POPULATION NEWS

POPULATION
NEWS
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See an article on the crisis from the U.N. --Nov 6th, 01. It's only gotten much worse since then.

Population increases poverty, & poverty increases population --for a time.

If China had not imposed its controversial one child policy a quarter-century ago, its population would be larger by 300 million than it is today. --that number will increase automatically --even if the policy were stopped.

http://www.medindia.net/patients/calculators/pop_clock.asp
Sept 18, 06 --India: 1,098,488,000
. . Rate of Increase:
. . Per Year: 15,531,000
. . Per Month: 1,273,033
. . Per Day: . . 42,434
. . Per Hour: . . 1,768
. . Per Minute: 29

Estimated Population of World on
Sept 18, 06: 6,535,000,000
. . Rate of Increase:
. . Per Year: 77,760,000
. . Per Month: 6,480,000
. . Per Day: . . 216,000
. . Per Hour: . . 9,000
. . Per Minute: 150

China population clock: Sept 18, 06: 1,315,825,000 http://www.chinability.com/China%20population%20clock.htm

June 18, 09: One billion people throughout the world suffer from hunger, a figure which has increased by 100 million because of the global financial crisis, says the UN. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said the figure was a record high.

Apr 28, 09: A genetically modified (GM) maize fortified with three vitamins has been created by European researchers. The modifications make the growing maize, or corn, produce large amounts of beta carotene and precursors of vitamin C and folic acid. The development marks the first time any plant has been engineered to make more than one vitamin.
. . The yield of vitamins "vastly exceeds" any produced by conventional plant breeding methods. Producing a plant that contains three vitamins could help those in poorer nations who subsist on one food and rarely eat a balanced diet, the scientists said.

Apr 21, 09: EU fishing fleets need major cuts if stocks are to be managed sustainably, the European Commission says.

Apr 17, 09: In the rain forests of Central America grows the nutrient-rich Maya nut. The marble-sized seed can be prepared to taste like mashed potatoes, chocolate or coffee. To those who stumble upon the nuts on the ground, they're free for the taking. The problem, however, is that many people living in areas where the Maya nut grows abundantly don't know about it.
. . With one tree able to produce as much as 400 pounds of food a year, using the Maya nut prevents rain forest clear-cutting to harvest other foods and increases populations' food supplies. Dried, the Maya nut can be stored for up to five years --a lifeline for regions with frequent drought.
. . The Maya nut has high levels of nutrients including protein, calcium, fiber, iron and vitamins A, E, C and B.
. . In the rural village of Versalles, Nicaragua, women gather and cook the Maya nuts into pancakes, cookies, salads, soup and shakes that feed their community year-round. It is one of 700 communities so far. The Equilibrium Fund has taught more than 10,000 women across five countries about Maya nut for food and income. More than 800,000 Maya nut trees have been planted for rain forest conservation.
. . The group has found that where the Maya nut tree disappears, 50 to 80% of local species are wiped out in six months to a year.

Apr 15, 09: Sixteen million girls are missing in China. And now we know what happened to them: They were aborted because they weren't boys.
. . Worldwide, the number of boys born per 100 girls ranges from 103 to 107. (The numbers later equalize due to higher male mortality.) Among Chinese children born from 1985 to 1989, the number of boys per 100 girls was 108, close to normal. But among those born from 2000 to 2004, the number rose to 124. The authors conclude that as of 2005, "males under the age of 20 exceeded females by more than 32 million."
. . The steady rise in sex ratios across the birth cohorts since 1986 mirrors the increasing availability of ultrasonography over that period. The first ultrasound machines were used in the early 1980s; they reached county hospitals by the late 1980s and then rural townships by the mid-1990s. Since then, ultrasonography has been very cheap and available even to the rural poor. Second, the boy-girl ratio escalates radically among children who were born second or third in their respective families.
. . For third births, the sex ratio rose to over 200 in four provinces: Two hundred boys for every 100 girls. The number is mind-boggling.

Apr 13, 09: The broadcaster Sir David Attenborough has become a patron of a group seeking to cut the growth in human population. On joining the Optimum Population Trust, Sir David said growth in human numbers was "frightening".
. . Sir David has been increasingly vocal about the need to reduce the number of people on Earth to protect wildlife. The Trust, which accuses governments and green groups of observing a taboo on the topic, say they are delighted to have Sir David as a patron. "I've never seen a problem that wouldn't be easier to solve with fewer people, or harder, and ultimately impossible, with more."
. . The Trust, which was founded in 1991, campaigns for the UK population to decrease voluntarily by not less than 0.25% a year. It has launched a "Stop at Two" online pledge to encourage couples to limit their family's size. the Trust accuses policy makers and environmentalists of conspiring in a "silent lie" that human numbers can grow forever with no ill-effects.

Apr 1, 09: People who live in the tropics have more baby girls compared with those living in other parts of the world, a study reveals. She says this climate may change miscarriage rates and sperm quality. Or there may be some evolutionary advantage to having more girls than boys if you live by the equator. "The only country in the world which produces more females than males is the Central African Republic."
. . Research suggests the female fetus is less fragile than the male fetus, which is more prone to the effects of the environment on pregnant women. At times of extreme environmental stress, including war, the birth rate of girls outstrips that of boys.

Mar 31, 09: There are already too many people living on Planet Earth, according to one of most influential science advisors in the US government. Nina Fedoroff SAID that humans had exceeded the Earth's "limits of sustainability". Dr Fedoroff has been the science and technology advisor to the US secretary of state since 2007, initially working with Condoleezza Rice. She now advises Hillary Clinton.
. . "We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can't support many more people", Dr Fedoroff said, stressing the need for humans to become much better at managing "wild lands", and in particular, water supplies.
. . A National Medal of Science laureate (America's highest science award), the professor of molecular biology believes part of that better land management must include the use of genetically modified foods. "We have six-and-a-half-billion people on the planet, going rapidly towards seven. We're going to need a lot of inventiveness about how we use water and grow crops."

Mar 24, 09: October went down in the history books as one of Wall Street's worst months. Since then, the Cleveland Clinic has seen a 50% increase in vasectomies, an outpatient surgery that is the cheapest form of permanent birth control. Vasectomies are less invasive and cheaper than tubal ligation, which involves blocking, tieing or cutting a woman's fallopian tubes to prevent pregnancy.
. . Patients said that they were getting vasectomies because they were losing their jobs and health insurance, or concerned about being out of work soon.

Mar 19, 09: Growing world population will cause a "perfect storm" of food, energy and water shortages by 2030, the UK government chief scientist has warned. By 2030, the demand for resources will create a crisis with dire consequences, Prof John Beddington said. Demand for food and energy will jump 50% by 2030 and for fresh water by 30%, as the population tops 8.3 billion, he told a conference in London. Climate change will exacerbate matters in unpredictable ways, he added.

Mar 17, 09: Researchers are deploying new wheat varieties with an array of resistant genes they hope will baffle and defeat Ug99, a highly dangerous fungus leapfrogging through wheat fields in Africa and Asia.

Feb 19, 09: Scientists have pinpointed two genes that protect wheat against devastating fungal diseases (like rust) found worldwide, potentially paving the way to hardier wheat strains, international researchers reported.

Feb 2, 09: Uncontrolled population growth threatens to undermine efforts to save the planet, warns John Feeney. He calls on the environmental movement to stop running scared of this controversial topic.
. . Our inability to live as we do, at our current numbers, without causing pervasive environmental degradation is the very definition of carrying capacity overshoot. It's the great taboo of environmentalism: the size and growth of the human population. It has a profound impact on all life on Earth, yet for decades, it has been conspicuously absent from public debate.
. . Fundamentally, we need to ask what is the greater threat to human welfare: the possibility that humane efforts to address population growth might be abused, or our ongoing failure to act to prevent hundreds of millions, even billions, dying as a result of global ecological collapse? For humanity, this portends a potential cataclysm exceeding anything in our history.
. . Our chance to avert such an outcome depends on our ability to address our numbers before nature reduces them for us. There's no other way out. Merely reducing per capita consumption, for instance, won't do it.

Nov 30, 08: Zeng Yawen's outdoor laboratory in the terraced hills of southern China is a trove of genetic potential —-rice that thrives in unusually cool temperatures, high altitudes or in dry soil; rice rich in calcium, vitamins or iron.
. . Surging costs, population growth, drought and other setbacks linked to global climate change are pressuring world food supplies, while soaring prices on the street have triggered riots and raised the number of people going hungry to more than 923 million, according to U.N. estimates.
. . With food demand forecast to increase by half by 2030, the incentive to use genetic engineering to boost harvests and protect precious crops from insects and other damage has never been greater.
. . Many researchers believe such methods are essential for a second "green revolution", now that the gains from the first, in the mid-20th century, are tapering off.
. . Bioengineered crops are widely grown in Canada, Argentina and the U.S., where nearly all soybeans, most cotton and a growing proportion of corn are designed for tolerance to herbicides or resistance to insects. A virus-resistant GM variety of papaya is commercially grown in Hawaii and China.

Nov 18, 08: Some mothers choose what their children will eat. Others choose which children will eat and which will die. A food riot erupts in Haiti. Food scarcity is now hitting more affluent countries, experts say. A Haitian boy begs for food. One child dies from hunger every six seconds, an aid agency says.
. . Those mothers forced to make the grim life-or-death choices are the impoverished women Patricia Wolff, executive director of Meds & Food for Kids, encounters during her frequent trips to Haiti.
. . Wolff says Haitians are so desperate for food that many mothers wait to name their newborns because so many infants die of malnourishment. Other Haitian mothers keep their children alive by parceling out food to them, but some make an excruciating choice when their food rationing fails, she says. "It's horrible. They have to choose among their children."
. . Wolff thinks hunger can be conquered. Her group produces "Medika Mamba", energy dense, peanut butter food that's designed to ensure Haitian children survive childhood. Medika Mamba is easy to make, store, preserve and distribute, she says.
. . Causes for the rise in global hunger include:
. . • Surging oil costs have made it more expensive to harvest, fertilize, store and deliver food.
. . • The rise in droughts and hurricanes worldwide has wiped out crops and made farming more difficult.
. . • The world is running out of the raw materials --water, oil, good farmland-- needed to keep the food system intact.

The problem: It takes so much grain and other resources to produce meat, he says. "If the rest of the world were to eat like we do, the planet would collapse", Roberts says. "There's been this unspoken assumption that the rest of the world won't eat meat like we do. That doesn't go over well in countries like China."
. . Fixing our food system would be similar to weaning ourselves of our addiction to oil, Roberts says. It's going to require innovation, heavy business involvement and changes in public policy.

Oct 28, 08: The planet is headed for an ecological "credit crunch", according to a report issued by conservation groups. The document contends that our demands on natural resources overreach what the Earth can sustain by almost a third.
. . More than three quarters of the world's population lives in countries where consumption levels are outstripping environmental renewal. This makes them "ecological debtors", meaning that they are drawing --and often overdrawing-- on the agricultural land, forests, seas and resources of other countries to sustain them. "If our demands on the planet continue to increase at the same rate, by the mid-2030s we would need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles."
. . In the UK, the "ecological footprint" --the amount of the Earth's land and sea needed to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste-- is 5.3 hectares per person. This is more than twice the 2.1 hectares per person actually available for the global population. The US and United Arab Emirates have the largest ecological footprint per person, while Malawi and Afghanistan have the smallest.

Oct 23, 08: The health and fertility of soil in parts of England may threaten its capacity for food production in future, a new report warns.

The Census tells us there are about 100 million single people in America over the age of 17.

Oct 22, 08: They are introducing small-scale aquaculture to ensure families in Malawi have enough food and income to buy maize --even in years when droughts affect their crops. The project assists farmers by digging small, rain-fed ponds of about 10x15m on their land, or anywhere the soil is suitable for retaining water.
. . Manure from goats and chickens keep the pond high in nutrients which allow plankton to thrive. The fish eat the plankton, and when they grow to full size, they are harvested, usually every six months.
. . When the ponds are emptied, a rich layer of silt can be dug from the base - to use as fertilizer. Esther uses hers to grow maize, which in turn ensures that her goats and chickens keep popping out manure for the pond. It's a perfect circle. "Or what we call an integrated agriculture-aquaculture (IAA) system", says Joseph Nagoli, of WorldFish. "This isn't high input fish farming. This is simple and sustainable."

Oct 16, 08: Two thirds of India's population are forced to get by on less than two dollars (£1.15; 1.47 euros) a day. And the little money they do make now buys less food than it used to. Something has to give.

Sept 16, 08: A blanket crackdown on hunting bushmeat would starve Africans of essential protein, says a new report.

Sept 15, 08: Scientists suspect that twins are conceived much more often, but sometimes one dies out and is reabsorbed by the mother's body, or the larger fetus takes over and crowds the other out, making the pregnancy risky for both.
. . The human twining rate is estimate at 1.1% worldwide, and the current rate in the US is 3%, presumably because more women are having babies later in life and there is an increase in twinning with maternal age. Twinning varies across cultures and among environments.

Sept 12, 08: Scientists around the world have teamed up to sequence the genome of the potato, hoping to crack the genetic code of one of the world's most important crops at a time of surging population growth.

Aug 28, 08: The price of rat meat has quadrupled in Cambodia this year as inflation has put other meat beyond the reach of poor people, officials said.

July 14, 08: Demand for land to grow food and fuel crops is set to outstrip supply, leading to forest destruction, a report warns.

July 12, 08: World Bank President Robert Zoellick said he expected food prices to remain above 2004 levels until at least 2012 and energy prices would also remain high and volatile.

May 29, 08: Food prices will remain high over the next decade even if they fall from current records, meaning millions more risk further hardship or hunger, the OECD and the U.N.'s FAO food agency said in a report.

May 16, 08: Lifestyles and the consumption of resources vary widely from country to country. On average, each person needs 2.2 global hectares to support the demands they place on the environment, but the planet is only able to meet consumption levels of 1.8 global hectares per person.

May 8, 08: Researchers in Ivory Coast are asking $1 million for a three-headed hybrid coconut tree they believe could substantially boost the tropical nut's yield.
. . Dutch scientists said they have identified a key gene that protects tomatoes against a common fungus that causes the plants to wilt.

May 8, 08: Science has provided the souped-up seeds to feed the world, through biotechnology and old-fashioned crossbreeding. Now the problem is the dirt they're planted in. As seeds get better, much of the world's soil is getting worse and people are going hungry.
. . Soils around the world are deteriorating with about one-fifth of the world's cropland considered degraded in some manner. The poor quality has cut production by about one-sixth. Some scientists consider it a slow-motion disaster. In sub-Saharan Africa, nearly 1 million square miles of cropland have shown a "consistent significant decline."
. . A generation ago, through better types of plants, Earth's food production exploded in what was then called the "green revolution." Some people thought the problem of feeding the world was solved and moved on. However, developing these new "magic seeds" was the easy part. The crucial element, fertile soil, was missing.
. . Genetic improvements in corn make it possible to grow up to 9,000 pounds of corn per acre in Africa. But millions of poor African farmers only get about 500 pounds an acre "because over the years, their soils have become very infertile and they can't afford to purchase fertilizers."

May 8, 08: People are needlessly throwing away 3.6m tons of food each year in England and Wales, research suggests. The Waste & Resources Action Program (WRAP) found that salad, fruit and bread were most commonly wasted and 60% of all dumped food was untouched.
. . Environment Minister Joan Ruddock said the findings were "staggering" at a time of global food shortages and WRAP added it was an environmental issue. The average UK household needlessly throws away 18% of all food purchased. Families with children throw away 27%.
. . # The two most significantly wasted foods that could have been eaten were potatoes and bread.
. . # Yogurt was a commonly abandoned product, with an estimated 1.3m unopened pots disposed of each day.
. . "This is costing consumers three times over. Not only do they pay hard-earned money for food they don't eat, there is also the cost of dealing with the waste this creates. And there are climate change costs to all of us of growing, processing, packaging, transporting, and refrigerating food that only ends up in the bin."

May 5, 08: In Laos, the rice fields that blanketed remote mountain villages for generations are gone. In their place rise neat rows of young rubber trees --their sap destined for China.
. . All 60 families in this dirt-poor, mud-caked village of gaunt men and hunched women are now growing rubber, like thousands of others across the rugged mountains of northern Laos. They hope in coming years to reap huge profits from the tremendous demand for rubber just across the frontier in China.
. . As Beijing scrambles to feed its galloping economy, it has already scoured the world for mining and logging concessions. Now it is turning to crops to feed its people and industries. Chinese enterprises are snapping up vast tracts of land abroad and forging contract farming deals.
. . China is expected to consume a third of the world's rubber by 2020, become its largest car market and put 200 million vehicles on the road. But some Laotian farmers are losing their ancestral lands or being forced to become wage workers on what were once their fields. Chinese companies are accused of getting rubber concessions from officials and not compensating farmers. They are also accused of violating laws, human rights and the environment, under conditions described by experts as "anarchic."

May 5, 08: Scientists in China have identified a single gene that appears to control rice yield, as well as its height and flowering time, taking what may be a crucial step in global efforts to increase crop productivity. The researchers said they were able to pinpoint a single gene, Ghd7, which appears to determine all three traits. The scientists also found five different versions of Ghd7.
. . "The most highly active versions were present in warmer regions, allowing rice plants to fully exploit light and temperature by delaying flowering and increasing yield. Less active or inactive versions were found in cooler regions, enabling rice to be cultivated in areas where the growing season is shorter", they wrote.

Apr 24, 08: Concerns about food security mounted today, as rice prices hit records in Asia and the United Nations warned that staples for the world's hungry were getting much more expensive. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer sought to calm the frayed nerves of consumers, saying there was no shortage of rice in the US even as a major outlet limited sales.

Apr 24, 08: Genetic engineering, combined with organic farming, may be the best way to grow food for a rising population as the world confronts climate change and environmental degradation, a U.S. rice scientist said. [I totally disagree! It's food that causes population-growth! She --like Borlaug, will only make it worse.]
. . Pamela Ronald, professor at the U of California at Davis, said that the world needed to use every technology available to secure food supplies for the 9.2 billion people expected by 2050, up from 6.7 billion at present. Ronald, a plant pathologist, has helped to develop genetically modified (GMO) disease-resistant Xa21 rice, one of the top candidates Beijing has been considering to approve as the world's first GMO rice to be grown on a large scale. The scientist is also behind a flood-tolerant rice currently being tested in Bangladesh.

Apr 23, 08: The government of Botswana is refusing to allow Kalahari Bushmen access to a water borehole. In 2006, the Bushmen won a landmark legal victory against the government allowing them to return to land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. The court found they had been illegally driven off the land by the authorities.
. . The bushmen are the oldest people in Sub-Saharan Africa and the case was the longest and most expensive in Botswana's history. Several hundred Bushmen have decided to return, but because they cannot use the borehole, they have to bring the water in by truck or they have to collect their own rainwater.
. . Several boreholes have already been sunk for a diamond mine in the reserve, and more will follow when planned tourist lodges are built. But the Bostwanan government says the growth of a settlement could damage the environment!!

