputy sheriff to remove the applicant from the residence. The court may authorise arrest of the respondent where it is satisfied that the applicant or child is under imminent danger.  rw

The H-1B visa program allows temporary employment of foreign workers in specialized-skill and advanced-degree positions. The government only grants 85,000 such visas each year among all U.S. employers.

Foreigners are paid less than American workers.

Companies can use the lower end of government wage scales even for highly skilled workers, a legal mechanisms to underpay the workers. Beyond seeking approval for visas from the government, banks that accepted federal bailout money also enlisted uncounted foreign workers. Senators Grassley, and Durbin, are pushing for legislation to make employers recruit American workers first. The issue takes on a higher profile as President Obama pushes for massive government spending to create jobs nationwide.  rw   Karen Gaia says: nothing is said about how our resources will be stretched even further and our environment stressed by the addition of more people. Also, undercutting the U.S. economy will leave our country less able to provide aid to other countries. It is the population pressures that drives the need to leave one's own country and go to a strange country to get a job because there are no jobs to be found where you come from. Are U.S. citizens now going to be driven to work in other countries, or is the beginning of the end of our lifestyle as we know it?

Largely because of immigration, the U.S. Census estimates that from 303 million today we'll grow to 400 million people as early as 2040, and 420 million by 2050. The U.S. is growing so fast it now has the third largest population in the world.

America is a nation of immigrants. We absorbed 25 million people between 1860 and 1920, and most observers believe we are a stronger nation because of it.

America's rapid population growth makes it nearly impossible to achieve sustainability. About 93% of U.S. increases in energy use since 1970 can be attributed to population growth. We pave over an area the size of Delaware every year, and every day we remove 3.2 billion gallons of water from aquifers that are not replenished by natural processes.

The energy and climate effects are little understood. Any efficiency gains we make are being swamped by rapid population increases.

With just 5% of the world's population, the U.S. is the top consumer of 11 of the world's top 20 traded commodities. The increase in greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., which rose 13 between 1990 and 2000, mirrors the population increase. A huge percentage of climate emissions can be attributed to population growth.

Many people want to come to America from the overpopulated developing world. The swelling numbers abroad create pressures leading to "increased poverty, hunger, land degradation, a lack of health services and limited social and economic mobility."

How do we address these pressures without calling for the mandatory caps on U.S. immigration? The organization Population Connection wants to combine action at home (reducing teen pregnancy, ensuring contraceptive availability, defending reproductive rights) with foreign aid. If people see hope for better lives at home, they will feel less pressure to emigrate.

Such views have many supporters. If we and the governments of the countries they are coming from were to devote as much to improving their standard of living at home, they might not feel the need to come to America.

The obstacle is to get countries around the world to focus on eradicating hunger, infant mortality and poverty, and limiting births through universal access to family planning. A 20-year plan to address these issues has languished as donor countries, including the U.S., have fallen short of meeting their financial commitments.

In addition, the reinstatement of the "Global Gag Rule" which mandates that no U.S. family planning assistance be provided to foreign organizations that use funding to make abortion available, has had a severe impact. Cultural and religious opposition have also combined to thwart efforts.

Nevertheless, UNFPA, says that the process offers the best hope for reducing migration pressures. The growing poverty and demographic divide between rich and poor countries must be addressed.  rw

The projected 33% growth in global population over the next 40 years as one of three significant trends that will alter the security landscape in the current century. Most of that growth will occur in countries least able to sustain it. With the population of countries like Niger and Liberia projected to triple in size in 40 years, governments will be forced to find food, shelter and jobs for millions, or deal with restive populations. European countries will see particular growth in their Muslim populations while the number of non-Muslims will shrink as birthrates fall.

The CIA director predicted a widening gulf between Europe and North America on how to deal with security threats. The US sees the fight against terrorism as a global war, European nations perceive the terrorist threat as a law enforcement problem. A third security trend was the emergence of China as a global powerhouse, pursuing its narrow strategic and political interests. If Beijing begins to accept greater responsibility for the health of the international system, as all global powers should, we will remain on a constructive, even if competitive, path.  rw

Migration and urban growth are linked, because the majority of people on the move do so for economic reasons. And when these movements towards the growth centers intensify, such towns and cities can also be places of great misery.

Here, the foremost concern is the infrastructure, which stems from the excessive size of most of the urban areas beyond its holding capacity. This is leading to overcrowding, traffic congestion, lack of adequate housing, mushrooming of slums and settlements, lack of civic amenities, disease and squalor.

Surrounding green belts are slowly being devoured by concrete jungles and pollution. Further the psycho-social malignancies arising from the pressures of living in a survival of the fittest scenario, exacerbated by the loss of traditional social support systems, manifest in the high crime rates, psychotic disorders and racial and social tensions.

Appropriate policy must be put in place so that there can be a balance between the economic rationale for growth and sustainability. As a result of the non-availability of amenities and employment opportunities, the government policy should focus on ensuring that urban centers are well planned to absorb further growth while encouraging other growth centers to develop.

One long term solution is on improvement of rural infrastructure, the neglect of which accentuates the urban exodus. Municipal authorities have to keep pace with city growth.

Policy makers need to wake up or the process of urbanization will become insurmountable. A holistic approach to urban and peripheral area planning with a long greater stress on rural development which will obviate the need for people to migrate to urban areas.

The Central government has allocated huge funds including the urban infrastructure Development Scheme for Small & Medium Towns, which aims at improvement in a planned manner. For all this to materialize the State government and the concerned departments must ensure that funds are utilized properly.  rw

Dignitaries urged action at a three-day U.N. conference.

We have the obligation to fight a crime that has no place in the 21st century," said the head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

Some 2.5 million people are involved in forced labor as a result of trafficking, and 161 countries on every continent and in every type of economy are affected by the crime.

Most victims are between 18 and 24, and an estimated 1.2 million children are trafficked each year.

"My hope is to secure every child the right to be a child," said Martin, a five-time Grammy winner. "Human trafficking has no place in our world today."

Estimated annual profits from trafficked, forced labor is around $31.6 million, the U.N. Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking said.  rw

Between 1960 and 2005, international migrants who are women increased to a total number of approximately 95 million. The fact that women now account for almost half the total migrant population is having enormous effects on development.

Women migrants working in the United States, who hail from the Caribbean, East Asia, Europe, and Sub-Saharan Africa, have higher labor force participation than those from South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.

Those from Ireland, Australia and the Britain make the most money.

Among developing countries, women from South Africa, Jamaica and India have the highest salaries while those from Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Cuba are the least successful. U.S. educated women migrants earn more than those educated at home.  rw

Most urban growth in developing countries now stems from natural increase (more births than deaths) rather than migration from rural areas.

The UN Human Settlements Programme (UN Habitat) estimates that more than half of the residents of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, are living in slums, where unemployment is high, livelihoods are unreliable, housing is poor, and basic amenities such as running water and unsanitary conditions mean they have poorer health outcomes than people living elsewhere.

Of every 1,000 live births in the slum areas, 91 infants will die before their first birthday, compared to 67 in Nairobi as a whole, and 79 in rural areas. And in the slums, at least 151 infants die before their fifth birthday compared to 117 in rural areas, and 95 in Nairobi as a whole.