Apr 23, 08: Women on low-calorie diets or who skip breakfast at the time of conception are more likely to give birth to girls than boys, British scientists said. [does India count as lo-cal?!]

Apr 22, 08: Life expectancy may have reached an all-time high for the US, but it is declining in many poor counties, especially among women, researchers reported.

Apr 22, 08: If everyone lived like North Americans, we'd need at least five planets to support our lifestyles.

Apr 15, 08: The global agriculture system will have to change radically if the world is to avoid future environmental and social problems, a report has warned. The study, commissioned by the UN and World Bank, concluded that while recent advances had increased food production, the benefits were spread unevenly. It said that 850 million people were still not getting enough food to eat. The authors added that food prices would remain volatile as a result of rising populations and biofuel growth.
. . "We have lost some of our environmental sustainability. "There have been adverse effects in some parts of the world on soils, water, biodiversity; our agricultural systems have contributed to human-induced climate change and, in turn, human-induced climate change threatens agricultural productivity."

Mar 31, 08: Having sons is important to many Asian cultures, and now American families from those groups seem to be asserting the same preference. A new analysis of the 2000 Census shows that among U.S. born children of Chinese, Korean and Asian Indian parents the odds of having a boy increase if the family already has a girl or two.
. . The findings "suggest that in a sub-population with a traditional son preference, the technologies are being used to generate male births when preceding births are female." They do not know what method is being used for sex selection, but they speculated that the most common is fetal ultrasound to determine the sex of the baby followed by disproportionate abortion of females. Ultrasound has improved in recent years and is being given earlier, they noted.

Mar 18, 08: A bandit-infested region of India is trying to persuade men to undergo sterilization by offering to fast-track their gun licence applications, an official said.

Mar 5, 08: India has just announced a plan to pay families for raising girls. Give birth to a daughter, and you'll get a cash installment. Vaccinate her, and you'll get another. Enroll her in school, keep her there, nourish her adequately, and you'll keep collecting. Total payout: up to $5,000 per daughter. Chowdhury is explicit about the program's first objective: stopping sex-selective abortions.
. . Meanwhile, China is rethinking its one-child policy. Last year, dissenters within the Communist Party moved to abandon the policy. A week ago, Zhao Baige, vice minister of the country's family-planning commission, told reporters that the policy had "become a big issue among decision makers" and that the government was studying whether to phase it out. The commission denies that the policy will change, but the fight is now out in the open.
. . Twenty years ago, China commonly enforced its one-child policy through forced sterilizations and abortions. This produced outrage at home and abroad. Citizens with money or connections evaded the limit. When the government shifted its enforcement methods from compulsion to fines, the evasion became explicit. The rich can pay to have extra kids; the urban poor can't.
. . The policy's purpose was to limit population to a level that the country's resources could support. Defenders of the policy still make that argument. But critics, even within the government, say the limit has backfired. There aren't enough young workers to support the aging older generation. Labor shortages are slowing economic growth. Kids used to grow up and take care of their parents; now they can't
. . The shift in enforcing the policy, from force to fines, was a concession to this ecology and to personal choice. It mirrored the government's concessions to capitalism. If you really want something, including a second child, you can pay for it, provided you have the money. And if you and your spouse have no siblings, the policy now allows you a second kid without a fine.
. . Defenders of the policy have always feared that if the cap were lifted, population would explode. What's driving the reform movement is growing confidence that this calculation is mistaken. Zhao says surveys that show today's young Chinese don't want the big families of yesteryear. 60% want no more than two kids; few want more than three. Over the last 30 years, the number of kids each family would produce if given total freedom has fallen from 5.8 to 1.8. That's below the replacement rate.
. . The one-child policy has also warped China's male-to-female ratio. If you live in a traditional, sexist society, you probably want a boy. If you're allowed only one child and you find out you're carrying a girl, things get ugly. At birth, the normal boy-girl ratio, if you let nature take its course, is about 105 to 100. In China, it's 118 to 100.
. . Zhao says the government is trying to persuade the public that girls are valuable. It's also subsidizing rural areas that have regarded sons as financial assets and girls as liabilities.
. . A recent study calculated that over the last two decades, 10 million Indian girls have been aborted. The most recent estimated rate is 7,000 per day. Nationwide, the number of girls born for every 1,000 boys is 933. In some regions, it's below 900. Much of the reason is economic. In parts of India, as in China, boys are regarded as assets, while girls require dowries so that somebody else's son will support them.
. . In India, as in China, central mandates have failed. The country's ban on sex-selective abortion has proved unenforceable. Chowdhury is trying a different tack. Instead of telling parents what to do, she's offering what she calls an "incentive." You can lecture parents all day about the value of raising girls, but the best way to make them appreciate that value is to make it concrete and immediate. Chowdhury thinks her subsidies will persuade parents "to look upon the girl as an asset rather than a liability since her very existence would lead to cash inflow to the family." Over time, she hopes, the education and employment of women will "help in changing their mindsets towards the girl."

Feb 27, 08: Argentina, a country famous for its steaks, will start exporting bovine genetics this year to China, which is trying to improve its meat production as consumption surges.

Feb 25, 08: Today, prenatal sex tests have come down in price to $300 or less, cheap enough to sell directly to would-be parents. And instead of waiting the "10 to 16 weeks needed for traditional medical tests, such as ultrasound", you can now find out at just seven weeks whether you're carrying a boy or a girl. That's early enough to get the most basic surgical abortion or, possibly, a chemical abortion instead.

Feb 8, 08: Modern life means small families. Starting about two centuries ago, families in Western Europe began to shrink, and then --country by country, continent by continent-- the rest of the world followed suit. The trend is so big that it may rein in the world population's exponential growth, perhaps even causing it to stop growing altogether over the next century.
. . But exactly why families are shrinking is a mystery. Rising living standards seem to have something to do with it. It's certainly true that as living standards rose in England --as children died less from diseases, as the country overall became richer-- the size of the English family shrank. When other countries became wealthier, their families shrank, too. These days, affluent countries tend as a rule to have smaller families than poor ones.
. . Natural selection is not just about having a lot of kids. After all, a parent isn't an infinite source of food and protection. The more offspring an animal has, the less energy it can give each one. If a hawk can't supply its chicks with enough food, they may not live long enough to have chicks of their own.
. . It turns out that animals have evolved a balance between offspring and effort. Some can even adjust how many offspring they produce, depending on whether they are under stress or live comfortably. Ruth Mace, an expert on family size at Imperial College London, argues this week that humans are governed by the same kinds of rules. When the standard of living goes up, the cost of living goes up too. It takes a family in Addis Ababa a lot more money to raise an additional child than a family out in the Ethiopian countryside. That may be one reason why the population is exploding in rural Ethiopia, while in Addis Ababa it is actually shrinking.

Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care.

Dec 27, 07: The U.S. Census Bureau expects the nation's population to be 303.15 million on New Year's Day, up 0.9% from January 1, 2007. In 2008, the country will add one person every 13 seconds, the bureau said. That will come from one birth every eight seconds, one death every 11 seconds, and one migrant arriving every 30 seconds. California remained the most populous state with 37 million.

Dec 17, 07: The soaring cost of food is threatening millions of people in poor countries, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has warned. The agency's food price index has jumped almost 40% from last year, hitting its highest level since its inception in 1990.

Dec 3, 07: Divorce can be bad for the environment. In countries around the world divorce rates have been rising, and each time a family dissolves the result is two new households. "A married household actually uses resources more efficiently than a divorced household", said Jianguo Liu, an ecologist at Michigan State U.
. . Households with fewer people are simply not as efficient as those with more people sharing, he explained. A household uses the same amount of heat or air conditioning whether there are two or four people living there. A refrigerator used the same power whether there is one person home or several. Two people living apart run two dishwashers, instead of just one.
. . Per person, divorced households spent more per person per month for electricity compared with a married household, as multiple people can be watching the same television, listening to the same radio, cooking on the same stove and or eating under the same lights. That means some $6.9 billion in extra utility costs per year, Liu calculated, plus an added $3.6 billion for water, in addition to other costs such as land use. "We found the proportion of divorced households has increased rapidly across the globe."

Nov 19, 07: Wildlife experts in northeastern India are experimenting with a new weapon to prevent marauding elephants from destroying homes and crops and trampling people in villages close to their habitat —-super-hot chilies.
. . Conservationists working on the experimental project in Assam state said they have put up jute fences smeared with automobile grease and bhut jolokia —-also known as the ghost chili and certified as the world's hottest chili by the Guinness Book of World Records. They also were using smoke bombs made from chili.
. . Conservationists say wild elephants increasingly attack human settlements encroaching on their natural habitat. Satellite imagery by India's National Remote Sensing Agency shows that up to 691,880 acres of Assam's forests were cleared from 1996 to 2000. [Instead, how about a repellent for the invading HUMANS!]

Oct 29, 07: Pharmacists must be allowed to refuse to supply drugs that cause abortion or euthanasia, Pope Benedict said on Monday, calling on health professionals to be "conscientious objectors" against such practices. {& I say that if they can't do their jobs, they should get a different one!]

Oct 17, 07: A contraceptive drug that avoids the side effects of hormonal birth control is on the horizon, say scientists. A technique called "RNA interference" could stop sperm entering the egg.
. . Oral contraceptives can cause nausea, headaches, and low sex drive and raise slightly the risk of DVT and strokes. However, the new "Pill" is at least a decade away --and may have its own side-effects.
. . The research into ZP3 has one advantage in this respect, as the gene appears to be active only in eggs prior to the moment of fertilization, and nowhere else in the body. The researchers say this means it could be "switched off" without necessarily affecting either the prior development of the egg and ovulation, or other parts of the body.

Oct 6, 07: The world moved into 'ecological overdraft' today, the point at which human consumption exceeds the ability of the earth to sustain it in any year and goes into the red, the New Economics Foundation think-tank said.
. . Ecological Debt Day this year is three days earlier than in 2006 which itself was three days earlier than in 2005. NEF said the date had moved steadily backwards every year since humanity began living beyond its environmental means in the 1980s. "As the world creeps closer to irreversible global warming and goes deeper into ecological debt, why on earth, say, would the UK export 20 tons of mineral water to Australia and then re-import 21 tons", said NEF director Andrew Simms.
. . If everyone in the world had the same consumption rates as in the US it would take 5.3 planet earths to support them, NEF said, noting that the figure was 3.1 for France and Britain, 3.0 for Spain, 2.5 for Germany and 2.4 for Japan. But if everyone emulated China, which is building a coal-fired power station every five days to feed its booming economy, it would take only 0.9 of a planet.
. . There is still no meeting of minds between the world's biggest CO2 polluter, the US, and booming emitters like China and India; both sides insisting that the other make the first move. But the NEF report "Chinadependence" noted that Britain among others was understating its CO2 emissions because it in effect exported its smokestack industries to China in the 1990s and was now importing products it would have been making itself.
. . "As China is increasingly attacked because of its rising pollution levels, people overlook two important issues", said Simms. "First, per person, China's greenhouse gas emissions are a fraction of those in Europe and the US." "Second, a closer look at trade flows reveals that a large share of China's rising emissions is due to the dependence of the rest of the world on exports from China.

Sept 17, 07: Large-scale cultivation of transgenic crops is a necessity if India is to feed a growing population and use more of its farmland for industry and homes, a senior government official said.[ ...which will allow a larger population, & a greater number of people will die when the time comes.]

Sept 10, 07: A Russian province is readying for "Family Contact" day --unofficially being called "Conception Day"-- in an effort to boost flagging birth rates, officials said.

Aug 30, 07: World food demand will surge this century with a leap in population, highlighting a need to protect soils under strain from climate change, experts said. About 150 scientists and government experts will meet in Iceland from August 31-September 4 to try to work out how to safeguard soils from over-use and desertification when more food is needed and some farmers are shifting land to biofuels.
. . "Soil and vegetation are being lost at an alarming rate around the globe, which in turn has devastating effects on food production and accelerates climate change", Iceland's President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson said. The planet will need to produce ever more food with the world population set to rise to nine billion by 2050 from 6.1 billion in 2000 and 1.7 billion in 1900.
. . U.N. reports this year say that global warming will shift rainfall patterns and cause more frequent floods or droughts, adding to desertification that may mean more hunger for hundreds of millions of people in Africa and Asia.
. . The experts will debate ways to improve soil productivity, use water more efficiently and safeguard plants and animals vital to renewing soils. Iceland is now virtually barren, for instance, but forests covered up to 40% of the island before Viking settlers arrived and felled trees for fuel.
. . Andrew Campbell, Australia's first National Landcare Facilitator said that measures such as enforcing existing laws on land use or better food labeling could help. "If you buy a steak in a supermarket you can't tell if it's from a property that's overgrazed or one that's well managed." For the first time in history, there are more dwellers in cities than rural.And slum-dwellers have topped one BILLION, and could double in the next 13 years, & they pay 4-100 times the price for water.

Aug 3, 07: It's a girl —-yet again-— for the Duggars. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar welcomed their 17th child, and seventh daughter, into the world.

July 17, 07: A 93-year-old agricultural scientist and Nobel laureate regarded as the father of the "Green Revolution" in farming received the Congressional Gold Medal for a life-long battle against world hunger.
. . President Bush was on hand for the presentation of the highest civilian honor to Norman Borlaug, whose advances helped nearly double the food supply in countries including Mexico, India and Pakistan. [which let the population more than double, so things are *worse* than before he "helped"!]
. . Borlaug's efforts date back to the mid-20th century, when he developed disease-resistant, high-yield wheat varieties and worked with developing countries to grow these crops using modern farming techniques. He has more recently focused on increasing food production in Africa and other parts of Asia.

Jun 2, 07: "We're trying to make meat without having to kill animals", Bernard Roelen, a veterinary science professor at Utrecht U, said. Although it is in its early stages, the idea is to replace harvesting meat from livestock with a process that eliminates the need for animal feed, transport, land use and the methane expelled by animals, which all hurt the environment, he said.
. . Developed nations are expected to consume an average of 43 kg per capita of poultry, beef, pork and other meats this year, an amount that rises around 2% annually.
. . Asked whether people would be repulsed by lab-grown meat, Roelen said he believed there would be enough demand, as much of what people eat today is already extensively processed, from the feed that animals consume to the conditions under which they are raised and the preparation of meat after slaughter.
. . Research is also under way in the US, including one experiment funded by U.S. space agency NASA to see whether meat can be grown for astronauts during long space missions.
. . But it will take years before meat grown in labs and eventually factories reaches supermarket shelves. And so far, Roelen and his team have managed to grow only thin layers of cells that bear no resemblance to pork chops.

May 11, 07: Japan's fertility rate --the average number of children a woman bears in her lifetime-- hit a record low of 1.26 in 2005.

Apr 23, 07: More than 10% of China's farm land is polluted, posing a "severe threat" to the nation's food production, state media reports. Arable land shrank by nearly 307,000 hectares (760,000 acres) in the first 10 months of 2006, government officials were quoted as saying.
. . Excessive fertilizer use, polluted water, heavy metals and solid wastes are to blame, the reports said. Rapid economic growth has had a damaging impact on China's environment. Its cities, countryside, waterways and coastlines are among the most polluted in the world.
. . The Ministry of Land and Resources said agricultural land in China fell to 121.8 million hectares (30 million acres) by the end of October 2006 --a loss of 306,800 hectares since the start of the year.

Mar 16, 07: Half of the 6.7m tons of food thrown away in Britain each year is being wasted, as it is still edible, a report will say.

Mar 11, 07: The Bush administration wants to allow ocean farming for shellfish, salmon and saltwater species in federal waters for the first time, hoping to grab a greater share of the $70 billion aquaculture market. It would let companies operate fish farms three miles to 200 miles offshore, but without some of the rules on size, season and harvest methods that apply to other commercial fishermen.
. . Globally, the $70 billion aquaculture business accounts for almost half the seafood consumed in the world today as wild fish stocks decline. About 70% of all the seafood eaten in the US comes from overseas, contributing "a trade deficit of about $9 billion in fish." Until now, the U.S. industry has focused mainly on catfish, tilapia and other freshwater fish. Some ocean farms raise shellfish such as mussels, clams and oysters, as well as shrimp and salmon.
. . An earlier administration plan won little support in Congress last year. Senate Democrats cited potential risks with pollution and genetic mixing of farmed and wild fish.

Hong Kong restaurants have come up with a novel way to cut down on waste from food leftovers --threatening to fine diners who don't eat up.

Feb 17, 07: The number of children a woman in America has in her lifetime declined during the past two centuries, and it's not just because of the birth control pill. Historians are closing in on the socio-economic and cultural factors in family downsizing, a trend also found in most of Western Europe.
. . "There are two reasons fertility rates can decline", said J. David Hacker, a SUNY Binghamton historian. "One explanation is that marriage declines. Not as many women get married, and if they do marry, they do so at a later age, so that there is less time to have children. The second explanation is that people consciously try to limit having children, which was revolutionary in the 19th century."
. . According to most census estimates, an American woman had on average seven to eight children in 1800. By 1900 the number dropped to about 3.5. That has fallen to slightly more than two today. Birth rates fell first in New England, and then among pioneers as they headed west. Internationally, France led the way to smaller families.
. . Modern economics have made smaller families a good investment, historians and economists agree. Before the 1800s, children were educated at home or in church. Children became more expensive to care for and less helpful around the house once public schooling became available. At the same time, women were freed up from all-day children-rearing, allowing mothers to enter the paid labor force.

Feb 13, 07: In a small corner of the former East Germany, a retired truck driver is hoping to alleviate the hunger of North Korea with his super-sized rabbits.
. . Karl Szmolinsky, 67, has been breeding German grey giant bunnies --among the world's biggest-- for more than 40 years. But he caught the attention of the reclusive communist state last year when he won a competition in his home state of Brandenburg with a rabbit called Robert, weighing in at a hefty 10.5 kg. A delegation bought 12 of them. They are expected to produce about 60 babies a year between them.

Feb 13, 07: Australian men are being urged to eschew the traditional gifts of chocolates and flowers this Valentine's Day in favor of a lasting, if not very romantic, present: a vasectomy.

Feb 3, 07: A German breeder believes he has the answer to North Korea's hunger problems: his giant bunnies that can grow to as big as 23 pounds.

Dec 8, 06: The UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are "difficult or impossible to meet" without curbing population growth, a UK parliamentary group says (The All Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health). It concludes that a high birth rate in poor nations contributes to poor health and education and environmental damage. The global population is forecast to reach about nine billion by 2050.
. . "No country has ever raised itself out of poverty without stabilizing population growth", said the group's vice-chairman, Richard Ottaway MP.
. . The bulk of the growth came in developing countries. "Ethiopia had five million people in 1900; now it has 64 million, of whom eight million are receiving food aid," said Mr Ottaway. The projected figure for 2050, he said, was 145 million. Whereas many Asian countries are seeing birth rates of about two children per family, some African nations are still around five per family.
. . The UN's own report into the MDGs earlier this year noted that the number of people living on less than $1 a day in Asia dropped by nearly a quarter of a billion people between 1990 and 2002. But in Africa, the number in extreme poverty increased by 140 million.