Despite the poor infant mortality rates, according to the UNFPA report, the potential benefits of urbanisation far outweigh the disadvantages. Approaches should try to reduce natural increase, the major component driving urban population growth, by reducing poverty levels, promoting gender equity and equality, making education universally available and meeting reproductive health needs. These will enable women to avoid unwanted fertility and reduce the main factor in the growth of urban populations-natural increase.

Dr Alex Ezeh, executive director of the African Population and Health Research Centre in Nairobi, says "Large proportions of poor urban women who either do not want any more children or want to delay their next birth for at least two years, are at risk of getting pregnant because they are not using any method of family planning."

A five year study,'Educational outcomes in health and fertility', conducted in Kenya, Ghana, India and Pakistan, is currently under way to study the factors underlying a woman's decision to use contraception. It examines the link between schooling and reproductive decisions in poor households. It will try to determine how many years of schooling are required to enable women to take more independent decisions and to access a wider range of external resources.

This poses challenges: creating new slums, overwhelming governments, and placing new demands on land and water. But the migrants themselves are showing resilience in adapting.

There are innovative ways that people have learned how to deal with the problems.

On a recent day, a group of indigenous women participated in a workshop to develop leadership skills. All these women had moved to El Alto for a better life. Like most migrants here, their economic status is precarious. Latin America and the Caribbean is the world's most urbanized developing region, with 78% of residents living in cities. But this search for employment challenges cities. El Alto's government runs employment programs for youths - giving them internships to work in the factories that draw so many migrants. If some migrants end up in urban poverty, they tend to be better off than the countryside.

Governments tend to blame migration on growth of slums and violence, but it is misplaced. Providing services such as electricity and water is easier in urban areas than dispersed agricultural ones. And urban migrants tend to have networks of friends and family to help them. Census numbers in El Alto reveal an almost equal ratio of women to men, women tend to migrate more permanently, while men migrate seasonally.

Women migrants are vulnerable, but living in cities gives them access to civic roles they would not have in the countryside.

Women who benefit from Pro Mujer tick off the difficulties - infidelity, violence on television, alcohol.  rw

More than half of the world's population lives less than 1 hour from a major city, 85% of the developed world and 35% of the developing world; 95% of the population is concentrated on 10% of the world's land; but only 10% of the land is classified as more than 48 hours from a large city.

Digital maps of road, river and rail transport networks, population data, satellite-derived maps of land cover and terrain and information on border crossing times are combined using geographical modeling techniques. The result is a global map of travel time to over 8,500 major cities.

The human population is more concentrated than ever before. Because of advances in transport systems we are better connected than ever. This map also serves as a stark reminder that the price of greater connectivity is that there is little wilderness left.  rw

Sustainability is most prevalent in these disappearing rural villages because the way of life of the residents has been consistent over hundreds of years and the environment and agriculture haven't varied. These sustainable traits are what researchers are interested in preserving and applying to other areas.

As China grows, the young people living in rural villages are leaving for the large metropolitan cities that offer industrial jobs. Estimates of the number of people migrating to larger cities in China range from 200 to 400 million people.

The lack of renewable energy and dependency on fossil fuels will eventually affect everyone's daily life. If things do not change in the next 10 years in our way of thinking many cities will collapse and wither.  rw

But people vote in cities, pay taxes, are easier to monitor and control. Its cheaper to provide healthcare and education, businesses have the critical mass to survive. One of the aims of taxation is to force workers into a society which produces surplus, rather than self-sufficiency which cannot support a ruling class.

Poor city-societies are vulnerable and require imports of energy and food, which must be paid for with the profit from commerce. In poorer countries that means trading of the country's natural wealth. That is the 'profit' that pays for everything else. But the main activity of the city may be government administration, tax collecting and all the paraphernalia we are familiar with.

As energy prices rise and food prices double, poorer cities suffer most, because energy and food are their unavoidable imports. Poor self-sufficient people with their own land are largely unaffected. If we want to aid the people of a poor country, then land reform, provision of basic tools, water supply, non-hybrid seeds and harvest storage are best for the people.  rw   Karen Gaia says: This opinion piece ignores the impacts of overpopulation on agricultural land. When the number of children that survive childhood expands from 2 per family to 4 or 6 (due to better sanitation and health practices), the multiplication of people upon the land forces migration of the excess younger people to the cities.

Among gynecologists and family-planning clinics throughout the South Bay, there have been more birth-control consultations since the fall, and women are asking for more reliable, more permanent methods of contraception.

"They want to focus their finances on the one or two kids that they have," said an OB-GYN. "Instead of going with condoms or birth-control pills, they want longer-term solutions like the intrauterine device." IUDs have a lower failure rate than birth-control pills and condoms, according to the CDC.

A national Gallup poll revealed that 20% of women surveyed were more concerned about an unintended pregnancy during the bad economy, and 19% were more conscientious about using birth control.

In the years straddling the market crash of the Great Depression, birthrates plummeted almost 30%. Rates peaked after World War II, then took another nose-dive following the recession of the early 1970s.

Even lower-income women are filling the rooms of in a Planned Parenthood clinic East San Jose.

Planned Parenthood Mar Monte, which runs 33 clinics in Northern California,

including the South Bay region, sees between 40,000 and 50,000 patients every month. Last December clinics had 25% visits than the previous year, and in March, it was 16% more, with the bulk of patients coming in for birth-control consultations, refills and infection screenings and treatment. Local abortion rates went down during the same time period.

One woman who opted for an IUD said she wanted a more reliable method since her boyfriend started having trouble finding painting and construction jobs. They can hardly pay the rent on their one-bedroom apartment, and as their public benefits run out, they're struggling with the four kids they have. "I tried the injection and I got pregnant, I tried the pill and I got pregnant. I needed something safer."

Some women use permanent sterilization, such as the outpatient procedure of placing titanium coils in the fallopian tubes.

Sometimes it is more than the money. For Indian immigrant women on H-1B visas that require them to be actively employed, losing a job can mean leaving the country.

Paying for the birth control itself is usually a challenge for low income women. California's Family Planning, Access, Care and Treatment program, which provides free contraception and reproductive-health services to low-income Californians of childbearing age, received 5,000 more claims in 2008 for services than in 2007. Latinos make up the majority of enrollees in the

program at 65% statewide.

With the proposed up to $36 million in cuts to family-planning programs in the state budget, there is much to fear. The federal government matches

every $1 the state spends on family planning with $9, so even more is at stake.

Men are also undergoing more vasectomies to cushion their families against hard times.

We need to equip our children with education and skills and provide them with jobs so that they are gainfully employed and take advantage of our rapidly growing population to become an effective market in the great lakes region.

Rapid population growth has implications on the environment, food security and sustainable economic development.  rw

Ghana's fertility rate of 4.4, unchanged since 1998, is among the lowest in the region. Since independence in 1957, Ghana has maintained peace, since its independence in 1957, in a volatile region, with the latest democratic transition of power occurring between late 2008 and early 2009.

However, the unmet need for family planning among married women ages 15-49 is high at 34%. Education and employment for growing numbers of young people is a pressing priority. Ghana is in the "high risk" category for women's sexual and reproductive health. The maternal mortality ratio (MMR), while comparatively low for a West African country, is very high by global standards at 560 deaths per 100,000 births.

PAI said that "achieving the Millennium Development Goals, and Ghana's own development goals, will depend on fulfilling the country's high rate of unmet need for family planning."