Dec 7, 06: Iraq's marshlands are about halfway restored to their 1970s condition, according to the United Nations.

Dec 6, 06: after decades of legal battles, Los Angeles will make amends, in a modest way, for what Mulholland and L.A. did. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will turn a valve and raise a steel gate to send water spilling once more into a 100km stretch of the Owens River, which was a rushing stream generations ago before the aqueduct diverted its flow and reduced it to a pathetic trickle.
. . The farmers and ranchers who were ruined by the Los Angeles Aqueduct are long gone, and there is little hope the water will ever turn all of the scrubby, rocky landscape green again. But businesses hope the revitalized river will breathe life into the area's struggling towns by attracting more tourists.
. . The move is not expected to significantly affect Los Angeles' water supply or cost consumers anything extra. The water diverted represents only about 1/20th of the amount originally in the Owens. And at the end of the stretch of river, the redirected water will reach a storage pond, where four huge pumps will send it back into the aqueduct and on its way to Los Angeles.

Dec 3, 06: After six decades of wrangling, Egyptians living in the hills near Luxor have agreed to move out and give tourists and archaeologists access to nearly 1,000 Pharaonic tombs that lie beneath their homes, the government said.

Dec 1, 06: Mother Nature may be a force, but nothing like humans when it comes to causing erosion, says a Syracuse U scientist. Humans cause erosion at a rate 10 to 15 times faster than any natural process, according to new research.
. . Scientists have long identified humans as the primary agents altering the shape of the Earth's surface. Wilkinson said his study gauged the rate of man-made erosion and compared the speeds and differences under which natural and human-related erosion occur.
. . By using data gathered from around the world and the universal soil loss equation, Wilkinson determined that global erosion is occurring at a rate of about 75 gigatons a year —-a gigaton is a billion tons. The main cause of man-made erosion is agriculture, followed by construction and mining.
. . "To put that into context", Wilkinson said, "current annual amounts of rock and soil moved over the Earth's surface in response to human activities are ... an amount of material that would fill the Grand Canyon of Arizona in about 50 years."
. . Wilkinson's estimates from the Phanerozoic eon —-about 542 million years ago-— indicated that natural erosion took place at a rate of about five gigatons of sediment per year. Between the Phanerozoic eon and the Pliocene epoch —-about 5.3 million to 1.8 million years ago-— erosion increased to about 16 gigatons per year as continental glaciers plowed across the Earth's surface and then retreated. Current estimates of natural erosion stand near 21 gigatons per year.
. . Natural erosion occurs at the planet's highest elevations. Wilkinson said about 83% of the global river sediment comes from the highest 10% of the Earth's surface. Human-induced erosion, by contrast, occurs in the lower elevations. 83% of this erosion occurs at the lower 65% of land surfaces.
. . The data indicate that given the continuing population growth on the planet, the soil loss caused by erosion will present a serious challenge to meeting the food needs of a growing population. Global cropland has increased by 11% since 1961, while the global population has approximately doubled, Wilkinson said. The net effect of both changes is a 44% decrease in per capita cropland.
. . "Erosion by itself is not necessarily a crisis, but when you have more and more people, and less land on which to grow food, then you have a real problem", he said.

Nov 27, 06: Scientists are working on a contraceptive treatment which would stop men ejaculating sperm. King's College London researchers saw blood pressure and schizophrenia drugs had this effect, and have identified chemicals which can do the same thing. The team now plan to test the chemicals in animal and human studies and hope to have a treatment in five years. Fertility experts welcomed the work, saying it could mean couples could share contraceptive responsibility.
. . Several other male contraceptives, given as injections, implants or patches are under development. Most are based on hormones which trick the brain into switching off hormone production. The treatment being developed at King's acts by preventing the longitudinal muscle in the vas deferens contracting to propel sperm out of the penis.
. . The drugs designed to treat schizophrenia and high blood pressure stopped men ejaculating were found to have this effect over a decade ago. But they have side effects such as dizziness and drowsiness, which meant they could not be used as contraceptives.
. . Because the contraceptive is not dependent on hormones, the researchers suggest a man's fertility should return the following day.

Nov 25, 06: Scientists have found a way to boost the protein, zinc and iron content in wheat, an achievement that could help bring more nutritious food to many millions of people worldwide.
. . A team led by U of California researcher Jorge Dubcovsky identified a gene in wild wheat that raises the grain's nutritional content. The gene became nonfunctional for unknown reasons during humankind's domestication of wheat. The researchers said they used conventional breeding methods to bring the gene into cultivated wheat varieties, enhancing the protein, zinc and iron value in the grain. The wild plant involved is known as wild emmer wheat, an ancestor of some cultivated wheat.
. . Wheat represents one of the major crops feeding people worldwide, providing about 20% of all calories consumed. The World Health Organization has said upward of 2 billion people get too little zinc and iron in their diet, and more than 160 million children under age 5 lack adequate protein.
. . The gene made the grain mature more quickly while also boosting its protein and micronutrient content by 10-15%. "Rather than leave the protein and the zinc and iron in the straw, we've moved a little bit more into the grain."
. . Annual wheat production is estimated at 620 million metric tons of grain worldwide.

Nov 24, 06: England's strategy to reduce teenage pregnancies is working but the pace of decline is not enough to meet its target of halving the rate of conceptions by the end of the decade, scientists said.

Nov 24, 06: The U.S. Department of Agriculture formally approved a strain of genetically engineered rice whose discovery in commercial stocks earlier this year triggered a food market dispute with the European Union and Japan.

[This kind of thing increases with the popu. It's good AND bad.] Big Brother Is Listening: A Dutch town installs street mikes that use acoustic-recognition tech to listen for signs of aggression in the human voices passing by, then alert authorities if things get out of hand.

Nov 20, 06: Scientists have found a way to use the cotton plant, long a source of fiber for clothing but inedible by humans, to feed potentially half a billion people. The new-and-improved cottonseed could be ground into a flour and made into bread and other foods. [ Cotton is closely related to okra! But if we're not suddenly smarter, this will only result in a billion more population, & only increase the problem! ]
. . Texas A&M U plant biotechnologist Keerti Rathore and colleagues reported they have genetically altered the plant to reduce the levels of the toxic chemical gossypol in cottonseed, making it fit for human consumption. "It actually tastes pretty good. It reminds me of chickpea. "It tasted better than soybean, I can tell you that", added Rathore, who admitted he had not tasted it until being asked repeatedly about its flavor in the days before the research was published.
. . Rathore and his team turned to a technique also being used in cancer and AIDS research --so-called RNAi or RNA interference technology that can "silence" a gene-- to cut the amount of gossypol in the cottonseed, home to significant amounts of protein. When eaten by people, gossypol can damage the heart and liver. The researchers left gossypol intact in the remainder of the plant because it guards against insects and disease.
. . "Potentially, if all of the cottonseed today which is produced can be utilized for human nutrition directly, it can meet the protein requirements of 500 million people. That is a lot of protein right now really being wasted", he added, noting that cottonseed often is fed to cattle because bacteria in their stomachs can break down gossypol.
. . For millennia, people have spun cotton fibers into clothing and other fabrics. But for each pound of cotton fiber, the plant produces 1.6 pounds of seed. About 44 million metric tons of cottonseed is produced throughout the world annually, and it has 21% oil and about 23% protein.
. . Researchers estimate that it will take at least another decade to develop cotton varieties with these qualities for broad commercial production.
. . In the 1950s and 1960s, agricultural scientists bred cotton varieties that had no gossypol glands, but they were a commercial flop because the absence of the toxin made the plants too vulnerable to insects and disease. In addition to edible cottonseed, the technique might be applied to other crops with toxic components, such as fava beans, to increase their use.

Nov 16, 06: Hong Kong is considering designating areas of its shoreline as sea cemeteries where cremated ashes can be laid to rest, the government said as the city runs out of burial spaces.

Nov 11, 06: Rainwater harvesting could prove a cheap, easy solution to Africa's water woes, according to a UN report. Scientists found that enough rain falls in some countries to supply six or seven times the current need, and provide security against future droughts. Currently, 14 out of 53 nations are classified as "water stressed". This number is forecast to double by 2025.
. . A pilot project in a Kenyan Maasai community has improved supplies and done away with the daily trek to collect river water. In some regions of Africa, women spend a third of their calories collecting water.
. . The technique has been tried in a pilot project in Kisamese, about 30 minutes' drive from Nairobi. Here, collection and storage facilities including containers and mini-reservoirs, or "earth pans", have been installed. Trenches help water soak into the soil in small kitchen gardens. Last week, the Kenyan government announced plans to make all new buildings include capacity for rainwater collection and storage.
. . Much of Africa's rain comes in bursts, and is rapidly swept away or is never collected. Not all rain can be collected. Unep estimates at least a third needs to go into lakes, streams and rivers, for use by people downstream and by nature's consumers. And rainfall patterns vary across the continent. Parts of the West African coast will have six months of daily rain followed by six months with none; other regions are more mixed.

Beijing issues 1 dog per family rule: First it was one child. Now authorities say Beijing families will be allowed only one dog. [Hey, dogs eat too...]

Nov 8, 06: Natural England health adviser Dr William Bird said: "Increasing evidence suggests that both physical and mental health are improved through contact with nature. "Yet people are having less contact with nature than at any other time in the past. This has to change."
. . Dr Bird said children with attention disorders had been shown to improve when they had contact with nature, and people recovering from operations had been shown to need less painkillers if they looked out on to green fields.

Nov 8, 06: Norway, Iceland, Australia, Ireland and Sweden rank as the best five countries to live in but Africa's quality of life has plummeted because of AIDS, said a U.N. report.

Nov 7, 06: Water levels in the upper reaches of the Yellow River, China's second longest, have hit a historic low, Xinhua news agency said, after a senior official warned that China might run out of water by 2030. Hot weather and low rainfall led to the dry-up, with water flow over the first 10 months of the year down nearly 33% from the long-term average.
. . The river, which supplies water to over 150 million people and irrigates 15% of the country's farmland, is also at serious risk from over-exploitation. Nearly two-thirds of the river's water is used for residential and industrial supplies, while international guidelines suggest a 40% limit.
. . Once known as China's sorrow because of its flooding, in recent years it has sometimes run dry before it reaches the sea. From 1971 to 1998, its lower reaches were dry for 1,091 days although a new management system means there have been no entirely dry days since 1999.
. . But China's increasing wealth and inexorably-growing population means it faces an uphill challenge in managing its already-scarce water. The country is home to one-fifth of the world's population but has only 7% of its water resources. The country will consume between 700 and 800 billion cubic meters of water annually by 2030. But they'll only have around 800 billion to 900 billion cubic meters available.
. . With the country trying to clean up its air and cut back dependence on fossil fuels, low water levels cause another problem by denting hydropower generating capacity. In October, water levels at key hydropower reservoirs nationwide were down 12% from a year earlier, meaning China was likely to rely more on dirty-burning coal and oil powered plants for its electricity supplies.

Mumbai, also known by its Portuguese name Bombay, is India's most populous city with 19m residents.

The man who helped establish Britain's DNA database says it now poses a threat to civil liberties because the police have filled it with samples taken from people who have no business being in there.

Nov 2, 06: [Over-population results in increased gov't controls.]
. . There are 5 million CCTV cameras watching over Britain's 60 million inhabitants. But what exactly are they watching for? Are you really safe if you have nothing to hide? Britain's privacy watchdog sounded the alarm over growing state and commercial intrusion into people's lives as a report on Thursday ranked the country alongside Russia and China as "endemic surveillance societies."
. . Richard Thomas, the UK's independent information commissioner, said clear lines needed to be drawn about the extent to which government agencies and businesses could hoard information on people's movements and buying habits. "Two years ago I warned that we were in danger of sleepwalking into a surveillance society. Today I fear that we are in fact waking up to a surveillance society that is already all around us", Thomas said.
. . Civil liberties group Privacy International, in a survey of 37 countries, named Britain alongside Russia, China, Malaysia and Singapore as countries practicing "endemic" surveillance against the individual. Only slightly better were the United States, Thailand and the Philippines, described as "extensive" surveillance societies."
. . Rights groups say governments around the world have used the war on terrorism as justification for increased snooping into the lives of citizens. They cite examples such as U.S. surveillance of data on millions of private money transfers, and a U.S. government program, not authorized by the courts, to eavesdrop on international phone calls and e-mails by Americans suspected of links to terrorism.

Oct 31, 06: Scientists are developing a male contraceptive drug which stops the development process of sperm.
. . Tests on rats show blocking connections to cells which "nurture" developing sperm makes the animals infertile. The US and Italian researchers say they used relatively low doses of the molecule and found no obvious side effects, and the effect was reversible.
. . When sperm are being made in the body in a process called spermatogenesis they sit next to other cells, called Sertoli cells, which nurse and help them grow. If the connection between these two cell types is broken, infertility can result in men.
. . In the study, authors used a recently developed molecule called Adjudin to dislodge the developing sperm from the Sertoli cells.

Oct 27, 06: OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK, Wash. - Reclining against the trunk of a western hemlock tree, arms behind his head, Gordon Hempton listens closely to the quiet symphony of nature.
. . "Quiet is going extinct", Hempton said. "I wanted to find a quiet place and hang on to it and protect it." National park officials like the concept. National park officials recently released a draft general management plan —-including goals and strategies for protecting natural quiet and soundscapes-— that will be finalized in the coming year. But Hempton says the draft, as written, doesn't go far enough.
. . At one spot, the decibel level was just 26 decibels. He wants Olympic National Park added to the Federal Aviation Administration's list of no-flight zones for all aircraft. He also wants the park to hire a full-time acoustic ecologist and to complete a comprehensive sound survey within the next five years.
. . Hempton has set up an account to organize a not-for-profit organization to help pay for the monitoring of the site. His "One Square Inch" album —-an hourlong recording of soundscapes from the park-— is available on iTunes and the One Square Inch Web site, with proceeds going toward his project. He won an Emmy for the 1992 PBS documentary "Vanishing Dawn Chorus" and has recorded sounds of nature on six continents.
. . Hempton has secured an agreement from American Airlines not to fly over the park, though an airline spokesman said there were never any plans to fly over the park anyway. Alaska Airlines similarly agreed to ask its pilots not to overfly the park during maintenance and test flights, but noted that some routine flights will continue to follow FAA-approved routes over the park. "Altering flight paths would likely mean a less efficient flight path, requiring more fuel to be burned, which would lead to an increase in emissions."
. . The three noisiest parks in the country are the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone and the Hawaii volcanoes, mostly due to aerial tourism.

Oct 27, 06: [Pope willing, we can all live like this soon!] In the crowded sprawl of Manila, the living must compete for space with the dead.
. . Fortunately for Virginia Bernardino and hundreds of other slum dwellers who have moved into the largest cemetery in the Philippines, the deceased don't seem to mind. Living conditions are basic but the residents manage some creature comforts. Clothes hang from lines strung among the makeshift shacks and television sets flicker in a few homes with electricity stolen from nearby power lines.
. . The mainly Roman Catholic country, now home to more than 86 million people, has one of the fastest population growth rate in Asia at 2.36%, or 5,400 babies born each day. The incessant search for jobs and accompanying migration to cities has worsened problems of poverty, poor sanitation and urban decay.
. . The country's housing shortage is expected to worsen as the population continues to grow to a projected 142 million by 2040. The high birth rate is tied to the strong influence of the Catholic Church, which frowns on the use of contraceptives such as condoms and birth-control pills.
. . President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who survived an impeachment attempt last year and an alleged coup plot in February, relies on the support of the Church and shows no signs of reversing her emphasis on natural family planning over artificial methods.

Oct 24, 06: Humans are stripping nature at an unprecedented rate and will need two planets' worth of natural resources every year by 2050 on current trends, the WWF conservation group said. "If everyone around the world lived as those in America, we would need five planets to support us."
. . Populations of many species, from fish to mammals, had fallen by about a third from 1970 to 2003 largely because of human threats such as pollution, clearing of forests and overfishing, the group also said in a two-yearly report. "For more than 20 years, we have exceeded the earth's ability to support a consumptive lifestyle that is unsustainable and we cannot afford to continue down this path", WWF Director-General James Leape said, launching the WWF's 2006 Living Planet Report. "People are turning resources into waste faster than nature can turn waste back into resources", Leape, an American, said in Beijing.
. . Leape said China, home to a fifth of the world's population and whose economy is booming, was making the right move in pledging to reduce its energy consumption by 20% over the next five years. "Much will depend on the decisions made by China, India and other rapidly developing countries", he added. People in the United Arab Emirates were placing most stress per capita on the planet ahead of those in the United States, Finland and Canada, the report said.
. . Everyone would have to change lifestyles --cutting use of fossil fuels and improving management of everything from farming to fisheries. "Humanity's footprint has more than tripled between 1961 and 2003", it said. Consumption has outpaced a surge in the world's population, to 6.5 billion from 3 billion in 1960. U.N. projections show a surge to 9 billion people around 2050.
. . It said that the footprint from use of fossil fuels, whose heat-trapping emissions are widely blamed for pushing up world temperatures, was the fastest-growing cause of strain.
. . The WWF report also said that an index tracking 1,300 vetebrate species -- birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals -- showed that populations had fallen for most by about 30% because of factors including a loss of habitats to farms.

Oct 19, 06: Potato farmers in southeastern Idaho got a look at a possible weapon to fight weeds, insects and erosion: oriental mustard-seed plants. That plant and others were on display Tuesday at the Fort Hall Indian Reservation, where farmers are getting advice from the University of Idaho on how to use biologically friendly agents to boost the quality of their crops.
. . UI research and extension scientists planted the mustard-seed plants in August. When they are cut in several weeks, what remains of the plants will leach natural chemicals into the soil that could keep crop-destroying pests away.

Oct 17, 06: A recent study by the Connecticut-based Center for Environment and Population (CEP) paints a troubling picture of the United States as an expanding nation of "super-sized resource appetites" making disproportionate claims on the planet's resources. Steady birth rates, longer life spans, and heavy immigration have helped make the U.S. the third most populous nation in the world, behind China and India.
. . "The main point is that we are the only industrial country having this kind of population growth", said Martha Farnsworth, former director of the U.S. Census Bureau, who was not affiliated with the CEP report. "People aren't aware that we differ so much from other industrialized countries in this respect."
. . The CEP study notes that the U.S. has just 5% of the world's people but consumes nearly a quarter of all natural resources.
. . The CEP study says each American currently withdraws water at rates three times the world average; produces 2.2 kg of trash per day, or five times the average in developing countries; and occupies 20% more land for housing, school, shopping, and other uses than the average American did two decades ago. The study says 3,000 acres (1,214 hectares) of farmland are plowed under daily to meet suburbia's needs.
. . America's plump populace also eats what the study says are "disproportionately high amounts of meat and dairy products", foods that require more land, water, and energy than grain and vegetable-based diets.
. . 51% of Americans now live within 160 km of a coast, according to the report.