Our continuing failure to deal with the environmental declines that are undermining the world food economy is most important: falling water tables, eroding soils and rising temperatures force me to conclude that such a collapse is possible.

In six of the past nine years world grain production has fallen short of consumption, forcing a drawdown in stocks. When the 2008 harvest began, world stocks of grain were at 62 days of consumption. In response, world grain prices climbed to the highest level ever.

As demand for food rises faster than supplies are growing, the resulting food-price inflation puts severe stress on the governments of countries teetering on the edge of chaos. Unable to buy grain or grow their own, hungry people take to the streets.

Many of their problems stem from a failure to slow the growth of their populations. But if the food situation continues to deteriorate, entire nations will break down at an ever increasing rate. In the 20th century the main threat to international security was superpower conflict; today it is failing states.

States fail when national governments can no longer provide personal security, food security and basic social services such as education and health care.

When governments lose their monopoly on power, law and order begin to disintegrate.

After a point, countries can become so dangerous that food relief workers are no longer safe and their programs are halted. Failing states are a source of terrorists, drugs, weapons and refugees, threatening political stability everywhere.

Our civilization depends on a functioning network of politically healthy nation-states to control the spread of infectious disease, to manage the international monetary system, to control international terrorism and to reach scores of other common goals. If enough states disintegrate, their fall will threaten the stability of global civilization itself.

During the second half of the 20th century, grain prices rose dramatically several times. Prices typically returned to normal with the next harvest.

The recent surge in world grain prices is trend-driven, making it unlikely to reverse without a reversal in the trends themselves. On the demand side,

those trends include the ongoing addition of more than 70 million people a year; a growing number of people wanting to consume highly grain-intensive livestock products; and the massive diversion of U.S. grain to ethanol-fuel distilleries.

The extra demand for grain associated with rising affluence varies widely among countries. People in low-income countries where grain supplies 60% of calories, such as India, directly consume a bit more than a pound of grain a day. In affluent countries such as the U.S. and Canada, grain consumption per person is nearly four times that much, though perhaps 90% of it is consumed indirectly as meat, milk and eggs from grain-fed animals.

The potential for further grain consumption as incomes rise among low-income consumers is huge. But that potential pales beside the insatiable demand for crop-based automotive fuels. A fourth of this year's U.S. grain harvest, enough to feed 125 million Americans or half a billion Indians, will go to fuel cars. The grain required for 25-gallons with ethanol could feed one person for a year.

That double demand is leading to competition between cars and people for the grain supply and a political and moral issue of unprecedented dimensions.

The spread of water shortages poses the most immediate threat. The biggest challenge here is irrigation, which consumes 70% of the world's freshwater. Millions of irrigation wells are pumping water out of underground sources faster than rainfall can recharge them.

Aquifers are replenishable, but some of the most important ones are not: the fossil aquifers, store ancient water and are not recharged by precipitation.

These including the vast Ogallala Aquifer that underlies the U.S. Great Plains, the Saudi aquifer and the deep aquifer under the North China Plain.

Depletion would spell the end of pumping and agriculture. As water tables have fallen and irrigation wells have gone dry, China's wheat crop, the world's largest, has declined by 8% since it peaked at 123 million tons in 1997. China's rice production dropped 4%.

In India, the margin between food consumption and survival is more precarious. Half of India's traditional hand-dug wells and millions of shallower tube wells have dried up, bringing a spate of suicides among those who rely on them. Electricity blackouts are reaching epidemic proportions in states where half of the electricity is used to pump water from depths of up to a kilometer [3,300 feet].

A study reports that 15% of India's food supply is produced by mining groundwater. Over 175 million Indians consume grain produced with water from wells that will soon be exhausted. The shrinking of water supplies could lead to unmanageable food shortages and social conflict.

Topsoil is eroding faster than new soil forms on perhaps a third of the world's cropland. In 2002 a U.N. team assessed the food situation in Lesotho, The finding was straightforward: "agriculture in Lesotho faces a catastrophic future; crop production is declining and could cease altogether over large tracts of the country if steps are not taken to reverse soil erosion, degradation and the decline in soil fertility.

Haiti, one of the first states to be recognized as failin, was largely self-sufficient in grain 40 years ago. In the years since, though, it has lost nearly all its forests and much of its topsoil, forcing the country to import more than half of its grain.

The third threat to food security is rising surface temperatures. In many countries crops are grown at or near their thermal optimum, so even a minor temperature rise during the growing season can shrink the harvest. For every rise of 1C, 1.8F above the norm, wheat, rice and corn yields fall by 10%.

As the world's food security unravels, individual countries acting in their self-interest are worsening the plight of the many. The trend began in 2007, when leading wheat-exporting countries such as Russia and Argentina limited or banned their exports, in hopes of increasing locally available food supplies and bringing down food prices domestically. Vietnam banned its exports for several months for the same reason. Such moves are creating panic in importing countries that must rely on what is then left of the world's exportable grain.

The Philippines recently negotiated a three-year deal with Vietnam for a guaranteed 1.5 million tons of rice each year. In spite of such measures, soaring food prices and spreading hunger are beginning to break down the social order. In several provinces of Thailand rice rustlers have forced villagers to guard their rice fields at night with loaded shotguns. In Pakistan an armed soldier escorts each grain truck.

U.S. consumers will share their grain with Chinese consumers, no matter how high food prices rise.

Similar in scale and urgency to the U.S. mobilization for World War II, Plan B has four components: cut carbon emissions by 80% from their 2006 levels by 2020; the stabilization of the world's population at eight billion by 2040; the eradication of poverty; and the restoration of forests, soils and aquifers.

We must ban deforestation worldwide, as several countries already have done, and plant billions of trees to sequester carbon. The transition from fossil fuels to renewable forms of energy can be driven by imposing a tax on carbon, while offsetting it with a reduction in income taxes.

Stabilizing population and eradicating poverty go hand in hand. The key to accelerating the shift to smaller families is eradicating poverty. One way is to ensure at least a primary school education for all children,

girls as well as boys. Another is to provide rudimentary, village-level health care, so that people can be confident that their children will survive to adulthood. Women everywhere need access to family-planning services.

The fourth component, restoring the earth's natural systems and resources, incorporates a worldwide initiative to arrest the fall in water tables by raising water productivity: the useful activity that can be wrung from each drop. That implies shifting to more efficient irrigation systems and to more water-efficient crops. In some countries, it implies growing (and eating) more wheat and less rice, a water-intensive crop. And for industries and cities, it implies doing what some are doing already, namely, continuously recycling water.

We must launch a worldwide effort to conserve soil, terracing the ground, planting trees as shelter belts against windblown soil erosion, and practicing minimum tillage in which the soil is not plowed and crop residues are left on the field, are among the most important soil-conservation measures.

Meeting these goals may be necessary to prevent the collapse of our civilization. Yet the cost would amount to less than $200 billion a year, a sixth of current global military spending.

Our challenge is to do it quickly. The world is in a race between political tipping points and natural ones. Can we stabilize population before countries such as India, Pakistan and Yemen are overwhelmed by shortages of the water they need to irrigate their crops?