Oct 16, 06: Many nations with the highest levels of hunger are also gripped by violent conflicts or civil wars, a report has shown. Armed groups are using hunger as a weapon by cutting off food supplies, destroying crops and hijacking relief aid, the Global Hunger Index suggests. The 119-nation study describes South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa as the worst "hunger hotspots".
. HUNGER INDEX'S TOP FIVE:
. . Burundi, Eritrea, Congo, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone.

Oct 14, 06: America's population is on track to hit 300 million on Tuesday morning, and it's causing a stir among environmentalists. People in the United States are consuming more than ever —-more food, more energy, more natural resources. Open spaces are shrinking and traffic in many areas is dreadful.
. . But some experts argue that population growth only partly explains America's growing consumption. Just as important, they say, is where people live, what they drive and how far they travel to work.
. . The population reached its last milestone, 200 million, in 1967. That translates into a 50% increase in 39 years. The estimated 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. are included in official population estimates, though many demographers believe they are undercounted.
. . During the same period, the number of households nearly doubled, the number motor vehicles more than doubled and the miles driven in those vehicles nearly tripled. The average household size has shrunk from 3.3 people to 2.6 people, and the share of households with only one person has jumped from less than 16% to about 27%.
. . The U.S. is the third largest country in the world, behind China and India. The U.S. is the fastest growing of the industrialized nations, adding about 2.8 million people a year, or just under 1%. India is growing faster but the United Nations considers it to be a less developed country. About 40% of U.S. population growth comes from immigration, both legal and illegal, according to the Census Bureau. The rest comes from births outnumbering deaths.

Oct 10, 06: Rising consumption of natural resources means that humans began "eating the planet" on 9 October, a study suggests. The date symbolized the day of the year when people's demands exceeded the Earth's ability to supply resources and absorb the demands placed upon it. The figures' authors said the world first "ecological debt day" fell on 19 December 1987, but economic growth had seen it fall earlier each year.
. . The data was produced by a US-based think-tank, Global Footprint Network. The New Economics Foundation (Nef), a UK think-tank that helped compile the report, had published a study that said Britain's "ecological debt day" in 2006 fell on 16 April.
. . The authors said this year's global ecological debt day meant that it would take the Earth 15 months to regenerate what was consumed this year.
. . Global Footprint Network's executive director said humanity was living off its "ecological credit card" and was "liquidating the planet's natural resources. While this can be done for a short while, overshoot ultimately leads to the depletion of resources, such as forests, oceans and agricultural land, upon which our economy depends." Critic: "Perhaps 'ecological exuberance' is better."
. . The European Commission will present an action plan next week to reduce energy use in the 25-nation European Union by 20% by 2020, Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said today.

Oct 2, 06: Sometime this month, the number of Americans will surpass 300 million, a milestone that raises environmental impact questions for the only major industrial nation whose population is increasing substantially.
. . The U.S. Census Bureau predicts the 300 million mark will be reached in mid-October, 39 years after U.S. population topped 200 million and 91 years after it exceeded 100 million. This will make the United States No. 3 in population in the world, after China and India.
. . Most of the growth is taking place in the South and West, according to the Census Bureau. From 2004 to 2005, U.S. population had a natural increase --births minus deaths - of 1.7 million and international migration of 1 million.
. . The report's author, Victoria Markham, noted that the United States is the only industrialized nation with significant population growth. The vast majority of the world's population rise --about 98%-- is in poor countries, she said.
. . The report found:
. . -- *Each* American occupies 20% more developed land --housing, schools, shopping and roads-- than 20 years ago.
. . -- Each American uses three times as much water as the world average; over half the original wetlands in the United States have been lost, mainly due to urban and suburban development and agriculture.
. . -- Half the continental United States can no longer support its original vegetation; nearly 1,000 plant and animal species are listed by the U.S. government as endangered or threatened, with 85% of those due to habitat loss or alteration.
. . -- The United States consumes nearly 25% of the world's energy, though it has only 5% of the world's population, and has the highest per capita oil consumption worldwide.
. . -- Each American produces about 2.3 kg (5 pounds) of trash a day, up from about 1.4 kg (3 pounds) in 1960; the current rate is about five times that in developing countries.

Sept 20, 06: Japan's dwindling population has got the country's planning association all worked up. With the fertility rate at successful levels averaging at 1.25 children per woman. 2.1 would maintain the present over-population.
. . A survey conducted by the Family Planning Association revealed that 31% of the 16- to 49-years-olds did not indulge in sex for over a month. There was no specific reason attributed to this abstinence from sex. And nearly 44% of the surveyed persons found that engaging and maintaining a sexually active relationship with a partner of the opposite sex was far too tiring.

Sept 10, 06: Wading into the Jordan River, the pastor blessed his flock, tapping the believers on the head before sending them into the hallowed waters to be baptized. The faithful wet their faces and arms, shouting 'amen' and 'hallelujah' after each baptism, unaware that just downstream, raw sewage was flowing into the water. That's the split personality of one of the world's most sacred rivers.
. . Small sections of the Jordan's upper portion, near the Sea of Galilee, have been kept pristine for baptisms. But Israel, Jordan and Syria have siphoned off huge amounts of river water to meet their needs in this arid region, and pumped waste water back in. Hardest hit is the 95 Km downstream stretch —-a meandering stream from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea.
. . The damage began in 1964, when Israel began operating a dam that diverts water from the Sea of Galilee. Syria has also built reservoirs that catch the Yarmouk's waters. In a year, the Yarmouk's flow into the Jordan River will dwindle to a trickle. The freshwater foliage that once flourished along the river's banks has been replaced with saline vegetation.
. . Overpumping and mineral extraction by Israeli and Jordanian companies are also drying up the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth, with the shoreline receding three feet a year. The southern third of the lake is gone, and the experts doubt the famously salty lake can ever be rehabilitated.
. . In 1978, the shoreline was just 10 meters from the road. Today, the spa has to drive its guests 1.5K to the water.

Sept 5, 06: Rapa island lies isolated in the South Pacific, halfway between South America and New Zealand. Initially cooperative, its first settlers turned to violence when faced with the same pressures of environment and competition happening right now across the globe, the research suggests.
. . "Rapa is a very remote place, like another planet. When settlers arrived there, there was an immediate impact on the environment", said study leader Douglas Kennett. "With populations expanding, you can see the same thing on a larger scale today. It leads to social strife."
. . The first people to live on Rapa arrived via canoe in AD 1200, according to radiocarbon dating conducted at various sites. They initially set up camp in rock shelters along the coast and probably got along well with each other. The peace wouldn't last, it seems, based on several heavily fortified structures found inland. Environmental degradation and competition for resources led the people of Rapa to split into warring factions.
. . When the Polynesians arrived in Rapa, "there was massive erosion, clearing of the land…that had an impact", he said. "People also brought things with them, like different crops and rats, as well as their main staple of taro."
. . Rapa's history is a lesson that is applicable even in today's world, Kennett says. "With the world's population exceeding six [and a half] billion, human-induced environmental change is an acute problem confronting our increasing inter-dependent global community", Kennett writes in his research paper. "Remote islands provide well-bounded microcosms for studying the ecosystem effects of human colonization."
. . There are more and more modern examples of population expansion causing environmental problems, experts say, and not just in the Third World. Parts of California, Arizona and the northeastern United States are experiencing severe water shortages that can only get worse, said popular UCLA geographer Jared Diamond.
. . "These particular environmental problems, and many others, are enormously expensive in terms of resources lost, cleanup and restoration costs, and the cost of finding substitutes for lost resources: a billion dollars here, 10 billion there, in dozens and dozens of cases", he said. "Even the mildest of bad scenarios for our future include a gradual economic decline, as happened to the Roman and British empires."

Aug 29, 06: Researchers have expressed alarm about cultures that favor male babies, saying sex-ratio imbalances could destabilize society because more men will remain unmarried, raising the risks of anti-social and violent behavior.
. . They said parts of China and India would have 12% to 15% more men over the next 20 years --many of them rural peasants with limited education. "The growing number of young men with a lack of family prospects will have little outlet for sexual energy. This trend would lead to increased levels of anti-social behavior and violence, as gender is a well-established correlate of crime, and especially violent crime."
. . Sex ratios were already distorted in large parts of Asia and North Africa, and sex-selective abortion and discrimination in healthcare for girls have led to higher female mortality. "There are now an estimated 80 million missing females in India and China alone." In 2004, 48.6% and 48.7% of the population in China and India, respectively, were female. In contrast, females comprised 49.1% of the total population in East Asia, and 52.1% in all of Europe and Central Asia, according to figures from the World Bank.
. . China introduced a one-child policy in 1979 to control population growth, but it has led to a rise in the male-to-female ratio from 1.11 in 1980-89 to 1.23 in 1996-2001, according to a study published this month in the British Medical Journal.
. . The authors called in the paper for measures to reduce sex selection and an urgent change in cultural attitudes, or dire consequences could follow.

Aug 23, 06: Australia has an estimated 57 million wild kangaroos, or nearly three times the human population, which damage crops and property and compete with livestock for food and water.
. . Despite being featured on the nation's coat of arms, Australia culls millions of kangaroos each year. But the number of sturdy marsupials keeps increasing. The problem is prominent around Canberra, where five years of drought have seen more kangaroos move into the suburban fringes looking for feed and becoming traffic hazards for commuters. Kangaroos are the biggest animal risk to motorists in Australia, accounting for 70% of animal-related car accidents in 2004.
. . The local government that administers Canberra has now announced a scientific trial of contraceptives, which will be added to the grass in low-lying areas where the animals graze. Authorities in the past have trialed vasectomies for male kangaroos and slow release contraceptive implants for female, but both methods proved unworkable.

Aug 21, 06: Fixing leaky pipes in conurbations from Mexico City to New Delhi is a better way to avert water shortages as the world population grows than costly schemes such as dams, a leading expert said.
. . Asit Bitwas, head of the Third World Center for Water Management in Mexico City said many developing nations often wrongly put priority on expensive schemes to build dams or divert rivers in a bid to increase supplies. He said that the key was in simpler measures like fixing leaks. "In nearly all the megacities nearly 40 to 60% never reaches the consumer" because of leaks and poor maintenance, he said.

Aug 21, 06: Eating raw or half-raw snails has led to almost 40 people in Beijing coming down with meningitis, state media said today, and the same species is being blamed for destroying a huge swath of rice crops. [but if they cook 'em, they're livestock! If only all our "pests" were edible... ]

Aug 18, 06: China's one child per family policy has cut the country's birth rate and means men clearly outnumber women in the population, a new study showed. Using data from nearly 40,000 women, it found the birth rate had dropped from 2.9 before the policy was introduced in 1979 as a short-term measure to 1.94 in women over 35 and 1.73 in women under 35 --below replacement level.
. . The policy also means that the male to female ratio has risen from 1.11 in 1980-89 to 1.23 in 1996-2001 [So for 123 women, there'll be 100 men.]. Experts say Chinese parents have resorted to sex-selective abortion to ensure their child was a boy since the one-child policy was introduced. 35% of the women questioned said they wanted only one child and 57% said they would stop at two. Less than 6% said they wanted more.
. . Malcolm Potts of the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, praised the policy for lifting 150 million Chinese out of abject poverty by creating the conditions for increased economic growth. He said that while the policy had caused grief for one generation of Chinese it had brought far greater comfort for following generations. "For China, and the world as a whole, the one child policy was one of the most important social policies ever implemented", he wrote, saying other countries from Afghanistan to Nigeria with high population growth had lessons to learn.
. . Creeping bentgrass was engineered to resist the popular herbicide Roundup to allow more efficient weed control on golf courses. But the modified grass could spread that resistance to the wild, becoming a nuisance itself. The engineered bentgrass has the potential to affect more than a dozen other plant species that could also acquire resistance to Roundup. Such resistance could force land managers and government agencies like the U.S. Forest Service, which relies heavily on Roundup, to switch to "nastier" herbicides to control grasses and weeds, Ellstrand said.

Aug 16, 06: Globally, water usage had increased by six times in the past 100 years and would double again by 2050, driven mainly by irrigation and demands by agriculture
. . In Australia, five years into a drought, irrigation water costs less than five U.S. cents a cubic meter, compared to $1 to $2 per cubic meter for drinking tap water and $100 to $200 per cubic meter for bottled drinking water.
. . Australia had among the highest water usage in the world. Each day, urban Australians use an average of 300 liters of water each, compared with Europeans who consume about 200 liters, while people in sub-Saharan Africa existed on 10-20 liters a day, said the report.

Aug 16, 06: Rich countries have to make drastic changes to policies if they are to avoid the water crisis that is facing poorer nations, the WWF said.
. . In a survey of the situation across the industrialized world, it said many cities were already losing the battle to maintain water supplies as governments talked about conservation but failed to implement their pledges.
. . It suggested that agriculture in the richer countries should have to pay more for water and be held responsible more actively for its efficient use and for managing wastes, like salt, especially in intensive livestock farming.
. . From Seville in Spain to Sacramento in California and Sydney in Australia, the report said, water had become a key political issue at local, regional and national levels as climate change and loss of wetlands dramatically reduce supplies.
. . The overall picture, the WWF said, would only get worse in coming years as global warming brought lower rainfall and increased evaporation of water and changed the pattern of snow melting from mountain areas.
. . The report proposed seven ways to tackle the problem: conserving catchments and wetlands; balancing conservation and consumption; changing attitudes to water; repairing aging infrastructure; increase charges to farmers for water use; reduce water contamination; and more study of water systems.

Aug 9, 06: Scientists say they have identified a gene that will allow rice plants to survive being completely submerged in water for up to two weeks. Most rice plants die within a week of being underwater, but the researchers hope the new gene will offer greater protection to the world's rice harvest.
. . Farmers in south-east Asia lose an estimated £524m ($1bn) each year from rice crops being destroyed by flooding. Although rice production has doubled over the past 40 years, demand is continuing to grow. [Again, more food is the problem, not the answer!]

July 18, 06: New maps developed by investigating the relationship between human population and natural resources shows where people will most likely settle through 2025.
. . Population will grow along various coastlines and in already densely populated developing countries. The number of people living within 100 km of coastlines will increase by about 35% compared to 1995, the mapmakers say. This type of migration will expose 2.75 billion people to coastal threats from global warming such as sea level rise and stronger hurricanes in addition to other natural disasters like tsunamis.
. . Gaffin and colleagues predict that by 2025, fewer people will live in southern Eastern Europe and Japan and other regions whose inhabitants will head for places that provide them with better resources.
. . Other areas expected to show declines: sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South America, the Philippines, Nepal, Turkey, Cambodia, Myanmar (Burma), and Indonesia.

July 10, 06: In a breakthrough that could help improve the treatment of male infertility, scientists have produced mice using sperm grown in the laboratory from embryonic stem cells. [I always feel another way about anything that increases the population!]

After nearly two decades of ridicule, a father has agreed to change his son's name from "Fined Six Thousand and Five Hundred" — the amount he was forced to pay in local currency for ignoring Vietnam's two-child policy.

June 30, 06: Monsanto, the world's largest seed company, has touted the Vistive soybean as a scientific breakthrough because it is ready-made for processing into healthier food oils that are low in trans fats. But the secret recipe behind Vistive doesn't include genetic material from bacteria or other organisms that Monsanto often uses to develop seeds of what become pest-resistant plants.
. . Instead, there is an enormous numbers game, a complex system of data analysis, gene screening and a transcontinental network of greenhouses churning out seeds every day of the year in search of those with the desired traits.
. . Although Monsanto is known around the world for making genetically engineered plants --derided as "Frankenfood" by critics-- it is increasingly focused on breeding as a way to develop new crops. the Vistive bean was developed through traditional breeding — mating one plant with another, again and again, until the offspring contain desired traits.
. . But Monsanto applied a new twist to the age-old process, drawing on techniques the company developed over a decade of splicing genes. The techniques — like using "gene markers" to spot promising seeds and crunching the data in supercomputers — shaved at least three years off the process of moving Vistive from the drawing board to the marketplace.

June 30, 06: Japan, struggling to deal with a falling birth rate and an aging population, said today its ratio of elderly people to total population was now the world's highest, surpassing that of Italy. [And once they're past this spike, they'll be very prosperous!]

June 22, 06: "Japanese people simply aren't having sex", Dr. Kunio Kitamura, director of the Japan Family Planning Association, was quoted as saying.
. . An association survey of 936 people between the ages of 16 and 49 showed 31% had not had sex for more than a month "for no particular reason" -- a condition known as "sexless." "As much as subsidies and welfare programs are important, sexlessness is also a critical issue in this problem."
. . Japan's fertility rate --the average number of children a woman bears in her lifetime-- fell to an all-time low of 1.25 last year. Demographers say a rate of 2.1 is needed to keep a population from declining. [Why not say: "a rate under 2.1 is needed to keep a population from disasterously increasing."]
. . Japan came last among 41 nations in a poll last year by condom manufacturer Durex, with lovers there having sex just 45 times a year compared to a global average of 103 times a year.

June 21, 06: More than 3 million babies have been born following fertility treatment since the birth of the first IVF child nearly three decades ago, according to a report.

June 14, 06: Men face a future medley of birth control methods as varied as the female lineup of sponges, pills, and diaphragms.
. . There's an implant for men that releases the same chemicals found in "the Pill", a gel that kills off the sneaky seeds, and a plug that brings hyperactive sperm to a standstill. For perfectly planned baby-making, tomorrow's contraceptives for guys even promise reversibility.
. . Several new male contraceptives that kill sperm, block sperm production or prevent sperm from leaving the body have recently begun clinical trials and may make their way to doctor offices and into the bedroom within the next few years. The latest push by pharmaceutical companies makes hormonal medicines the most likely mode to make it to market first.
. . Similar to the way the birth control pill for women suppresses ovulation, a male version keeps men from making sperm. The "pills" being tested for men are actually implants that release a hormone called progestin, which is also found in most female birth control pills.
. . Sperm are produced in the testis, controlled by several hormones that are secreted by the hypothalamus and pituitary glands in the brain. When you add a dose of progestin, it shuts down the hormones that produce sperm.
. . Unfortunately, progestin also stops the production of testosterone, the hormone that gives men many of their manly characteristics such as muscle mass and libido. To maintain their maleness, men with the implants also receive shots to boost testosterone levels. The regimen isn't simple either: implants need to be replaced annually, and shots come every three months.
. . The Intra Vas Device (IVD) obstructs sperm traveling in the tubes called the vas deferens. The sperm stops, but men still produce an ejaculate. The sperm-less secretions are made in the seminal vesicle, which isn't barricaded by the IVD. Although the device is implanted in a procedure similar to a vasectomy, in this case the vas deferens is kept intact. However, the reversibility of the IVD has yet to be fully tested.
. . Another clinical trial underway in India is testing a removable gel injected into the vas deferns. The gel, called Reversible Inhibition of Sperm Under Guidance (RISUG), partially blocks the tubes and also kills any sperm that manage to get by.