It is hard to overstate the urgency of our predicament. We desperately need a new way of thinking, a new mind-set. The thinking that got us into this bind will not get us out.  rw   Karen Gaia says: this article has some excellent points. However, I do not believe that we can accelerate the shift to smaller families by eradicating poverty. We can provide basic health care, education, womens empowerment, and infant survival, and perhaps some food security, but beyond that, improving a 'comfortable' life may beyond the capacity of this planet. At any rate, having smaller families is a prerequisite for eradicating poverty.

Uganda's population explosion is being fuelled by electricity shortages which lead couples to go to bed early, a minister has said.

More than 90% of Ugandans are without reliable access to electricity.

Uganda's annual population growth rate is one of the highest in the world at 3.4%. Mr Kamuntu said this was a major reason why Ugandan living standards remained low. He said that improved electricity infrastructure is needed to keep lovers out of bed.

Widening access to power would also help increase the efficiency in the country's agricultural sector he said.

Ordinary Ugandans were not convinced that turning off of the lights is what is turning on the nation's couples. "It's because of poverty," said one. "Personally I think it's all about birth control,"

said another. "People don't use contraceptives.  rw

The FAO estimated that the number of people living with daily hunger is now almost one billion people. These people do not consume enough calories to work hard. Almost all of the very poor will also have been deficient in micronutrients since conception. They lack education, and lack the capacity to learn well, due not only to tiredness, but to brain damage because of chronic nutrient deficiency.

These people have the lowest control over their fertility. They have the highest birthrates, and the lowest life expectancy. It is likely that hundreds of millions of these additional people will remain locked in intractable poverty.

If the US administration can transfer some of its immense military spending towards a global campaign of hope not only for the poor but for the world as a whole. Could it not be that the pirates of Somalia, the oil raiders of Ogoniland, and even many suicide bombers are the forerunners of people attacking those within the fortress?  rw

She argued that the worst impact was on the third world where masses are prone to starvation and drought. The people in the rural areas are living in miserable conditions below the poverty line.

Poor in rural areas are forced to sell their children, while women are committing suicides and parents have withdrawn their children from school, on account of their inability to pay school dues.

The rate of flour is Rs 1200 per forty kilograms while rice is being sold at Rs 120/kg in those areas. These are beyond the reach of poor people, the participation of women alongside men is the need of the hour. The dominance of influential feudal lots in rural areas has suppressed the rural women.

Among the most underprivileged and deprived areas that are suffering from scarcity of food include the constituency of the Minister of Agriculture. ActionAids journey across Pakistan has received success and villagers have given them a warm welcome everywhere. Poor masses realise that they need to encourage the equal participation of women. ActionAid has formed a charter regarding womens rights including equality of right to land, allotment of minimum 8 acres per family to local peasants and agriculture workers, limitation of private landholdings and progressively-scaled agricultural income tax.  rw

A bigger factor though is that more people in a more populated world are now living in areas along fault lines. There are 130 cities with populations greater than 1 million, and more than half of those cities are on fault lines.

Haiti, with an estimated population of 9 million, has a fertility rate of 3.81, too high to be sustainable. It's estimated there are about 100,000 Haitians living in the United States illegally and another 30,000 who were awaiting deportation at the time of the quake.  rw

The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report said that many river deltas are at risk from about 18 inches in sea level rise by the end of the century, but other factors are involved: upstream trapping of sediments by reservoirs and dams, man-made channels and levees that whisk sediment into the oceans beyond coastal floodplains, and the accelerated compacting of floodplain sediment caused by the extraction of groundwater and natural gas.

24 out of the world's 33 major deltas are sinking and 85% experienced severe flooding in recent years. About 500 million people in the world live on river deltas. Each year about 10 million people are affected by storm surges.

Hurricane Katrina in the United States, flooding in the Asian deltas of Irrawaddy in Myanmar and the Ganges-Brahmaputra in India and Bangladesh are examples. Similar disasters could potentially occur in the Pearl River delta in China and the Mekong River delta in Vietnam, where thousands of square miles are below sea level and the regions are hit by periodic typhoons.

People have trouble coping with the fury of storm surges that can temporarily raise sea level by three to 10 meters (10 to 33 feet). The trend seems to be worsening.

The Delta is in crisis. The levees providing flood protection and secure water supplies are crumbling. The complex system by which water is moved through the Delta is over-subscribed and under the jurisdiction of federal and state court judges.

Seismologists predict a one-in-three chance of a catastrophic earthquake in the next 50 years that would damage or destroy major portions of the levee system and revert the Delta to an inland salt sea. Federal experts warn that Sacramento is now the most flood-prone city in the nation, exceeding New Orleans.

There is agreement that the Delta is unsustainable and unacceptable. Political gridlock has prevented California's leaders from fashioning a solution, and those problems have mushroomed into a crisis as government leaders have failed to act.

Governor Schwarzenegger appointed a Delta Vision Task Force to develop an independent vision for the Delta. The seven-member group began its work last March, advised by expert scientists and a group of stakeholders reflecting every conceivable interest. The resulting Delta Vision, recommends state actions approved unanimously. but will not be universally popular. It speaks some harsh truths, notably, that each day brings California closer to a major disaster. Task Force members noted that "what the nation learned from New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina is the terrible price of waiting."

Protection of the Delta's ecosystem and a reliable water supply for California should be primary goals. Among recommendations sure to spark controversy:

Repairing the Delta is likely to require reduced water diversions -- or changes in the pattern and timing of diversions; New, coordinated water conveyance and storage facilities are needed. Conservation and water system efficiency are the cornerstones of better water management; Urbanization must be halted, and the landscape should be dominated by agricultural, environmental and recreational uses. The locally-dominated governing structure must be changed, in favor of a single authority.

The Task Force is embarking on fashioning a plan it has presented to California's political leaders. That promises to be equally daunting. But the future of the Delta, and those who depend on it, will require equally bold thinking and actions in 2008.  rw

His worry stems from global warming predictions that his home, could be inundated within 50 years.

Global warming is beginning to impact the choices about where to buy a home.

Most scientists say the planet is nearing a state of emergency and humans are helping push that state to a reality.

The Earth has the highest levels of carbon dioxide in more than 400,000 years and the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 1990.

Urban and suburban heat islands can produce temperatures 2 to 10 degrees hotter than nearby rural areas. Temperatures in the Los Angeles area have increased 7 degrees since 1940.

A home's location can mean greater insurance costs, lenders won't sign off at closing if the homeowner can't obtain adequate coverage. Homes are less attractive if they come with prohibitively high insurance costs, limited coverage or coverage of last resort.

The Florida beach coast is not a good long term proposition. People on beach front property have a dicey proposition about whether you are going to be under water 50 years or 100 years from now. Global warming sounds could force residents away from the coast and out of the desert.

Home buying considerations could be exacerbated by stiffer building codes, zoning restrictions and insurance costs.

Electric bills are going up and it cost you more to cool your house than it does to heat it and that is related to global warming as summers continue to get hotter. That means smaller homes with more energy-efficient systems and designs.

Large McMansions built on the outer edge of the suburbs are most susceptible to a drop in value as the cost of driving will rise.

Each region has it's own quirks, be it wild fires in California or ice storms in New England, so make sure your home is adequately weather-proofed for your region.  rw

Dams and levees fail, and do so spectacularly and sometimes catastrophically. Worse, they provide a false sense of security that encourages risky development. When New Orleans was devastated the primary cause was not Hurricane Katrina, but the failure of the city's poorly conceived and maintained flood defenses. A warming climate threatens New Orleans with increasingly intense hurricanes and a rising sea level. Sacramento is witnessing high floods washing down from the Sierra.

Fortunately there is the "soft path" of flood-risk management.

This assumes all anti-flood infrastructure can fail and must be planned for. We need to recognize that floods will happen and learn to live with them as best we can. This means reducing the speed, size and duration of floods by restoring river and wetlands, and by improving drainage. It means improved warning and evacuation measures. It means developing plans to help communities recover from flood disasters and discouraging development in areas that will inevitably flood.

Houses can be raised on stilts. By removing levees that protect low-value land, we can free up funds to maintain essential levees protecting urbanized areas.

A sensible flood bill was killed in the California Assembly and would have required local governments to share liability with the state for damages caused by levee failure. A 10-year, $220 million project to reduce floods on the Napa River will restore tidal marshlands, remove some buildings in the flood zone and set back levees to give the river room to spread.

u

There remain powerful interests devoted to outmoded flood control. The "soft path" of flood management should be a core part of efforts to adapt to a changing climate.  rw

Water supplies, lack of sanitation and hygiene is becoming a secondary threat to Bolivians. The U.N. Children's Fund will help provide water and sanitation supplies, and the WHO and the UNFPA will oversee health care.

Some 175,000 acres of crops have been partially or totally destroyed. The FAO plans to deliver farming and veterinary assistance.  rw

There is now more relief support due to the coordinated efforts of the aid agencies and local NGOs. During the first two weeks of the disaster, the flood victims complained they were not receiving enough food and medical supplies.

NRC, the organisation through which all aid agencies were providing support, had fallen short of resources and manpower due to lack of funding. Several groups, have been regularly providing support for the country's relief efforts. WFP would be providing rice, oil, lentils and salt worth about US $500,000 to feed people over the next month. In addition, UNFPA has provided medical aid through mobile health camps. The Nepalese government has also set up a Prime Minister's Relief Fund to provide immediate relief.

For the long-term rehabilitation and resettlement of flood victims aid agencies are planning to provide support following an assessment of damage. The need for more food aid is likely to rise as important rice producing districts have lost their crops as a result of the flooding.  rw

Their ancestral homelands covered large parts of northern Tanzania and included the Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti Plain.

Now, the Hadzabe exploit a far smaller territory that is home to a wide array of wildlife and flora that includes the baobab trees, home to the bees from which they collect wild honey.

The Hadzabe are facing severe pressures on their traditional way of life.

Scientists fear that the Hadzabe ethnic group could become extinct in a few years.

According to research by Oxfam, the Hadzabe, who survive on fruit-gathering and hunting, are under threat of extinction as their habitats have been converted into conservation areas and agricultural farms.

The researchers blamed the situation on poor government policies, which favour conservation of land for wildlife hunting. Researchers found that hunting companies were allowed to hunt in the Maswa game reserve while no locals had access.

The pastoralist Maasai face similar restrictions on account of licensed hunting.

Critics say that efforts to resettle Hadzabe in permanent villages have failed.

The indigenous groups across the planet are struggling to maintain ancient ways of life in the face of the relentless encroachment of modern ways of living.

While the Tanzanian government is not hostile to the Hadzabe way of life the politics of land in Africa are often fraught with many competing claims and full restoration in the region of Hadzabe hunting rights looks a long way off.  rw   Ralph says: Not a single comment regarding the pressure of overpopulation that is the basic cause of their problem --- that has in the past affected us all. Karen Gaia says: The indigenous are the first to suffer from overpopulation. They are like the canaries sacrificed in the mines to tell if there was enough air.

The average Nigerian lives on less than $2 a day, despite the country's rise in oil exports. Villagers saw the fire as a negotiating tool, risking their health, land and even lives to grab spoils from the multinational oil companies that rule the region.

Pipeline explosions have killed hundreds in past years, including more than 400 in Lagos.

Oil firms blame criminals who tap the line to steal crude, villagers argue that aged pipes rupture.

In Kegbara Dere, village youths confessed to sabotaging the line, and village leaders refused to let the fire be extinguished without a payout.

Foreign companies left the land riddled with polluted waterways and half-cleaned-up spills. Oil companies continue production in the rest of the delta, but in Ogoniland, residents ran Shell out in 1993, leaving the pipeline and the pollution.

In May, 40 young men closed off pipe valves for six days to extract money from Shell. The closure cut output by about 170,000 barrels a day. The pressure from the stepped-up pipes was so intense that the ground shook.

The rest of the village banded to reopen the valves. Shell invited the youth involved to a training session on environmental cleanup in a fancy hotel. They expected lucrative cleanup contracts, but none arrived. The young men wrote to Shell warning "the situation would be bad" if the company failed to give them contracts. When no contracts came, the fire started.

Youth leaders said it was wrong to cut the pipes. But he said villagers now wanted $40,000 to let Shell put out the fire and repair the leak. In Lagos, the fire was a problem for Shell. The oil companies say it's not their job to pave roads or build schools. The Nigerian government owns 55% of Shell's venture in Nigeria.

A young man from Ogoniland runs a contracting company that helps get oil companies into villages to clean up spills but he won't work in Ogoniland because of accusations that he profits off his people's misery.

In two nearby villages, smoke continues to fill the air from pipeline fires that haven't yet been negotiated out.  rw

There are several reasons why prostitution is growing, migration and poverty, political instability, erosion of traditional values, desire to earn easy money, globalization and declining job opportunities for uneducated and unskilled youths. Also urbanization, new attitudes to sex, apprehension among youths about their sexual performance, rise in hospitality industries, promiscuity as well as myths about sex with virgin women.

But prostitution is largely an urban phenomenon; a study involved interviewing 10,000 people, mostly prostitutes, across 31 states and territories.

Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal accounted for about a fourth of the total respondents. Girls and women from these states were operating in more than 12 states and territories. Bangladeshi, Nepalese, Bhutanese and Myanmar women also formed a small part of the prostitution market.

There is a new form of 'commuting prostitute' where girls and women from rural areas come to cities for specific hours on the pretext of working in offices/homes. They come mainly from groups and backward castes and are of all religions.

Call girls are from general caste groups and have had better education.

Most prostitutes, are 15 to 35 years. Many young men look for sex for pleasure and fun. While income for the majority of prostitutes ranges from Rs.2,000 to Rs.24,000 a month some call girls earn Rs.40,000 to Rs.800,000 a month.

But girls and women live in dilemma and duality. The study says complete eradication of prostitution is not possible. But its prevalence can be reduced. Dealing with such a problem will require sincere and sustained efforts of the government, voluntary organizations, people's group and all round support of the socio-religious and political leaders based on properly planned national line of action.  rw

Thirty European countries are either dying today or, like France, seeing their cultures and populations transformed by growing ethnic and religious minorities.

Europe is shrinking as the population in Islamic, African and Asian countries is exploding. In 2020, there will be one billion "fighting-age" men; only 65 million will be Europeans. At the same time, the Muslim world will have 300 million males, often with limited opportunities at home.

Little can be done to reverse Europe's fate. Germany's 80 million inhabitants would need 750,000 skilled immigrants every year up to 2050 to offset the declining fertility rate that started in 1975. Even if this could be achieved Germany's median age would jump to 52 from 42 while ethnic Germans would become a minority.