June 5, 06: The United Nations used World Environment Day today to warn that the growth of deserts was a growing obstacle to ending poverty and a threat to peace. To mark the day under the slogan "Don't desert drylands!", environmentalists were planting trees to slow erosion, cleaning cities, going on marches and holding special lessons in school.
. . Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, whose largely desert country was officially hosting the campaign, urged the adoption of a World Charter on Deserts to help achieve a Millennium Goal of halving poverty by 2015.
. . The United Nations says almost a quarter of the world's land surface is already desert, and the share is growing. "Across the planet, poverty, unsustainable land management & climate change are turning drylands into deserts, and desertification in turn exacerbates and leads to poverty", U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said.
. . In Beijing, a city of more than 16 million, where 1,000 new vehicles take to the road every day, a quarter of a million people pledged to leave their cars at home to mark the day.
. . The United Nations said land degradation caused an estimated loss of $42 billion a year from agricultural production, without counting human suffering from famine. Many of the world's crop-growing regions are drylands, which cover 41% of the planet's land surface and are home to 2 billion people. Much of the pressure on land quality comes from a surge in world population to 6.5 billion now from 2.5 billion in 1950.
. . The World Bank said it was becoming "carbon neutral" in its main office and all operational travel from it. This means the "greenhouse gas" emissions from these activities have been offset by spending on renewable energy and energy efficiency.
. . The European Union stepped up its campaign against climate change with a publicity drive to convince people that small changes in daily routine can help the environment significantly.

May 24, 06: Earlier this month, the UN's children's agency, Unicef, said that 57 million of the world's 146 million malnourished children under the age of five were in India, by far the largest share of any nation. Nearly half of Indian under-fives are underweight, it said. According to official figures, about 1.2 million children under five die from malnutrition in India every year.
. . Despite the need, tons of grain and vegetables rot in granaries every year due to lack of adequate storage. Three decades ago, India proudly announced that a green revolution engineered since independence from Britain had ensured that extreme hunger would be a thing of the past.
. . Yet malnutrition persists, often reflecting cultural traditions that are far harder to tackle than a simple lack of food: millions of women are poorly educated, marry when they are barely out of puberty and have little or no say in the nutrition of their children.
. . Across much of India's vast countryside, superstitious mothers only begin to breastfeed their babies three days after giving birth, believing that the yellow colostrom that a mother produces after a pregnancy and a rich source of protein and protection against infection, is dirty.
. . The situation has actually improved: ten years ago, more than six million children died every year in India from malnutrition.

By 2030, 72 million people, or nearly one out of every five Americans, will be 65 or older. Nearly 8,000 people are now turning 60 every day. We can expect a major wave of retirements starting in 2011.

May 8, 06: In new research at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, scientists have mapped a hormone-signaling pathway that regulates plant height. The work could lead to sturdier rice, wheat, corn and soybean crops, as well as grass that rarely if ever needs mowing. "By manipulating the steroid pathway ... we think we can regulate plant stature and yield." They studied a family of plant hormones known as brassinosteroids.

May 4, 06: In the last 50 years, since the great diversions upstream to irrigate a growing economy, the river flow that fed the Dead Sea has decreased to 8% of its former pour. The lake is dropping about a meter a year, and its surface area is just a third of what it once was.

May 2, 06: [ HORRORS!! ] Alarmed by a falling birth rate and rapidly aging population, Japanese policymakers are thinking about allowing TV ads for matchmaking agencies in the hope that an increase in couples will result in more kids. [Talk about snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory! ]

Apr 25, 06: The threat of being eaten could drive the march of Mormon crickets as they munch their way across millions of acres in the arid West, new research suggests.
. . They found that the insects that move in large bands survive on salt and protein found in seeds, flowers, dead animals and feces. But when those food sources are absent, the bugs turn to what's available —-each other. The crickets themselves are "walking packages of protein and salt".
. . Also known as flightless katydids, Mormon crickets can destroy 40% to 50% of the vegetation in their path. About 12 million acres were infested by the insects last year in Nevada.
. . Lorch said it's uncertain whether the danger of being eaten from behind really motivates the crickets at the head of the column to step up the pace. The insects are not cognizant, but the danger could be hard wired into their tiny brains, he said.

Apr 16, 06: The UK is about to run out of its own natural resources and become dependent on supplies from abroad, a report says. A study by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) and the Open University says 16 April is the day when the nation goes into "ecological debt".
. . It warns if annual global consumption levels matched the UK's, it would take 3.1 Earths to meet the demand. In 1961, the Earth could have supported everyone having a UK lifestyle. The findings are based on the concept of "ecological footprints", a system of measuring how much land and water a human population needs to produce the resources it consumes and absorb the resulting waste.
. . The report, produced by Nef and the Open University's geography department, uses a number of examples that it says illustrate how resources are being wasted, including:
. . * In 2004, the UK exported 1,500 tons of fresh potatoes to Germany, and imported 1,500 tons of the same product from the same country
. . * Imported 465 tons of gingerbread, but exported 460 tons of the same produce
. . * Sent 10,200 tons of milk and cream to France, yet imported 9,900 tons of the dairy goods from France
. . In 2004, the UK lost its energy independent status when it became a net importer of gas following lower returns from the North Sea fields.

Apr 4, 06: A reversible, nonhormonal male contraceptive has been tested by volunteers in India for the last 15 years, but the tests were stopped 4 years ago because of concerns about side effects. Now, this contraceptive has again received approval to begin enrolling additional study volunteers. This new male contraceptive, which uses a gel to disable active sperm, is called RISUG (short for Reversible Inhibition of Sperm Under Guidance), "provides 10 or more years of protection after a 10-15 minute procedure." But tests in the U.S. should not start before several years.

In the RISUG study, doctors inject a gel into the tube that sperm travel through after they are produced (known as the vas deferens). The gel then disables the sperm as they swim by. In study animals, male fertility returns if the RISUG is flushed out with another injection that dissolves the gel.

Mar 27, 06: As he pores over plant tissue and petri dishes in a biotech seed lab in Johnston, Iowa, Luke Mehlo is half a world away from his home in South Africa. The goal is to turn sorghum --a common U.S. row crop used in animal feed, cereals and industrial products-- into a plant that can not only weather devastating drought but also yield a rich blend of vitamins and minerals. Researchers believe such a combination could help combat the hunger and malnutrition ravaging parts of Africa.
. . While conventional sorghum is already known to do well in drought conditions, it lacks certain key nutrients. By taking genes from other crops as well as manipulating genes within the sorghum plant itself, scientists believe they can remake sorghum into a more easily digestible crop richer in vitamins A and E, iron, zinc and amino acids and protein.
. . Along with the sorghum project, the Gates group is funding projects aimed at creating more nutritious bananas, cassava and rice as part of a total of $450 million in grants for improved nutrition, disease prevention and treatment, Dahl said. Biotech sorghum and other crops are not expected to eradicate the devastation caused by drought, but they could partly ease the pain, researchers believe.

Mar 20, 06: Farms and their wasteful irrigation systems are major contributors to water scarcity on the globe, nations at a world water summit said.
. . Farming accounts for 70% of the water consumed and most of its wasteful use, said representatives of 130 nations at the World Water Forum discussing water management. With 525 million small farms in the world --and 2.5 billion people living off the land-- farmers suffer the most from the problems discussed at the forum: poverty, disease, and the lack of sanitation and clean water. Drought-parched fields, withered corn stalks and skinny cattle make up the face of the crisis in the developing world.
. . Traditionally, governments have responded to the problems of small farmers --defined as those with plots of 5 acres or less-- with big dam projects. But most small farms are so high up in the hills or removed from rivers that they cannot benefit from them. The answer is more efficient irrigation systems, said Ute Collier, of the World Wildlife Fund. "We can't afford to waste water in irrigation systems that are 30 to 40% efficient", he said. "If we could get that part of the equation done, we could probably cut down the number of dams we're building by half, at least."

Mar 20, 06: Many of the world's poor live on less than 2.5 gallons of water per day --one-thirtieth of the daily usage in developed nations. Other problems include pesticide and herbicide runoff from farm fields that pollute rivers and lakes, as well as soil erosion and salt buildup from irrigation.
. . In Mexico, host of the international forum, farm water disputes are among the most sensitive issues in its relations with the United States. In 2004, farmers in Texas were outraged when Mexico failed to let billions of gallons of water flow into a border river under a 1944 treaty. Texans also accused Mexico of growing alfalfa --a water-hungry feed crop-- in desert areas. One state politician suggested that the United States retaliate by reducing its flow into another border river, the Colorado.
. . Europe also has its conflicts. Spain would like France to share some of its water, but Rocard, France's former prime minister, said the French are reluctant to do so until the Spaniards improve their water management.
. . The numbers behind the world's water crisis are daunting. About 1.1 billion people lack clean drinking water, causing diseases that kill 3.1 million people a year. And 1.7 million deaths could be prevented with better sanitation.Some of those attending the 4th World Water Forum in Mexico City focused instead on smaller numbers, like the average distance women in developing countries walk each day to fetch water: just under 4 miles.
. . Simple solutions can help, experts said Sunday. In Morocco, a World Bank project that moved water taps closer to villages increased school attendance by girls in six provinces by 20% over four years. This and other projects under discussion here require a fraction of the cost of other solutions, like big dams.
. . There are other small numbers, like three: the estimated percentage of Africa's hydropower potential that is used — compared to about 75% in Europe. A majority of Africans lack regular electricity, preventing them from operating pumps to extract water from wells.
. . Large dams can also be easier to maintain than small ones, said Gerald Galloway, a civil engineering professor and visiting scholar with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
. . Others disagree. "It's going to be all the problems with big dams revisited", said Jamie Pittock, director of the World Wildlife Fund. He said that with big dams or irrigation projects, water doesn't reach the smallest, remote farms. Instead, Pittock's group is promoting the restoration of thousands of small, community earthen dams dating as far back as the 13th century.

Mar 20, 06: Libyans like to call it "the eighth wonder of the world". The Great Man-Made River Project has the potential to transform Libyan life in all sorts of ways.
. . Following the Great Al-Fatah Revolution in 1969, industrialization put even more strain on water supplies. Coastal aquifers became contaminated with sea water, to such an extent that the water in Benghazi (Libya's second city) was undrinkable. Finding a supply of fresh, clean water became a government priority. Oil exploration in the 1950s had revealed vast aquifers beneath Libya's southern desert. According to radiocarbon analysis, some of the water in the aquifers was 40,000 years old.
. . After weighing up the relative costs of desalination or transporting water from Europe, Libyan economists decided that the cheapest option was to construct a network of pipelines to transport water from the desert to the coastal cities, where most Libyans live.
. . Over the country as a whole, 130,000 hectares of land will be irrigated for new farms. Some land will be given to small farmers who will grow produce for the domestic market. Large farms, run at first with foreign help, will concentrate on the crops that Libya currently has to import: wheat, oats, corn and barley. Because the soil is so fertile, agronomists hope to grow two cereal crops a year.

Mar 12, 06: [water has much to do w carrying capacity.] The United States is dotted by about 2.6 million man-made ponds that significantly alter natural runoff schemes by trapping a previously unknown amount of sediment. The number was generated in a new review of satellite images. Most of the ponds are less than 1.5 acres in size, but they add up.
. . "These ponds capture the runoff from about 20% of the area of the U.S.", said Jeremy Bartley of the Kansas Geological Survey. "Most large-scale studies of sedimentation haven't taken these small water bodies into account. Taken together, they have a dramatic impact." The ponds collect about a quarter of the sedimentation that would otherwise end up in rivers and deltas.

By 2050, every 10 Chinese workers will support seven Chinese who are too young or too old to work.
. . According to Deutsche Bank's analysis, the percentage of working-age Chinese in the population (those aged 15 to 64) will peak around 2010 at 72.2%. Over the next 40 years, that number will fall steadily to just 60.7%, according to U.N. forecasts. The steep drop is due in large part to China's one-child policy, first implemented in 1979. Also, many Chinese retire before they are 64; China's current retirement age is 50 for most women and 60 for most men.

Mar, 06: Africa's farmland is rapidly becoming barren and incapable of sustaining the continent's already hungry population, according to a report. The report shows that more than 80% of the farmland in Sub-Saharan Africa is plagued by severe degradation. This is a major cause of poverty and hunger in sub-Saharan Africa, where one in three people is undernourished.
. . Population growth is leading to the overexploitation of farmland, depleting soil of nutrients, the report says. Farmers' inability to afford fertilizer is a major contributing factor, it adds. Deforestation, use of marginal lands, and poor agricultural practices also play a role. The International Center for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development (IFDC) report tracks soil health on the continent from 1980 to 2004.
. . More than 60% of Africa's population is directly engaged in agriculture. But crop productivity has remained stagnant, while cereal yields in Asia have risen three-fold over the past four decades.
. . "Farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa have traditionally cleared land, grown a few crops, then moved on to clear more land, leaving the land to regain fertility", the authors write in their report. "But population pressure now forces farmers to grow crop after crop, mining or depleting the soil of nutrients while giving nothing back."
. . During the 2002-2004 cropping season, about 85% of African farmland had nutrient depletion rates of more than 30kg per hectare yearly. About 40% of farmland had nutrient depletion rates greater than 60kg per hectare yearly.
. . Fertilizer use in Africa is the lowest in the world, at less than 10% of the world average.

Feb, 21, 2006: The planet's population is projected to reach 6.5 billion at 7:16 p.m. EST Saturday, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and its World Population Clock.
. . Back in 1798, when Malthus penned his classic An Essay on the Principle of Population, barely a billion Homo sapiens roamed the planet. Today, Earth's population teeters on the brink of a new milestone: 6.5 billion living, breathing humans. "Malthus would be astonished not only at the numbers of people, but at the real prosperity of about a fifth of them and the average prosperity of most of them", said demographer Joel Cohen, a professor of populations at Rockefeller and Columbia universities. "He wouldn't be surprised at the abject poverty of the lowest quarter or third."
. . The current growth of world population, estimated by Cohen at 1.1% a year, has slowed significantly from its peak of 2.1% annual growth between 1965 and 1970. "That's a phenomenal decline", said Cohen, who probed the question of whether population growth is sustainable in his book, How Many People Can Earth Support?. (The short answer: It depends.)
. . Today, a large portion of the world's population lives in nations that are at sub-replacement fertility, meaning the average woman has fewer than two children in her lifetime. Countries in this camp include former members of the Soviet Union, Japan and most of Europe. But low-birthrate countries are counterbalanced by nations like Yemen, where the average woman has seven children in her lifetime.
. . U.S. population is also growing at a steady clip, augmented by high numbers of immigrants. It is projected to hit 300 million later this year. Earth's population is expected to reach 7 billion in 2012, according to the Census Bureau.
. . For his part, Cohen estimates that if we want to support individuals indefinitely --allotting each person 3,500 calories per day from wheat and 247,000 gallons per year of fresh water-- the planet has room for only about 5 billion people.
. . But such formulas are subject to tinkering. Changes in agricultural practices, more efficient water-desalination technologies and a host of other factors can increase the number of people the planet can support. Shifts in behavior --such as acceptance of new food sources that are cheap to produce-- can have a similar effect, noted Cohen. "What most of this commentary neglects is the role of culture in defining wheat as food but not, let's say, cultured single-cell algae", he said. [All that SOOO misses the point!! Earth can support lots more, if we can just eliminate all those other species eating OUR food! ]

Feb 8, 06: Wild grasses that survive well in hot, dry places are helping create new drought-resistant wheat varieties, New Scientist magazine said. The technique was originally developed 15 years ago and is now beginning to show its worth with climate change, disease and drought threatening a crop that provides the main source of food for two billion people.
. . Scientists at the International Wheat and Maize Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico have cross-bred "synthetic wheats" created from emmer wheat and goat grass with conventional wheat to create varieties with up to 50% higher yields in drought conditions.
. . CIMMYT has also identified synthetic wheats with other desirable traits such as 50% more iron than usual or 80% more zinc.

Jan 20, 06: [remember the Club of Rome report?] If all nations were to use the same services enjoyed in developed nations, even the full extraction of metals from the Earth's crust and extensive recycling may not be enough to meet metal demands in the future, according to a new study. To investigate the environmental and social consequences of metal depletion, researchers looked at metal stocks thought to exist in the Earth, metal in use by people today, and how much is lost in landfills.
. . Using copper stocks in North America as a starting point, the researchers tracked the evolution of copper mining, use and loss during the 20th century. They then combined this information with other data to estimate what the global demand for copper and other metals would be if all nations were fully developed and using modern technologies. According to the study, all of the copper in ore, plus all of the copper currently in use, would be required to bring the world to the level of the developed nations for power transmission, construction and other services and products that depend on the metal.
. . For the entire globe, the researchers estimate that 26% of extractable copper in the Earth's crust is now lost in non-recycled wastes. For zinc, that number is 19%. These metals are not at risk of immediate depletion, however, because supplies are still large enough to meet demands and mines have become more efficient at extracting these ores. But scarce metals, such as platinum, face depletion risks this century because of the lack of suitable substitutes in such devices as catalytic converters and hydrogen fuel cells. The report says even the more plentiful metals may face similar depletion risks in the future.
. . The study, led by Thomas Graedel of Yale University, was detailed in the Jan. 17 issue of the journal for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Jan 19, 06: The onset of agriculture led to baby booms worldwide, a new study suggests. Researchers have long thought the transition from nomadic hunter-gathers to a sedentary farming economy, which occurred at different times in different parts of the world from about 9,000 to 1,000 BC, led to increases in birthrate wherever it took hold. But the idea had never been verified. The initial goal of the new research was to provide evidence for the increase in human numbers using skeletons in cemeteries throughout Europe and North Africa.
. . Looking at data from 38 cemeteries in Europe and North Africa, Naji and colleagues had previously found that the proportion of immature skeletons increased from 20% to 30% around the time agriculture was invented. "In a growing population, the proportion of immature individuals, dead or alive, is high", said Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel, research director at the National Center for Scientific Research, Paris. "In a declining population, this proportion is low."
. . Bocquet-Appel and Naji looked at data from 62 prehistoric cemeteries in North America and observed a similar trend to that of Europe and North Africa. The shifts occurred over a period of 600 to 800 years but at different times in history. "During the economic change from foraging to farming, the mortality profiles of immature skeletons in European and North American cemeteries are strikingly similar." There was more food with farming to support more people, and the sedentary nature of life allowed women to become more fertile and thus raised birthrate.
. . In nomadic societies, women carried their children around with them and often breastfed until the ages of 3 or 4. This delayed the return of women's menstruation cycle. With a farming lifestyle and less mobility, children spent less time in their mother's arms, reducing their breastfeeding to 1 to 2 years and allowing women to have more children.

Jan 6, 06: Earth is too crowded for Utopia
. . VIEWPOINT --Professor Chris Rapley is Director of the British Antarctic Survey, based in Cambridge, UK
. . The global population is higher than the Earth can sustain, argues the Director of the British Antarctic Survey in the first of a series of environmental opinion pieces on the BBC News website entitled The Green Room. Solving environmental problems such as climate change is going to be impossible without tackling the issue, he says. What about the net 76 million annual rise in the world's population, which currently stands at about 6.5 billion --more than twice what it was in 1960---and which is heading towards eight billion or so by mid-century?
. . Although reducing human emissions to the atmosphere is undoubtedly of critical importance, as are any and all measures to reduce the human environmental "footprint", the truth is that the contribution of each individual cannot be reduced to zero. Only the lack of the individual can bring it down to nothing. A rational view would be that along with a raft of measures to reduce the footprint per person, the issue of population management must be addressed.
. . Let us assume (reasonably) that an optimum human population level exists, which would provide the physical and intellectual capacity to ensure a rich and fulfilling life for all, but would represent a call upon the services of the planet which would be benign and hence sustainable over the long term. A scientific analysis can tell us what that optimum number is (perhaps 2-3 billion?).
. . So controversial is the subject that it has become the "Cinderella" of the great sustainability debate --rarely visible in public, or even in private. In interdisciplinary meetings addressing how the planet functions as an integrated whole, demographers and population specialists are usually notable by their absence.
. . Rare indeed are the opportunities for religious leaders, philosophers, moralists, policymakers, politicians and indeed the "global public" to debate the trajectory of the world's human population in the context of its stress on the Earth system, and to decide what might be done. Unless and until this changes, summits such as that in Montreal which address only part of the problem will be limited to at best very modest success, with the welfare and quality of life of future generations the ineluctable casualty.

Jan 11, 06: The Earth lacks the energy, arable land and water to enable populous and fast-growing China and India to attain Western levels of resource consumption, an environmental think tank said in a report today.
. . The Washington-based Worldwatch Institute's "State of the World 2006" report said the economic miracles in China and India masked severe air and water pollution crises in those countries, while demand for resources spurred surging worldwide oil and commodity prices. "The world's ecological capacity is simply insufficient to satisfy the ambitions of China, India, Japan, Europe and the United States as well as the aspirations of the rest of the world in a sustainable way."
. . If China and India, each with more than a billion people, were to match by 2030 the per capita use of resources of Japan, "together they would require a full planet Earth to meet their needs", it said. Per capita oil consumption in China and India is, respectively, one-fifteenth and one-thirtieth that of the United States. To attain half of U.S. consumption levels would cause the two countries to use 100 million barrels per day, more than 2005's total daily world consumption of 85 million barrels, it said.
. . Sketching a similar trajectory for grain consumption, the report says that with their shrinking and environmentally stressed farmland, China and India will buy more grain abroad, driving up prices for consumers worldwide.
. . Efforts to enlist the two Asian giants should include making China and India full members of the Group of Eight industrial nations, bringing China into the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and giving India a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, the report said.

Jan 6, 06: Solving the Earth's environmental problems means addressing the size of its human population, says the head of the UK's Antarctic research agency.
. . Professor Chris Rapley argues that the current global population of six billion is unsustainably high. Unless it is addressed, the welfare and quality of life of future generations will suffer, he adds. "If we believe that the size of the human [ecological] 'footprint' is a serious problem, and there is much evidence for this", he writes, "then a rational view would be that along with a raft of measures to reduce the footprint per person, the issue of population management must be addressed."
. . A number of studies suggest that humankind is consuming the Earth's resources at an unsustainably fast rate. Even so, the issue of population is hardly ever discussed at environmental summits or raised by green lobby groups. Professor Rapley, Director of the British Antarctic Survey, acknowledges it is a thorny question, invoking the spectre of forced population control and even eugenics.
. . He says population is one of a number of issues leading to environmental degradation of various forms, and needs a higher priority than it currently receives. "Unless and until this changes, summits such as [the recent climate change meeting] in Montreal which address only part of the problem will be limited to at best very modest success, with the welfare and quality of life of future generations the ineluctable casualty."

Dec 14, 05: Millions of the world's neediest children are not even a blip on the radar of their own governments because there is no record of their birth, the United Nation's Children's Fund UNICEF said. In its annual State of the World's Children report "Excluded and Invisible", UNICEF said one-third of the estimated 150 million children born worldwide each year were not registered -- and the number was growing.
. . From that stemmed an array of problems from pedophile abuse to slavery, the report said, estimating that 1.8 million children entered the sex industry, 5.7 million were sold into slavery and 1.2 million were trafficked each year.

Dec 9, 05: "For the poor people, they might represent the problem in terms of food production, in particular, drought and flooding. And the problem is increasing", Neira said. The report said some of the most serious problems included nutrition as degradation of fish stocks and farmland were factors in the malnutrition of some 800 million people around the world --nearly all of them in poor countries.
. . Water-associated infectious diseases claimed 3.2 million lives each year, about 6% of all deaths, the report said. Yet more than 1 billion people lacked access to safe water supplies and 2.6 billion lacked adequate sanitation, it said.

Nov 2, 05: The UN Environment Program estimates that there are about 677 lakes in Africa, holding a total of 30,000 cubic kilometers of water --the largest stored volume of any continent. Many are important sources of food and employment. But natural and human-made problems are combining to reduce the reliability of the water supply, and of foods associated with it. The UN says protecting these lakes is vital if poverty goals are to be met.

Mumbai (was Bombay) is the most densely populated region of the planet. At 45,000 people per square kilometer, Mumbai contains more than seven times the concentration of humanity than does the bustling city of Singapore (6000 per square kilometer).

Sept 23, 05: Horror-story! France announced financial incentives today for parents to have a third child, hoping to boost its fertility rate by helping people to better juggle the demands of work and family life.
. . A new measure will award $916 a month to parents who take one year's unpaid leave from work after the birth of a third child, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin announced at the close of a national conference on families. It will take effect in July 2006.
. . France's fertility rate, at an average of 1.9 children per woman, is the second highest in Europe after Ireland's, around 2. But it is still below the 2.07 level needed to prevent population decline.
. . The European Union average is around 1.5, dropping to less than 1.3 in some countries, including Greece, Spain, Italy and the new EU member nations in Eastern Europe where fertility rates dropped precipitously after the collapse of communism.

Sept 10, 05: The world is gradually winning its battle to overcome drinking water shortages through better resource management, an international conference on rivers held in Australia this week heard. But while countries including Australia and China begin to tackle problems caused by over-damming, diverting and polluting rivers, dangers are looming elsewhere, including in India.
. . China's record on water management was rated a "mixed bag", with some good achievements. The Yangtze River, with its Three Gorges Dam, flood mitigation work and better flood forecasting, was one example. Other rivers in China had done "fabulous" restoration work. In recent years, about 200 factories had been removed from one river's banks, many people had been moved and re-settled in less polluting areas, and toilets that once discharged straight into the river had been removed.

A third of Brazilians, or about 60 million people, live on $1 a day. Nearly 10% are unemployed.

Sept 8, 05: HIV/ AIDS has hurt Africa's farming communities so badly that the amount of cultivated land in some countries has declined by nearly 70%, researchers said. About 80% of Africans derive their living from agriculture, but the illness, which has infected more than 25 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, has left fewer and fewer people able to till the soil. In areas of Kenya, there has been a 68% reduction in cultivated land and a decline in cash crops such as coffee, tea and sugar.

Sept 8, 05: A resilient new strain of wheat fungus from east Africa is threatening to spread to the Middle East, Asia and the Americas and bring catastrophic crop damage, scientists said today. They said the new Ug99 form of stem rust could be spread by the wind and attacked many varieties of spring and winter wheat that were resistant to other strains of the fungus.
. . The strain could easily spread from Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia, which were the countries currently affected. "What we have to achieve is to stop this disease from spreading to other parts of the world. Otherwise we are going to see a catastrophe", said Masa Iwanaga, director general of Mexico's International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center.
. . The scientists gave no firm numbers on potential damage, but said they feared an epidemic similar to those that caused major grain losses in North America in 1903, 1905 and 1950-54 and famine in Asia. All those occurred before the cultivation of wheat varieties that were immune to stem rust, the report said.

Aug 31, 05: The key Millennium Goal of halving poverty in a decade cannot be met without better environmental protection, according to a new report. The World Resources 2005 document says that most of the world's poor depend on nature for their income. Its authors say a focus on aid has taken attention away from more complex issues such as the environment. The report is endorsed by the UN, and comes two weeks before a major summit to review progress on the Goals.
. . The report presents five case studies to reinforce its argument that environmental protection and poverty alleviation go hand in hand.
. . * in Namibia, handing communities the power to conserve wildlife led to increased incomes from employment and tourism, and a recovery in wildlife numbers
. . * in India's Maharashtra state, better management of water resources through measures like tree planting removed dependence on water imports and improved incomes
. . * in northern Tanzania, restoring traditional land management with plants improved diets, raised incomes and brought back wildlife
. . * in several Indonesian islands, training local people to document and report illegal logging protected forests and allowed the growth of activities such as river fishing which depend on trees for their sustainability
. . * in Fiji, encouraging communities to put quotas on shellfish catches returned stocks to a sustainable condition, ensuring long-term incomes.

A foreword notes the devastating figures which emerged earlier this year from a four-year study of global environmental decline, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment:
. . * organisms are disappearing at 100 to 1,000 times the "background levels" seen in the fossil record
. . * a third of all amphibians, a fifth of mammals and an eighth of all birds are threatened with extinction
. . * some 35% of mangroves and about 20% of corals have gone.

This is the latest in a stream of reports which have publicly doubted the will and ability of the global community to ensure the Goals are met, particularly in Africa, though it is unique so far in linking that lack of progress to environmental concerns.

Aug 30, 05: The number of Americans who fell into poverty rose to 37 million —-up 1.1 million from 2003-— according to Census Bureau figures released today. It marks the fourth straight increase in the government's annual poverty measure.

Aug 28, 05: Two key states have agreed to start the first stage of a $200 billion plan to link India's rivers, a scheme critics condemn as a recipe for ecological disaster and violence from those it will force from their homes.
. . The deal between Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh is a major step toward a project first mooted by the British a century ago becoming a reality, but many details remain to be worked out before work on even the first canal and dams can start.
. . The first stage involves building a 230 km canal diverting water from the Ken river to the Betwa in northern Madhya Pradesh and building a dam and small hydroelectric plant in the middle of the Panna tiger reserve, one of the most successful. More than 8,500 farmers and villagers will be forced from their homes just for the dam, and an unknown number by the canal.
. . Backers say river linking, which will eventually see 30 links across India, will provide irrigation, improve crop production, increase drinking water, provide hydroelectric power and help alleviate floods and droughts.
. . Shiva, who served on Vajpayee's river linking committee, said the project was based on flawed science and was being driven by vested interests who would gain from the huge construction projects and the shift toward water-intensive money crops, such as sugarcane and fruit and vegetables for export. "The dam inside the Panna park will wipe out the core of the park", she added.
. . She points out the Ken and Betwa rise from the same mountains and will therefore be high or low at the same time, making diverting water from the Ken damaging during floods and impossible during droughts. She also says the affected area, Bundelkand, is already well served by an ancient system of man made lakes and water tanks, adding the project would take control of water away from local communities and into the hands of the central authorities. "That will be one more reason of ecological breakdown, more corruption and more political instability."

Research: "Barbie-shaped women are more fertile."

Aug 23, 05: A human fetus is unlikely to feel pain before the third trimester, when consciousness begins to form, researchers said in a report that could fuel debate over proposed U.S. abortion legislation. Consciousness is created by brain connections between the thalamus and the cerebral cortex, and those do not begin to develop before the 23rd week and possibly not before the 30th week of gestation. The human gestation period is 38 weeks from conception.

Aug 22, 05: Investment in fish farms in Africa is urgently needed to halt a decline in fish consumption in the continent because natural stocks cannot keep up with population growth, experts said. Some 200 million Africans rely on fish as a main part of their diet, but the continent is the only region in the world where fish supplies per capita are falling. Just to maintain today's fish consumption levels, African fish supply would have to increase by 32 percent by 2020. In a continent where a third of the population is undernourished, the stakes are high.
. . One answer, according to the WorldFish Center, is to develop small-scale fish farms which are cheap and easy to set up and offer poor families a source of nutrition as well as income. [No no no... the only long-term answer is to reduce population!]
. . Fish farms can also improve the lot of people with HIV/AIDS as fish contain combinations of proteins, vitamins and minerals that fortify the body against secondary infections while increasing the effectiveness of anti-retroviral drugs. In a Malawi pilot scheme, families hit by HIV/AIDS, including many headed by widows and orphans, found that adding a small fish pond to an existing farm improved their situation without creating too much extra work.
. . Aquaculture, which has grown explosively in other regions, now provides 38 percent of fish production worldwide but less than 2 percent in sub-Saharan Africa although the continent's potential for fish farming is immense.

Aug 10, 05: Scientists have unscrambled the genetic code of rice, a development that could help end hunger around the world. The blueprint will speed up the hunt for genes that improve productivity and guard against disease and pests. In order to avoid shortages, if the population continues to increase, rice yields must increase by 30% over the next 20 years --& 30% more after that, --& 30% more after that --& 30% more after that, & everybody on earth starves to death after that.
. . According to the United Nations, rice currently provides 20% of the world's dietary energy supply, while wheat supplies 19% and maize 5%. Although rice represents 30% of global cereal production today, and production levels have doubled over the past 30 years, much more of the cereal will be needed in the future.
. . Rice is genetically similar to maize, wheat, barley, rye, sorghum and sugarcane. So understanding the genomes of these plants is now a small step away. Rice is the Rosetta Stone for crop genomes. Rice's similarity to barley has also helped researchers identify genes responsible for resistance to barley powdery mildew and stem rust, two major crop diseases.

Australia's 400,000 Aboriginals and Torres Strait islanders, who make up 2% of the 20 million population, remain the most disadvantaged group, dying 20 years younger than other Australians amid high rates of unemployment and alcohol abuse.

July 29, 05: Flocks of grain-eating quelea birds have destroyed crops in Nigeria's arid far north, raising fears of further food shortages in a region just south of drought-ravaged Niger, officials said. The birds, driven south by the drought in Niger, have destroyed tens of thousands of hectares of rice, corn and maize fields.
. . A swarm of quelea --the world's most abundant bird species which can travel in flocks several hundred thousand strong-- can devour a field of crops in minutes.
. . Last year, swarms of locusts ravaged vast swathes of West Africa, including the far north of Nigeria, in the worst infestation in 15 years.

July 29, 05: Many countries are wasting millions of dollars planting trees because of myths that forests always help improve water flows and offset erosion, a British-led study said. Many trees, especially fast-growing species like pines and eucalyptus favored by the paper industry, suck more water from the ground than other crops, it said. The water transpires from the leaves and so the trees dry out the land.
. . Forests have many other benefits --ranging from habitats for birds, insects or animals to human sources of building materials and firewood. But the report said it was a myth that forests acted as sponges that soak up rain, releasing it throughout the year and ensuring more regular flows in rivers. Instead, trees' deep roots often aggravate water shortages in dry seasons. It also said it was wrong to believe forests attracted more clouds and rainfall or that tree roots helped slow erosion more than those of short plants. It said the myths had been anchored in cultural history since at least the 17th century.
. . The study said trees often showed the "clothes line" effect. Just as wet clothes dry quicker if hung out rather than left lying on the ground, the enormous combined surface of trees' leaves combined with their deep roots meant they transpired more water into the air than other crops, it said.
. . The report said Panama was seeking hundreds of millions of dollars from the World Bank to back a project to plant trees on the apparently mistaken belief that it would attract more rainfall to help feed the Panama Canal. Other countries, from China to Mexico, also had costly afforestation schemes at least partly based on misconceptions about water. In the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, the study said conversion of agricultural land to forests had damaged water supplies, cutting flows by 16-26 percent.
. . The World Commission on Water has estimated that demand for water will increase by about 50 percent in the next 30 years and that around four billion people, or about half of the world's population in 2025, will have problems with supplies.

July 19, 05: India is unlikely to meet a target of increasing forest cover to one-third of its territory by 2012 because some trees will be cut for industrial activity to meet the needs of economic development. The environment and forests ministry said in its 2003 forest report that 23.68 percent or 778,229 sq km (300,373 sq miles) of the nation's area was covered by forests, which included trees in non-forested areas, up a marginal 0.65 percent from 2001.
. . "If we do not give some (forest) land to industrial and mining sectors, we would jeopardize economic growth." But Raja said that with current afforestation efforts, India would reach its 2007 target of 25 percent forest cover. Raja defended the policy of allowing limited mining in forested areas but added that mining firms had to compensate by planting twice the number of trees they cut.
. . The ministry's forest report said while the overall forest cover increased marginally in 2003, the area under dense forests --which have a canopy density of above 40 percent-- was down by 26,245 sq km from 416,089 sq km in 2001 due to deforestation. But the area under open forests --which have less than 40 percent canopy density-- rose 29,040 sq km in 2003 to 287,769 sq km from the 2001 figure.

July 16, 05: Some 70 million people a year migrate from the country to cities. That is about 130 a minute, says Robert Neuwirth, author of Shadow Cities. Many of these set up home in squats, put together from scarce materials, if put together at all. There are a billion squatters in 2005. By 2050, that figure will reach three billion. At this rate, our future cities may turn out to be quasi-temporary, low-tech shacks, missing the basics of human life, such as water and electricity, still belching out the waste of fuels that warm the globe.
. . Internationally renowned designer, sustainability architect and author of Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough, argues that we can only think of our future cities if we think about what our intention is as a species. The question for designers of what is dubbed the Next City is how to love all species all the time.
. . Mr McDonough's ideas for the Next City are about to be played out in China where his company has been charged with building seven entirely new cities. His book has been adopted as government policy in China, which needs to house 400 million more people in the next 12 years. Everything in his cities is designed from the molecule up. They meet the usual requirements for cost, performance, and function. But they also mean business when it comes to ecological intelligence and social justice.
. . "The energy systems will be solar energy. China will be largest solar manufacturer in the world", says McDonough. To top the Next City, in McDonough's thinking, the soil will be moved onto the roofs. The city will be inhabited by many species and the top of the city will be green.
. . He says the Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.