Throughout the 1400s, outbreaks of bubonic plague and pressure from conquering Muslim armies reduced Europe's population to 40 million. In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII decreed the death penalty for "persons of both sexes who slay infants yet in the mother's womb hinder women from conceiving."

The results produced fertility rates as high as today.

By 1510, the number of male births in England had almost doubled. Up to 1914, West European women raised on average about six children. The European economy couldn't keep up. In the 16th century, Spain called its young conquistadors "Secundones," second sons, those who don't inherit. Europe's surplus males began the conquest of the world. And despite the 80 million who died in Europe's domestic wars and genocides, their population rose tenfold to 400 million. Over the next few centuries, Europeans took control of 90% of the globe.

It took an alliance of Great Britain (10 million people) and Prussia (also 10 million) to prevail over France's 27 million. After 1861, Germany passed France's population and shortly afterwards defeated its neighbor across the Rhine. At the beginning of the 20th century, Europe's share of fighting age males had grown to 35%, with 10% belonging to the empires of Berlin and Vienna alone. In 1914 these two used their population advantage to make a bid for world supremacy. But their campaign to capture Eurasia's land mass failed. Though separated by an ocean, the U.S. commanded about the same demographic and industrial potential.

After 1945 Europe lost every war it fought, from Indochina, to Algeria to Timor. If Europeans had continued to multiply like in its imperialistic prime,

the world would still tremble before their armies. In just 100 years, Muslim countries have duplicated the tenfold growth that Europe experienced between 1500-1900. In the last century, the Muslim population skyrocketed to 1.4 billion from 140 million.

If Europe had matched the fourfold increase of the United States the continent's 1.6 billion would still dwarf China (1.3 billion) and India (1.1 billion). Yet, is lower today (9%) than it was in 1500 (11%).

With a fertility rate at the 2.1 replacement level, the U.S. is still defendable. But how many times can America send out their only sons to prevent all those second, third or fourth sons from engaging in acts of violence abroad? The alternative to the terrorism of the Islamist secundones will not be peace but conquest. Terror is conquest's little brother.  rw   Ralph says: So we have to increase our population to avoid conquest or reduce it to have sufficient resources to survive? Who is going to toss the coin?

These include clean water, sewage-related infrastructure, soldier health, compliance with environmental laws, sustainability, protection of historical and cultural sites, and management of agricultural and natural resources.

Research showed that environmental concerns can have significant impacts especially in cost, current operations, soldier health, diplomatic relations, reconstruction activities, and the success of the mission.

In Afghanistan, Iraq and the Balkans, U.S. soldiers have helped to build wells, sewage treatment plants and other water infrastructure systems. Army leaders should give weight to environmental considerations and develop practices to address environmental issues.

The Army's new counterinsurgency doctrine highlights the importance of environmental improvements, especially sewage, water and trash, to gain support of the local population.

Public opinion surveys suggest that Iraqis care about these issues almost as much as security.

Providing these things can influence whether inhabitants support the local government and U.S. goals and objectives.

Over the last 20 years, U.S. forces have remained in conflict locations longer than expected. Camps considered temporary have been occupied for many years and often have inadequate environmental systems. Pollution can affect relations with locals, cause health problems for soldiers, and require costly cleanup efforts. Operations that require less fuel, water and other resources, and produce less waste, will reduce the logistics burden.

Providing reliable sources of potable water, electricity and sanitation has "an important stabilizing effect".  rw

The population surge could undermine the stability of the world's most fragile states, especially in Africa, while in the West, governments will be forced to grapple with ever larger immigrant communities and deepening divisions over ethnicity and race. He described the 33% growth in global population over the next 40 years as one of three trends that will alter the security landscape. By 2050, the number of humans on Earth is expected to rise from 6.7 billion to more than 9 billion, he said.

Most of that growth will occur in countries least able to sustain it, and likely fuel instability and extremism. With the population of Niger and Liberia projected to triple in size in 40 years, regional governments will be forced to rapidly find food, shelter and jobs for millions, or deal with restive populations. European countries will see particular growth in their Muslim populations while the number of non-Muslims will shrink. Integration of immigrants will pose a significant challenge to many host nations.

The CIA director predicted a gulf between Europe and North America on how to deal with security threats. While U.S. and European officials agree on the urgency of the terrorism threat, there is a fundamental difference over the solution.

While the US sees the fight against terrorism as a global war, European nations perceive the terrorist threat as a law enforcement problem.

They tend not to view terrorism as an international challenge. Or if they do, we often differ on what would be effective and appropriate to counter it.

A third security trend was the emergence of China as a global economic and military powerhouse. But if Beijing accepts responsibility for the health of the international system, we will remain on a constructive, even if competitive, path. If not, the rise of China begins to look more adversarial.  rw

Brutality has taken place well after the peace deal was signed. In a school the teacher has over 100 students crammed into a single class. The SLDF are fighting in the Mt Elgon region, and the Govt is trying to get rid of them by brute force. No politician in Nairobi has the brain cells to look at the root causes of this uprising.  rw

The projected 33% growth in global population over the next 40 years as one of three significant trends that will alter the security landscape in the current century. Most of that growth will occur in countries least able to sustain it. With the population of countries like Niger and Liberia projected to triple in size in 40 years, governments will be forced to find food, shelter and jobs for millions, or deal with restive populations. European countries will see particular growth in their Muslim populations while the number of non-Muslims will shrink as birthrates fall.

The CIA director predicted a widening gulf between Europe and North America on how to deal with security threats. The US sees the fight against terrorism as a global war, European nations perceive the terrorist threat as a law enforcement problem. A third security trend was the emergence of China as a global powerhouse, pursuing its narrow strategic and political interests. If Beijing begins to accept greater responsibility for the health of the international system, as all global powers should, we will remain on a constructive, even if competitive, path.  rw

Cheney needed bodyguards just to move around the Green Zone, which took incoming mortar fire during Cheney's visit.  rw   Karen Gaia says: this does not mention the Iraqi casualties. There are over 1 million deaths due to the war in Iraq.

Vaccination must be reinforced in many cases, while unemployment and economic woes among the displaced had caused rising malnutrition. The health needs of more than 2 million displaced Iraqis should not be ignored. Many have serious medical conditions. Iraqis streaming into other countries over the past year had put an enormous strain on host governments.  rw   Karen Gaia says: The impacts from population pressures are now exacerbated by conflict. And the conflict is increased by population pressures and disappearing natural resources (oil and water). Sounds like a vicious cycle and a downward spiral to me.

Subsistence farmers in this small Central African country are struggling to find land to cultivate.

Plots are subdivided to meet the needs of growing families, which over-exploit the land, leading to soil degradation and its attendant problems. Agricultural land is insufficient and no longer has the quality necessary to give good harvests.

Burundi has a population of eight million, and a surface area of 27,834 square kilometres; a population density of 270 inhabitants per square kilometre.

But for an independent environmental consultant, the problems relating to land use are also a result of the lack of effective equipment, of bad agricultural practices and of a high rate of illiteracy. Population expert Evariste Ngayimpenda believes more needs to be done. "While there is not a clear national land policy, nothing will be able to slow this pressure on the land," he told IPS. Burundi's population is set to top 10 million by 2015. Burundians fear that disputes over land will cause ethnic tensions to flare. Tutsis have long been at odds with the majority Hutu group in this country.