July 13, 05: Africa may seem incapable of growing enough food to feed its starving millions, but in the fields of South Africa's Free State, farmers are taking in more maize than they know what to do with. While most African countries run at a substantial food deficit, with millions dependent on food aid and malnutrition rife, South African maize yields per hectare are the highest on record -- and farmers say it is not just down to good weather.
. . "If you look at rainfall patterns, a lot of other African countries get more than we do", says Laurie Bosman, President of South Africa's commercial farming union Agri SA. "Only 14% of our country is suitable for agriculture."
. . This year's rains were good, but even in a bad year South Africa produces a surplus. This year, farmers say new improved seed types --some genetically modified-- have helped the white-dominated commercial farming sector to the highest yields on record, and prices so low farmers fear they may go bankrupt. But across most of the continent, food production is dominated by small-scale subsistence farmers, much less sophisticated in their techniques and much more vulnerable to climate shocks such as sudden rain failure.
. . From Niger to Zimbabwe, Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia, crop failure leaves millions hungry. In Southern Africa, the World Food Program says 10 million will need aid after rains failed. Only a couple of miles from full silos and healthy fields in South Africa's Free State, Lesotho's maize production continues to dwindle, with yields falling to 450-500 kg a hectare against 1400 in the 1970s.
. . With almost a third of the population HIV positive, many farmers have died or are either too sick to tend their fields properly. AIDS and crop failure lead to an increasing cycle of poverty that leaves them unable to buy seeds or tools. While HIV is the dominant issue in Southern Africa, elsewhere war and locust plagues have done damage. In Eritrea, land mines left over from a border war with Ethiopia prevent cultivation, while conscription takes workers from the land.
. . In Angola, weather is almost irrelevant if farmers cannot get their crops to market because roads have been destroyed by war and neglect. Angolan farmers produce some 5,000 tons of coffee a year, but 2,000 tons rots on the farms. In the worst affected countries, war, illness and poverty combine with ever-worsening drought -- which environmentalists fear could become worse as climate change bites.
. . "Yearly rainfall rates have been decreasing since the late 1990s, falling from about 500mm (half meter) to nearly 200mm", said a United Nations report on Eritrea earlier this year.

To define a gathering of people... instead of cities with borders, rank world *agglomerations and define an agglomeration as a central city and neighboring communities linked to it by continuous built-up areas or many commuters.
. . On that basis, Tokyo, Japan is the most populous city on the planet with 34 million. The Tokyo agglomeration includes Yokohama and Kawasaki.
. . Brinkhoff credits Mexico City with 22.4 million (including Nezahualcoyotl, Ecatepec, and Naucalpan). Seoul comes in third with 22.1 million

In educated south-east India, birth rates are almost as low as Europe's.

June 19, 05: [HORROR-STORY OF THE MONTH!!!] Arkansas' best-known big family will be getting bigger in the fall. Michelle Duggar and her husband, former state Rep. Jim Bob Duggar, say they're expecting their 16th child. Michelle Duggar was honored [!] in April 2004 with the state's Young Mother award. "We consider each one a blessing from the Lord and we would both love to have some more."
. . Baby girl Duggar will join her family in a new, 7,000-square-foot house that the Duggars have been building for the last two years. When it's complete, the home will have a commercial kitchen, 10 bathrooms, master and guest bedrooms, a laundry room with four washers and eight dryers, and two dormitory-style bedrooms —-one for the boys and one for the girls.

June 5, 05: From Japan to Jamaica, millions marked World Environment Day on Sunday by planting trees or staging rallies as the United Nations urged better "green" city planning to cope with runaway urban growth. In San Francisco, the main host of the 2005 event, mayors from more than 50 cities including Shanghai, Kabul, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Phnom Penh, Jakarta, Rome and Istanbul planned to sign up for a scheme setting new green standards for cities. Cities would be ranked from zero to four stars according to compliance with a set of 21 targets.
. . By 2030, more than 60% of the world's population will live in cities, up from almost half now and just a third in 1950. "Already, one of every three urban dwellers lives in a slum", Annan said.

May 20, 05: If we continue with current rates of species extinction, we will have no chance of rolling back poverty and the lives of all humans will be diminished. That is the stark warning to come out of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), the most comprehensive audit of the health of our planet to date. The message is written large in Ecosystems and Human Well-being: the Biodiversity Synthesis Report.
. . Organisms are disappearing at something like 100 to 1,000 times the "background levels" seen in the fossil record. Scientists warn that removing so many species puts our own existence at risk.
. . It will certainly make it much harder to lift the world's poor out of hardship given that these people are often the most vulnerable to ecosystem degradation, the researchers say.

May 19, 05: Deforestation in the Amazon rain forest in 2004 was the second worst ever, figures released by the Brazilian government show. Satellite photos and data showed that ranchers, soybean farmers and loggers burned and cut down a near-record area of 10,088 square miles of rain forest in the 12 months ending in August 2004, the Brazilian Environmental Ministry said. The destruction was nearly 6% higher than in the same period the year before, when 9,500 square miles were destroyed.
. . The deforestation hit record numbers in 1995, when the Amazon shrank a record 11,200 square miles, an area roughly the size of Belgium or the American state of Massachusetts.
. . The Amazon forest —-which sprawls over 1.6 million square miles and covers more than half the country-— is a key component of the global environment. The jungle is sometimes called the world's "lung" because its billions of trees produce oxygen and absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
. . Environmentalists were shocked with the new figures, which were announced nearly a year after the Brazilian government announced a $140 million package to curtail destruction.

May 19, 05: More than half of all humans will soon be living in cities, according to a prediction by the United Nations. There are concerns that, in developing countries, basic provisions in cities will lag behind population growth.
. . In 1900, only 14% of humanity lived in cities. By the century's close, 47% of us did so. This change is revealed in the growth of the number of medium-sized cities. In 1950, there were 83 cities with populations exceeding one million; but by 2000, this had risen to 411.
. . Conurbations: In 2000, there were 18 megacities. It is now at 20 and is expected to increase to 22 by 2010. In the US, 80% of the population lives in cities. In the developing world that proportion has been much less until recently.
. . Analysts fear that in developing countries, the provision of houses and basic services will not be able to keep pace with the growing population. One billion people --one-sixth of the world's population-- now live in shanty towns.

In Britain, more babies with Down syndrome are aborted than are allowed to be born. In America, more than 80% of the babies diagnosed prenatally with Down syndrome are aborted. [If it isn't, what becomes of the perfect child that would've been born a year later?!!]

In the US, 100,000 cattle are slaughtered every day.

Apr 20, 05: Scientists have unravelled the genome of the rice plant's greatest fungal menace, a harvest-wrecking foe that each year destroys the potential to feed 60 million people. Magnaporthe grisea is the first pathogenic plant fungus to have its genetic code unravelled, a feat that the researchers hope will open the way to newer, smarter and less damaging weapons against this menace.
. . In India, more than 266,000 tons of rice are lost each year, about 0.8 percent of total yield. In Japan, the disease can infect about 865,000 hectares of rice fields. In the Philippines, many thousand hectares (acres) of rice fields suffer more than 50 percent yield losses, says IRRI.
. . M. grisea's cousins also attack some 50 other kinds of grass plants, including wheat, barley and millet.
. . The fungus is believed to be able to secrete 739 proteins, twice as many in other researched funguses, in order to penetrate and infect its host.

Apr 15, 05: British households throw about a fifth of their food, untouched and uneaten, straight into the rubbish bin, according to a BBC radio show. Britons no longer prepare meals from left-over scraps and over-cautiously chuck food, which may be perfectly edible, as soon as it passes its sell-by date.

Mar 28, 05: The bright lights and fast living of China's richest city have taken a heavy toll on the local sperm count. Shanghai's sperm bank had managed to collect just 6,000 samples in two years and many of those were of "poor quality", the Shanghai Daily said. "More than 2,000 people came here for physical checks and only 400 were found to be qualified" to donate sperm.
. . Shanghai, trying to reverse more than a decade of slowing population growth, abolished rewards last September for married couples who decide not to have children. Almost a 10th of married couples in Shanghai were believed to be infertile, and about 10% of those turned to a sperm bank for help.
. . China imposes strict family planning rules that typically allow couples to have just one child. But those have eased over the years as it faces an estimated $300 billion shortfall in its pension system while its populace rapidly ages.

Mar 15, 05: 3% of the world’s land surface is covered with urban areas, an increase of at least 50% over previous estimates, scientists said this week. The Global Rural Urban Mapping Project (GRUMP) combined satellite images of urban lights at night with population data, painting a more accurate picture than scientists had before.
. . The project identified 75,000 distinct urban settlements worldwide. Many are clumped. For instance, Tokyo, which is the largest urban area with 30,000 square-kilometers, is made up of more than 500 connected settlements. Sorting through the relevant data, GRUMP found that there are only 24,000 urban areas with 5,000 persons or more.

Mar 11, 05: An Indian *state government has offered to pay 100,000 rupees ($2,300) cash to families who have just one daughter in a bid to counteract traditional preferences for sons and balance the sex ratio. The cash incentive will be paid to the daughters when they reach 20 years of age, provided their parents have had only one child and have undertaken birth control operations, officials said. India has banned pre-natal sex testing through an act of parliament but non-government agencies say the law is basically toothless and sex determination tests are common.
. . The southern state of Andhra Pradesh has a sex ratio of 943 females to 1,000 males. Sex determination tests and female feticide are common in small towns and rural areas of the largely farming state.
. . In India, where millions of couples still hanker for a male child, the overall sex ratio is 927 females to 1,000 males, even fewer than the 945-to-1,000 of a decade ago. It has one of the lowest female-to-male ratios in the world.
. . Many couples see the boy as growing up to be a bread-winner and providing for them in their old age, unlike a daughter who will be married off and become part of her husband's family.

Feb 25, 05: Most single Japanese women prefer not to marry and believe they can live happily alone for the rest of their life, a poll showed, casting another shadow on the future of a country plagued by a falling birthrate. [very biased reporting! It's not a shadow, it's a bright light; & it's not "plagued", it's literally lifesaving! ] About seven in ten single Japanese women surveyed by the conservative Yomiuri newspaper said they would rather stay unwed.
. . Japan's government is struggling to stem a tumbling birthrate and keep the population from shrinking. [insane!] The country's fertility rate --the average number of children born to a woman during her lifetime-- fell to 1.29 in 2003, the lowest in the post-World War II period. In Tokyo, the figure was a startling 0.9987.
. . Japan said that its population grew only 0.05% in the year to Oct. 1, its slowest increase in 54 years. Japan's population totaled an estimated 127,687,000 as of Oct. 1, 2004. A government think tank has forecast that Japan's population will peak in 2006 and start to shrink the following year.
. . If present trends persist, the population would fall to about 100.6 million in 2050. Among oft-cited reasons for the falling birthrate are higher education levels, changing attitudes toward marriage and individual freedom, the high financial burden of child rearing, and the hardships involved for working women given long hours on the job and a persistent dearth of daycare.

Feb 25, 05: World population 'to rise by 40%'. The world's population is expected to rise from the current 6.5 billion to 9.1 billion by 2050, the UN says. Virtually all the growth will be in the developing world. The population of developed countries will remain almost static at 1.2 billion.
. . It says India will overtake China as the world's most populous country by 2030 - five years earlier than previously expected. The new report predicts that the population in the world's 50 poorest countries will more than double by 2050. It says that nations such as Afghanistan, Chad and East Timor will see their numbers going up three-fold.
. . Fertility is expected to decline from 2.6 children per woman today to slightly over 2 children per woman in 2050.

Feb 21, 05: [Incredible stupidity!] Hong Kong's deputy leader has urged young couples to get down to business and start producing more babies to reverse a potentially damaging fall in the birth rate. Chief Secretary Donald Tsang said prospective parents should have at least three children for the good of the southern Chinese autonomous region. His comments came after government officials revealed the city's fertility rate was just 0.9 babies for each woman of child-bearing age --half the 2.1 needed to continue their catastropic population growth.
. . The population of Hong Kong rose slightly to 6.9 million at the end of last year, largely because of immigration from neighboring mainland China.

Medical studies show weight problems pose a greater health threat than malnutrition in Brazil, where up to 46 million people go hungry each day. Brazil's population is about 180 million.

Jan 10, 05: A growing population coupled with diminishing fresh water supplies should force major changes in the way the world's farmers water their crops in the coming decades, a recent study recommends.
. . Since agriculture uses about 70% of the world's fresh water every year, farming should be the focus of intense conservation efforts, said David Pimentel, a professor at Cornell University and primary author of the study."Agriculture is going to have to give up water as the population grows. States like California, Colorado, Texas and Nebraska are going to have to make some major changes."
. . The study said farmers should use water-conserving irrigation methods combined with water and soil conservation practices to minimize run-off. The study also suggests governments eliminate water subsidies to farmers to encourage more efficient water use, work to reduce water pollution and protect forests and wetlands.
. . In parts of Arizona, water from major aquifers is now being withdrawn more than 10 times faster than it can be recharged by rainfall. In California, agriculture accounts for about 3% of the state's economic production but consumes 85% of the fresh water. The United Nations estimates world population will rise to 9.4 billion by 2050 from about 6.3 billion now.
. . Pimentel cites the massive Ogallala aquifer, under parts of Nebraska, South Dakota, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas, that supplies water to a fifth of all irrigated land in the country. The underground water source has dropped 33% since 1950 — half the volume of Lake Erie! "We are using tomorrow's water today to meet our food needs", she said.
. . Bob Stallman, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation and a Texas-based rice farmer. "Frankly, I think wars will be fought over water."
. . Farmers should turn to drip irrigation, a system that pipes water directly to plants, or better sprinklers that can cut water use by 50 to 80%. But drip systems could be at least 30% more expensive.
. . Government subsidies only exacerbate the problem. The United States provides $2.5 billion to $4.4 billion in annual construction subsidies for irrigation, the study said. Pimentel argues that cutting those subsidies would encourage farmers to conserve.
. . Adding to the problem in the United States is a population shift from rainfall-rich areas like the Northeast to warmer, drier areas in the South and Southwest.
. . It takes 3,500 liters of water to produce one kilogram of chicken, but 43,000 liters for the same amount of beef, he said. Rice needs about 1,600 liters of water per kilogram, but corn requires just 650 liters.

Jan 6, 05: China named the first baby born at a Beijing hospital today as the 1.3 billionth person of the world's most populous nation, more than two decades after a one-child policy was introduced to keep its numbers in check. China's population exploded after the late Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong exhorted the people to multiply in the 1950s to make the country strong.
. . But China put the brakes on growth with the tough one-child rule and is now worried about finding jobs for the masses and caring for the elderly. A hefty fine is slapped on urban residents with more than one child. Rural folk and members of ethnic minority groups can have a maximum of two children. While the rules have helped China curb its birth rate from more than 33 births per 1,000 population in 1970 to less than eight per 1,000 per year three decades later, the country faces new demographic challenges over how to support an aging population.
. . China is expected to add eight million to its population each year, the U.N. Population Fund says, and has no plans to ease the one-child policy despite concerns of low urban birth rates. The birth rate is highest in the largely rural, impoverished west, while it is lowest in booming Shanghai.
. . The rules on family size have also created a gender imbalance, with about 117 boys for 100 girls, as a cultural preference for sons prompts couples, usually in rural areas, to abort girls.
. . India, the world's second-most populous nation, has just over 1 billion people and could overtake China by 2035 if current trends continue, according to India's census office.

Dec 22, 04: There are now more dogs and cats in Italian homes than children. And, if statistical projections in a study published on Wednesday prove right, the pitter-patter of little Italian feet will increasingly give way to that of little Italian paws.
. . According to the study published in Rome's La Repubblica, there are at least 14.5 million dogs and cats in Italian homes compared with 8.7 million children under the age of 15.
. . Italy has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe despite economic incentives for couples to have children.

Dec 22, 04: A recent study found 40 to 50% of all U.S. food ready for harvest never gets eaten. Anthropologist Timothy Jones of the University of Arizona spent 10 years studying the flow of food from farms and orchards to grocery stores, kitchens and landfills. Jones says vegetable growers are like riverboat gamblers, playing the commodity market odds and, upon losing a bet, simply plowing a field under. The average household tosses out 14% of the food it buys. A quarter of that is never even opened. The cost per household: $590 a year just in meat, fruits, vegetables and grain products.

Dec 16, 04: A quarter of the people in the world still drink filthy water and live miles from electrical power; nearly half the world lacks sewage treatment. Environmental engineer Bruce Logan and his team at Penn State are working to remedy all three problems at once. They have created a fuel cell that uses wastewater to generate electricity, and spits out pure water in the process.

Dec 14, 04: The girls in villages near the languid waters of the Nile were always told they could do no better than to marry young, as early as 11, no later than 16.
. . Eventually, four dozen other girls considered to be near marrying age --illiterate and seemingly unremarkable 13- and 14-year-olds -- embarked on a small, brave experiment that questioned how and why girls are made into brides. In this farming community 120 miles south of Cairo, the youngsters were immersed, over 2 1/2 years, in six years' worth of study and buffeted by far more than ABCs. Ping-pong was on the agenda. So was electrical wiring and cooking, with each girl learning to pull apart a light socket and, as importantly, finesse a smooth tomato puree. Soon the girls were challenged by other mysteries of life. Did they know the names of their own body parts? What were they used for? Was pregnancy something that their bony hips, flat chests and teenage brains could handle?
. . Child marriage exists almost everywhere in the world, but slums and rural areas of developing countries produce some of the most luckless young brides. Daquf's girls were part of a fresh and holistic approach to changing possibilities and expectations of adolescent girls and their families in rural Egypt.
. . The web of programs launched in 2001--based in literacy, sports, life skills education and family seminars--is being examined as a possible model for the rest of Egypt and other troubled spots to ensure that childhood doesn't end in forced marriage.
. . In many countries, social workers have combated child marriage through education programs. India, for instance, has focused on keeping girls in school with the idea that a one- or two-year delay in marriage has a positive effect on their health.
. . Still, even with a broad government effort, girls often do not find support within their families to remain in school. Unless families and communities are pulled in to help preserve a girl's childhood, there are powerful religious, cultural and economic forces that can overwhelm any girl.
. . Girls wed as young as 7 have little say in when or whom they marry. They rarely have access to contraception. More to the point, they usually have no inkling of why they might want contraceptives anyway. A good wife should give birth in the first year of marriage, and, often married to older men, the girls must succumb to all sexual demands.
. . Teen brides die during pregnancy and in childbirth at double the rate of women in their 20s. Girls pregnant by age 10 to 14 are five times more likely to die than women twice their age. Babies borne by girls are sicker, weaker and less likely to survive childhood. Girls with older, experienced husbands suffer sexually transmitted diseases at a galloping rate, so high that they now make up a population highly vulnerable to AIDS.
. . This month, top AIDS experts warned that India, where child brides still abound within the billion-plus population, is on the brink of having an epidemic parallel to those in Africa.
. . None of this is exactly news in Cairo, New Delhi or Addis Ababa, where laws limit the age of marriage to 16 in the case of Egypt, and 18 in India and Ethiopia. But such laws are routinely ignored among the poor and the least educated.