The return of Burundian refugees who fled conflict in their country is complicating land matters further.

About 33,000 Burundian refugees returned from years in Tanzania, leaving roughly 400,000 Burundian refugees in Tanzania. Fear of food shortages and continued insecurity seem to account for the decline in returns, The return of refugees has multiplied conflicts over land ownership, flooding the justice system with land cases.  rw

Authorities hailed the completion of the Sardar Sarovar Dam as an answer to the water needs of millions in the west of the country.

The Sardar Sarovar is the centerpiece of the multibillion- dollar Narmada Valley development project that taps the Narmada, India's fifth-largest river. The dam will connect an 86,000 kilometer (50,000 mile) network of canals and help irrigate 1.8 million hectares (4.5 million acres) of farm land and provide drinking water to 20 million people. It will help in flood control and generate 1,450 MW of peak power.

Construction of the dam, which is 1,250 metres (4,100 ft) long, 122 metres (400 ft) high, began in 1987. But it became the focus of one of the world's longest social and environmental campaigns.

Nearly a decade was lost over how to divide water and power and five years in legal battles with activists from the Save the Narmada Movement.

They claim the dam will displace 320,000 people -- and the benefits are false promises.

One said the dam showed policymakers favoured the rich in urban India, and went on a hunger strike that forced authorities to come up with better rehabilitation plans for some of those affected.

The Sardar Sarovar project will have to prove whether it is a right combination of engineering and natural resources or a blunder of depriving farmers of their land.  rw

Expanding deserts are primarily the result of overstocking grasslands and overplowing land. Rising seas result from temperature increases from the burning of fossil fuels.

China is losing productive land at an accelerating rate. From 1950 to 1975 China lost an average of 600 square miles to desert each year. By 2000, 1,400 square miles were going to desert annually.

Satellite images show two deserts in north-central China expanding and merging to form a single, larger desert overlapping Inner Mongolia and Gansu provinces. To the west in Xinjiang Province, two even larger deserts--the Taklimakan and Kumtag--are also heading for a merger. Further east, the Gobi Desert is within 150 miles of Beijing. Chinese scientists report that over the last half-century, 24,000 villages in northern and western China were abandoned as they were overrun by drifting sand.

Kazakhstan, site of the vast Soviet Virgin Lands Project, has abandoned nearly half of its cropland since 1980.

In Afghanistan, with a population of 31 million, the Registan Desert is encroaching on agricultural areas. A UNEP team reports that up to 100 villages have been submerged by windblown dust and sand. In the northwest, sand dunes are moving onto agricultural land, from the loss of stabilizing vegetation due to firewood gathering and overgrazing. Iran, which has 70 million people and 80 million goats and sheep, is losing its battle with the desert. In 2002 sand storms buried 124 villages in the southeastern province forcing their abandonment. Drifting sands had covered grazing areas, starving livestock and depriving villagers of their livelihood.

The Sahara Desert is pushing the populations of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria northward toward the Mediterranean. In countries from Senegal and Mauritania in the west to Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia in the east, the demands of growing human and livestock numbers are converting land into desert. Nigeria is losing 1,355 square miles to desertification each year. While Nigeria's human population grew from 33 million in 1950 to 134 million in 2006, its livestock population grew from 6 million to 66 million. The food needs forced the plowing of marginal land and the forage needs of livestock exceeded the carrying capacity of its grasslands. Nigeria's population is being squeezed into an ever-smaller area.

In Mexico, the degradation of cropland forces some 700,000 Mexicans off the land each year in search of jobs in nearby cities or in the United States.

Rising seas promise to displace greater numbers in the future. During the twentieth century, sea level rose by 6 inches. During this century seas may rise by 4 to 35 inches. Since 2001, record-high temperatures have accelerated ice melting making it likely that the future rise in sea level will be even greater.

If the Greenland ice sheet, a mile thick in some places, were to melt entirely it would raise sea level by 23 feet, or 7 meters.

A one-meter rise would inundate many of the rice-growing river deltas and floodplains of India, Thailand, Viet Nam, Indonesia, and China. A one-meter rise in sea level would cause some 30 million Bangladeshis to migrate, internally or to other countries.

Hundreds of cities would be at least partly inundated, including London, Alexandria, and Bangkok. More than a third of Shanghai, would be under water. A one-meter rise combined with a 50-year storm surge would leave large portions of Lower Manhattan and the National Mall in Washington, D.C., flooded. If the Greenland ice sheet should melt, it would force the abandonment of thousands of coastal cities and communities. Rising seas and desertification will present the world with an unprecedented flow of environmental refugees and the potential for civil strife.

We must deal with rapid population growth, advancing deserts, and rising seas. Growth in the human population is accompanied by a growth of livestock populations of more than 35 million per year. The rising concentrations of carbon dioxide that are destabilizing the earth's climate are driven by the burning of fossil fuels. Reverse these trends or risk being overwhelmed by them.  rw

The Kenya director of the World Food Programme (WFP) said: "People are already going hungry, malnutrition is preying on more and more young children, cattle are dying". The WFP is supplying 2.6 million Kenyans with food aid and hopes to increase that number by 1.2 million. Pasture and water for livestock is quickly dwindling.

Many parts of Kenya have experienced three or even four consecutive seasons of failed rains. The Government expects the main maize harvest to fall nearly one-third below the five-year average.

Acute malnutrition rates among children under the age of five are over 20% in some areas. "WFP is aiming to help almost 1 in every 10 Kenyans to cope with this serious crisis but we can't do it without money."

The agency also hopes the influx of funds will allow it to expand its school feeding programme by 100,000 to reach almost 1.2 million children, currently the Kenyan government is providing meals to 500,000 young people.

WFP said it wants to provide food aid to 108 million people in 74 countries this year, but is experiencing funding shortfalls, including over $160 million for Somalia and nearly $100 million for Ethiopia, with an unprecedented $3 billion total budget shortfall this year, while $6.7 billion is needed.

China reduced child malnutrition, and now just 7% of its children under 5 are underweight. In India, the comparable number is 42.5%. Malnutrition makes children prone to illness and stunts physical and intellectual growth.

Economists and public health experts say malnutrition rates point to a central failing of the poor. Hunger was not enough of a political priority. India's public expenditure on health remains low, and in some places,

financing for child nutrition remains unspent.

Ignoring the needs of the poor altogether does spell political peril in India, helping to topple parties in the last elections.

India's sluggish and sometimes corrupt bureaucracy has only haltingly put in place simple solutions such as iodizing salt, or making sure all children are immunized against preventable diseases.

India runs the largest child feeding program in the world, but it is inadequately designed, and has made barely a dent in the ranks of sick children in the past 10 years.

The $1.3 billion Integrated Child Development Services program finances a network of soup kitchens in urban slums and villages.

But providing adequate nutrition to pregnant women and children under 2 years old is crucial and the Indian program has not homed in on them adequately. Many women here remain in ill health and are ill fed; they are prone to giving birth to low-weight babies and not to be aware of how best to feed them.

At one nursery the teacher was a no-show. At another, there were no children; instead, a few adults sauntered up with their lunch pails. At a third, the nursery worker said that 13 children and 13 lactating mothers had already come to claim their servings, and that now she would have to fill the bowls of whoever came along. "Otherwise, they will curse us."

None of the centers had a scale to weigh children and to identify the vulnerable ones. The nurseries were largely missing the needs of those most at risk: children under 2, for whom the feeding centers offered a ration of flour and ground lentils, containing none of the micronutrients a vulnerable infant needs.

The Ministry of Women and Child Development acknowledged that the program had yielded some gains in the past 30 years, but the impact on physical growth and development has been "rather slow." The report recommended fortifying food with micronutrients and educating parents on how to better feed their babies.

India remains home to more than a fourth of the world's hungry, 230 million people. Anemia is on the rise among rural women of childbearing age in eight states. Women are often the last to eat in their homes and unlikely to eat well or rest during pregnancy.

Childhood anemia, a barometer of poor nutrition in a lactating mother's breast milk, is three times higher in India than in China.

Serious rates of hunger persisted across Indian states that had posted enviable rates of economic growth in recent years. In the capital, which has the highest per-capita income in the country, 42.2% of children under 5 are stunted, or too short for their age, and 26% are underweight.  rw

The FAO estimated that the number of people living with daily hunger is now almost one billion people. These people do not consume enough calories to work hard. Almost all of the very poor will also have been deficient in micronutrients since conception. They lack education, and lack the capacity to learn well, due not only to tiredness, but to brain damage because of chronic nutrient deficiency.

These people have the lowest control over their fertility. They have the highest birthrates, and the lowest life expectancy. It is likely that hundreds of millions of these additional people will remain locked in intractable poverty.

If the US administration can transfer some of its immense military spending towards a global campaign of hope not only for the poor but for the world as a whole. Could it not be that the pirates of Somalia, the oil raiders of Ogoniland, and even many suicide bombers are the forerunners of people attacking those within the fortress?  rw

Climate change is overshadowed by the amount of water, land and energy needed to grow food to meet the projected increase in population. We are facing a crisis.

The price of rice in Thailand had risen from $A200 a tonne to $A800 a tonne, and India had banned rice exports in a bid to ensure the country had sufficient supplies of this food.

Australias needs smarter ways to improve water efficiencies so we can continue to grow those crops.

Many politicians are out of touch with crucial issues facing rural Australia, particularly poverty and the loss of jobs in communities built on wealth generated by irrigated food production.

Irrigators are trying to make a living for their families, and have made a lot of effort to achieve water efficiencies. Australia must also think about the future social and environmental implications of its "population footprint".

It has to be a decision about geographic spread and location, about benefits for indigenous communities, for river systems and wetlands. It's a big exercise and needs to be done very carefully.  rw   Ralph says: Not only in Australia! Water will continue to be a problem in many countries. Remember, ----More People Need More Water, and there is a limit to the water available.

21% children weigh below 2,500 grammes at the time of birth. This is the second plan of its kind after the first one failed. The government has set a target to reduce malnutrition among children less than five by at least 1/3 of the current rate, with special attention to children below two years of age. The target is to provide safe drinking water to 95% of the population and hygienic sanitation facilities to 82% by 2015. It aims to reduce HIV among people aged 15-24 by 25% by 2008 and 50% by 2015. This will reduce the number of infants infected with HIV by almost the same percentage.  rw   Karen Gaia: In the U.S., 50% of children are shorter than average, and 50% are taller than average. 50% weigh less than the average, and 50% weigh more. That is what average means. They must be using a different way of measuring malnutrition in this study.

A sound food security policy encompassing recurring drought and poverty was needed.

The government has set up a committee to formulate a national food security policy with the help of UN and donor agencies.

The decline in dietary intake combined with poor water and sanitation conditions and poor healthcare contributed to the increase in rates of malnutrition.

Pastoral livelihoods had declined because of successive droughts, and would take several years and intensive programes to recover.

Two-thirds of Djibouti's estimated 800,000 people live below the poverty line; 10% in extreme poverty with 60% unemployment.

Infant mortality in urban areas is 68 per 1,000 compared with 54 per 1,000 in rural areas. The national under-five mortality rate is 94 per 1,000.

Malnutrition was highest among children 12-23 months, because that was when children are weaned from maternal milk and exposed to contaminated water, food and environment.

Since the data was collected, adequate rainfall in rural areas where the malnutrition rates were the highest has improved livestock conditions and thus improved rural food security.  rw

A UN report said that half of the world's under-nourished children live in South Asia, with most in India.

Some 50 million children aged six and below are supposed to be covered under the 45bn-rupee ($1bn) ICDS scheme.

The situation calls for urgent action.

A further 110m children in the 0-6 age group remain outside the programme, which was meant to expand gradually.

Last year UNICEF said that the average malnutrition rate in some Indian states was 40%, higher than sub-Saharan Africa. A recent survey said that the number of undernourished children below the age of three had risen in some states since the late 1990s.

The ICDS scheme is one of the biggest childcare efforts in the world, providing immunisations, supplementary food and medical check-ups for pregnant women.

It is implemented by thousands of state-funded community workers in poor, rural areas. But efforts to provide nutritious food to children have been marred by corruption. India's economy has grown at over 8% over the past three years and is expected to expand close to 9% in the fiscal year ending March 2007.

But close to 300m Indians still live on less than $1 (44 rupees) a day.  rw

In the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity
cannot survive. Convenience and decency cannot survive. As you put more
and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, it
disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies, the more people there are,
the less one person matters.

Some segments of the global economy will be affected more than others, among these are the automobile, food, and airline industries. Cities and suburbs will also evolve.

Stresses within the U.S. auto industry were already evident and their affiliated industries will also be affected, including auto parts and tire manufacturers.

Food will become more costly, diets will be altered as people move down the food chain and consume more local, seasonally produced food. Rising oil prices will draw agriculture into the production of fuel crops, setting up competition between affluent motorists and low-income food consumers. Airlines, both passenger travel and freight, will continue to suffer and cheap airfares may become history.

Air freight will be hit hard and one of the early casualties could be the transport of fresh produce from the southern hemisphere during the northern winter as the price becomes prohibitive.

During the century of cheap oil, an enormous automobile infrastructure was built in industrial countries that requires large amounts of energy to maintain. The United States, for example, has 2.6 million miles of paved roads, covered mostly with asphalt, and 1.4 million miles of unpaved roads to maintain even if world oil production is falling.

Modern cities depend on concentrating food and materials and then disposing of garbage and human waste. As cities grow larger garbage must be hauled longer distances and the cost of garbage disposal also rises. At some point, many throwaway products may be priced out of existence.

People living in poorly designed suburbs are often isolated from their jobs and shops. Suburbs have created a commuter culture. Shopping malls and discount stores, were all subsidized by artificially cheap oil. Isolated by high oil prices, suburbs may prove to be ecologically and economically unsustainable.

In the coming energy transition, countries that fail to plan ahead may experience a decline in living standards. The inability of national governments to manage the energy transition could lead to failed states.

Political leaders seem reluctant to plan for the downturn in oil even though it will become one of the great fault lines in the history of civilization. Developing countries will be hit doubly hard as expanding populations combine with a shrinking oil supply to steadily reduce oil use per person. This could translate into a fall in living standards. If the US, the world's largest oil consumer and importer, can reduce its use of oil, it can buy the world time for a smoother transition to the post-petroleum era.  rw