Nov 24, 04: India has dropped a plan to bar politicians with more than two children from fighting elections for parliament or state legislatures, saying it does not want to use force to control the population. The health ministry will withdraw a bill pending in parliament for more than a decade and aimed at encouraging new elected representatives to limit their families, so setting an example for the rest of the country.

Nov 18, 04: Another exercize in totally missing the point! -- "By 2025, a third of the world's population will be facing acute water shortages and farmers, academics and governments must work together to solve the problem, global experts said. 70% of global water usage is taken up by agriculture and using water efficiently is seen as key in preventing serious shortages, with experts studying river basins across the world for clues to boost food production."
. . We do NOT want to boost food production. That only makes the problem worse. We want to boost population-reduction programs. Fast!

Nov 12, 04: Overfishing by subsidized European fleets off the coast of West Africa is hurting local fisheries and forcing people to slaughter wildlife to get enough to eat, researchers said. Bushmeat includes game such as antelope but also species such as monkeys and jackals. Unfortunately, the impacts on wild game resources are not sustainable, and species are literally disappearing from the reserves."
. . "Recent collapses of mammal populations in some areas of West Africa have been linked to geographic patterns of poverty and malnourishment." They found a 76% decrease in numbers of mammals, with many local extinctions. The fewer fish there were year to year, the harder the impact on land animals.
. . Bushmeat hunting has also been linked to the emergence of dangerous new viruses that may have jumped from animals to people --Ebola and the AIDS virus.
. . The researchers noted that the European Union heavily fishes off the African coast, with financial subsidies for fleets rising to more than $350 million in 2001 from $6 million in 1981.

Nov 12, 04: China is facing water shortages of 30-40 billion cubic meters a year, state media said, threatening public health and economic development. Ministry of Construction official Zhang Qingfeng said some 110 cities in China are "severely short of water", while another 400 are also facing shortages. More than 20 million rural residents are also suffering from inadequate supplies. In 40% of China's cities, at least 12% of the water supply is lost through leaking pipelines and excessive use.
. . China has resorted to a variety of measures to address growing shortages from local well-digging projects to the multi-billion dollar "South-to-North Water Diversion Project" to divert up to 48 billion cubic meters of water yearly from the Yangtze River valley through three canals to the north of the country.
. . China's break-neck economic development has resulted in surging demand for water and power and experts have warned that the worsening situation could become a major problem impeding the economic development of the country.

Nov 6, 04: Madagascar has identified the additional forests, wetlands and marshes it wants to protect under a plan to triple the size of its nature reserves by the end of 2008. President Marc Ravalomanana pledged to boost its protected spaces to six million hectares from the present 1.7 million in September last year at a World Parks Congress in South Africa.
. . Wildlife on the world's fourth largest island is under growing threat from poverty and population pressure, an issue of global environmental concern because three-quarters of its estimated 200,000 plant and animal species exist nowhere else.
. . 75% of the giant island's 17 million people live on less than a dollar a day, most of them eking out a living as subsistence farmers, where competition for land is encroaching on the island's remaining forest. Traditional "slash-and-burn" agriculture in which forests are cleared for planting subsistence crops such as rice has decimated the island's rainforest cover. [Again, "decimation" --10%-- isn't bad. I think they meant "devastated".]
. . The Indian Ocean island broke from Africa 165 million years ago, leaving it to evolve an ecosystem that has 10,000 plant species, 316 reptiles and 109 bird species found nowhere else.

Oct 30, 04: In the Congo, the bright yellow bulldozers look absurdly out of place. They've been there for more than five years, abandoned since the latest in a string of wars broke out. But the people have come to repair the machines so they will soon cut the trees. As Congo tries to consolidate peace after a five-year war, the government, private companies and foreign donors are all keen to find ways of tapping into the vast resources of timber in Africa's third-largest country. With nearly 222 million acres of woodland, it has the world's second largest rainforest, half of Africa's total.
. . In theory, the code passed in 2002 should ensure that civil society and local populations have a say in how Congo's forests are carved up. Logging concessions will be distributed by public auctions and 40% of the revenue earned by the government must be returned to the communities whose trees were felled. The code also calls on companies to respect the rights of communities living in the forests, primarily by signing agreements on what benefits they will provide and compensating groups adversely affected by their work.
. . Experts who have seen forests opened up elsewhere in Africa are skeptical that the code will be followed in a country where corruption is rife and the government still has little control over its own natural resources. Many Congolese villagers living in areas where logging companies already operate tend to agree, complaining about broken promises from the firms and corrupt local authorities. "But we get nothing. And the authorities don't help us. When we demonstrate, they just help the loggers. We have all this wood, but when our people die, we have to bury them in mats, rather than coffins."

A UN-funded census of the Sundarbans mangrove forest straddling India and Bangladesh shows it contains at least 668 Royal Bengal tigers. And yet, a large number of people live in there, & walk about w/o weapons, many becoming dinner every week. Some wear face-masks on the back of their head, to confuse the tiger.

Earth's lowest point, the Dead Sea, has dropped 8 meters, down to minus 416 meters, because of increased agricultural water consumption from its inlet: the Jordan river.

Oct 21, 04: The world is consuming some 20% more natural resources a year than the planet can produce, conservationist group WWF warned. "We are running up an ecological debt which we will not be able to pay off."
. . In its 'Living Planet Report 2004', the fifth in a series, the WWF said that between 1970 and 2000, populations of marine and terrestrial species fell 30%. That of freshwater species declined 50%. "This is a direct consequence of increasing human demand for food, fiber, energy and water."
. . What WWF calls the "ecological footprint" --the amount of productive land needed on average worldwide to sustain one person-- currently stands at 2.2 hectares (5.43 acres). But the earth had only 1.8 hectares per head --based on the planet's estimated 11.3 billion hectares of productive land and sea space divided between its 6.1 billion people. This contrasts with the position in 1960 --the year WWF was launched-- when the world used only 50% of what the earth could generate.
. . The fastest growing component of the footprint is energy use, which has risen by 700% between 1961 and 2001. Overall, resource use as measured by the footprint rose 8% in per capita terms among the planet's richer one billion inhabitants in the years 1991-2001, but fell by the same percentage among the rest of the world.
. . North Americans were consuming resources at a particularly fast rate, with an ecological footprint that was twice as big as that of Europeans and seven times that of the average Asian or African.
. . But technology could play a vital role, particularly through the use and development of more environment friendly energy sources, Loh said.
. . The country with the largest overall footprint in 2001 was the United Arab Emirates, with just below ten hectares per person, mainly due to energy consumption that accounted for more than 70% of the size.
. . It was followed by the United States and Kuwait, with scores above nine hectares. Australia was the fourth largest burden on the world's resources (7.7 hectares), followed by Sweden and Finland (seven hectares). The two Nordic countries have relatively low energy consumption --about 15% of their footprint --but have the highest demand for "food and fibre" --five hectares-- mainly due to the timber industry's use of their forests.
. . China's 1.2 billion people had an average footprint of 1.5 hectares, just within the sustainable.
. . "It's not a question of how much oil is left", he said. "The question we should be asking is how much fossil fuel consumption the earth can sustain. The earth has a limited capacity."

India's "green revolution" between 1967 and 1978 is credited with making the country self-sufficient in food. More than 60% of India's 1.1 billion population depend on agriculture for a living.

Oct 6, 04: China has developed a method to wash an entire car with just 0.3 liter of water, apparently aimed at solving the problem of an economy that combines booming auto sales with severe water shortage.
. . The National Bureau of Statistics expects automobile production to reach 2.39 million units this year, marking a growth rate of 18% from 2003.
. . China expects water shortages to go on worsening all the way until 2030, when the population reaches at 1.6 million.

Women's ova quality drops dramatically after age 35 and is a chief cause of infertility. Only about 100 babies ever born worldwide from frozen eggs. success rate is about 30%.

Sept 22, 04: Southern Africa faces major challenges to feed its swelling populations and to keep its wells from running dry, a new study showed. The Southern African Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (SAMA) is the first in a series of regional checkups of the planet's health launched by the United Nations.
. . The water situation was most serious in Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, South Africa and Malawi.
. . "In practice, because of distribution inequities, up to 25% of the population are undernourished." . "One of the key things to come out of this is that we have documented severe protein deficieny north of the Zambezi (river)." He said the minimum requirement for healthy development in adults was 52 grams of protein per day. But overall in the region, it has fallen to 49 grams from 57 in 1976. Critically, the countries north of the Zambezi are down to about 42 grams."
. . He said a trend related to rising populations which are stripping nitrogen out of the soil through crop production, faster than it is being replaced by fertilizers.

Sept 20, 04: A court in China's southern boomtown of Shenzhen has fined a couple $94,250 and sealed off their house for having more than one child, the Beijing Morning Post said. The pair were among nine couples who were fined "social fostering fees" for their extra children, the newspaper said. They had their first boy in 1997 and last year had twin boys.
. . With approximately 1.3 billion people, China is the world's most populous nation. It has stringent rules on family planning that allow couples usually to have just one child, at least in cities, and limit numbers elsewhere.

Sept 17, 04: India has banned child weddings but half of the nation's women are still married off before the age of 15, according to a new government report. The legal age for marriage in India is 18 years for females and 21 years for males. "In the large north Indian states such as Rajasthan and Bihar, 68 to 71% of girls were married off by age 18.
. . "A host of factors, such as lack of awareness, limited mobility and decision-making authority, and lack of communication with husbands have an important bearing on the ability of adolescent girls to make informed choices and seek appropriate care", the report said.
. . The health ministry painted a grim picture of a looming health crisis in India which has an estimated five million AIDS victims. The report warned that youngsters were also engaging in unprotected sex.

Bangladesh, a country of 130 million, with an average per capita income of $444.

Although the U.S. accounts for only 5% of the world's population, Americans use approximately 27% of the wood commercially harvested worldwide, and U.S. wood consumption is also expected to grow dramatically in coming years.

Sept 7, 04: BAD NEWS: After 11 years of negative population growth, China's eastern financial hub of Shanghai has canceled rewards for married couples who decide not to have children. Childless families, or "dinks" --short for double income, no kids-- used to be given double the financial awards granted to couples that followed China's one-child policy. Last year, there were 57,000 new births in Shanghai, but 100,700 deaths, with natural population growth standing at minus 3.24 per thousand.
. . With approximately 1.3 billion people, China is the world's most populous nation. It has stringent rules on family planning that allow couples usually to have just one child, at least in the cities, and limit numbers elsewhere.

Aug 25, 04: Asian farmers drilling millions of pump-operated wells in an ever-deeper search for water are threatening to suck the continent's underground reserves dry, New Scientist warned. "This little-heralded crisis is repeating itself across Asia and could cause widespread famine in the decades to come."
. . The worst affected country is India. There, small farmers have abandoned traditional shallow wells where bullocks draw water in leather buckets to drill 21 million tube wells hundreds of meters below the surface using technology adapted from the oil industry. Another million wells a year are coming into operation in India to irrigate rice, sugar cane and alfalfa round-the-clock. While the $600 pumps have brought short-term prosperity to many and helped make India a major rice exporter in less than a generation, future implications are dire.
. . Tushaar Shah, head of the International Water Management Institute's groundwater station in Gujarat, said there was no control over the expansion of pumps and wells. "When the balloon bursts, untold anarchy will be the lot of rural India", he said at the annual Stockholm Water Symposium. Shah said Indian farmers were taking 200 cubic kilometers of water [!] out of the earth per year, with only a fraction of that replaced by the monsoon rains.
. . Officials have said water shortages will soon make China dependent on grain imports. Vietnam has quadrupled its number of tube wells in the past decade to 1 million, while water tables are plunging in the Pakistani state of Punjab, which produces 90% of the country's food, New Scientist added.
. . In India, "farmers have invested some $12 billion in the new pumps, but they constantly have to drill deeper to keep pace with falling water tables", it said. Meanwhile, half of India's traditional hand-dug wells and millions of shallower tube wells have already dried up, "bringing a spate of suicides among those who rely on them."
. . Another consequence is electricity blackouts, reaching "epidemic proportions" in some Indian states where half of the power is used to pump water from up to a kilometer down.
. . To counter the water crisis, some states are placing small dams across river beds in a bid to replenish groundwater by infiltration, and organizing farmers to capture monsoon rains in ponds.

Aug 20, 04: The risk of wars being fought over water is rising because of explosive global population growth and widespread complacency, scientists said. At the World Water Week conference in Stockholm, scientists said that ignorance and complacency were widespread in wealthier countries. "I don't know what will shake these regions out of complacency other than the fact there will be droughts, pestilence and wars that break out over water rights", said Mitsch, professor of natural resources at Ohio State University.
. . With the world's population growing at exponential rates, there was extreme pressure on water supplies to provide drinking water and food, said scientists. "In 2025, we will have another two billion people to feed, and 95% of these will be in urban areas."

Aug 18, 04: India is set to overtake China as the world's most populous nation by 2050, while some countries will shrink by nearly 40%, according to new research. The Population Reference Bureau (PRB) says the next half century will see wild swings in population sizes. It predicts that the number of people on Earth will reach 9.3bn by 2050, compared to 6.3bn today.

. . 1 India, 1,628m (was 2nd)
. . 2 China, 1,437m (1)
. . 3 United States, 420m (3)
. . 4 Indonesia, 308m (4)
. . 5 Nigeria, 307m (9)

. . "Nearly 99% of all population increase takes place in poor countries." [Population increases poverty, & poverty increases population --for a time.]
. . Britain's population is likely to overtake that of France, while many of its European neighbors decline, & the US will grow by nearly 50%, it says.
. . In Eastern Europe, the decline will be marked, if current trends continue. Bulgaria could lose 38% of its 7.8m inhabitants, with Russia declining by 17% - some 25m people. The projections are based on infant mortality rates, life expectancy, fertility rates and age structure, as well as factors like contraception and Aids rates. What the study cannot predict is how migration between nations may affect population growth.
. . The UN published a recent study, whose "medium-case" scenario was that the world would reach 9bn by 2300 - 250 years later than PRB predict. Its most extreme prediction was that, if current fertility rates continued, there would be 134 trillion of us by 2300 --tho it admitted this is possible only on paper.

Aug 18, 04: World water supplies will not be enough for our descendants to enjoy the sort of diet the West eats now, experts say. The World Water Week in Stockholm will be told the growth in demand for meat and dairy products is unsustainable. Scientists say the world will have to change its consumption patterns to have any realistic hope of feeding itself.
. . A paper to be delivered during the conference, entitled Water: More Nutrition Per Drop, says: "For several decades, the increase in food production has outpaced population growth. Now much of the world is simply running out of water for more production... "
. . The World Health Organisation calls malnutrition "the silent emergency", and says it is a factor in at least half the 10.4 million child deaths which occur every year.

. . A kilogram of grain-fed beef needs at least 15 cubic meters of water.
. . A kilo of lamb from a sheep fed on grass needs 10 cubic meters.
. . A kilo of cereals needs from 0.4 to 3 cubic meters.

Mr Berntell said the rich would be able to buy their way out of trouble by importing "virtual water" - the water needed to grow the food they bought from abroad. He said: "The transport of virtual water is huge. Australians were astonished to find that although their country is short of water, they're net exporters of water in the form of meat."

July 19, 04: Brazil's vast tropical savanna will disappear by 2030 if an area nearly the size of New Jersey continues to be cleared each year to transform it into the world's biggest grain growing area, a study showed. Covered with stunted trees, palm-studded grassland and gallery forests, up to 70% of the Western-Europe-sized savanna or "cerrado" has already been leveled, according to environmental group Conservation International (CI).
. . The ancient savanna wilderness resembles the safari lands of Africa and is known for species like the maned wolf and rare jaguars. It is the world's most biodiverse savanna and home to around 5% of the world's animal and plant species.
. . The cerrado is also considered the only continuous agricultural area in the world that can be expanded to meet growing global food demands. Farm exports are helping drive Brazil's current economic recovery.
. . The savanna is disappearing at a faster rate than Brazil's Amazon and Atlantic rain forests. It is cleared for crops like soy, corn and cotton; settlements grow, and reservoirs are created to create hydroelectric dams to supply energy, Conservation International said.
. . Around 1.5% or 7,722 square miles are being cleared annually, according to the study.

July 5, 04: As rampant population growth blurs the divide between city and countryside, it appears man is not even safe from nature's predators in the middle of the world's fifth-largest metropolis.
. . Leopards have killed 14 people this year, and 10 last month alone, in Bombay -- a city unique in that it almost entirely surrounds a verdant forest. Environmentalists blame a shortage of prey in the forest, which forces an estimated 35 leopards living in an area 30 times the size of New York's Central Park to hunt in the city. In a solution that could be out of a film script, officials plan to start releasing around 500 pigs and dozens of rabbits in the forest in the hopes that will satisfy the hunger of the big cats. "The problem lies with people, they are stepping into the land that belongs to animals."

July 4, 04: More bad news, but it may not work: Baby-short Singapore was to get a glimpse of the highs and lows of pregnancy and childbirth Saturday with the premiere of a television series that follows a couple through the entire baby-making process. The show — dubbed "Here's Looking at You, Babe!" — comes as the wealthy Southeast Asian city-state grapples with a precipitous fall in its birth rate, which threatens to shrink its population if it isn't reversed.
. . Young adults in Singapore, the region's wealthiest country, are becoming averse to having families — a trend mirrored in other Asian nations such as Japan, and the Chinese territory of Hong Kong. Last year, the fertility rate dropped to a record low of 1.26 births per woman, far below the 2.1 children per woman viewed as the minimum needed to keep a country's population stable.

June 29, 04: Leopards from a national park on the edge of Bombay, India's largest city, have killed 10 people this month —-prompting forest officials to let loose pigs and rabbits to feed the big cats. The killings are up sharply from previous years, and six of this month's deaths occurred outside the park as leopards extended their range in search of food.
. . Traps are being set up outside the park. A low voltage electric fence will be built to prevent the estimated 30 leopards from leaving Sanjay Gandhi National Park Conservationists say some 11,000 squatters live illegally in the park and about 1 million people live in nearby suburbs. "Leopards are not creating the problem, man is."
. . The forest —-spread over 40 square miles-— was made a national park in the 1970s. As Bombay expanded, apartment buildings were constructed along the park's edge and squatters moved into the park.

June 29, 04: Marc Imhoff, a lead researcher on the study at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and his colleagues found that the global population consumes about 20% of the world's plant life annually, which includes agricultural products for food and lumber for fuel, paper and other goods. "In ... the world's biomass, we're over consuming given our numbers." According to United Nations statistics, there are more than six billion humans living and consuming on Earth. That population, researchers said, represents about 1% of the world's total biomass. North America, for example, consumes the amount it can produce locally --about 24% of its annual plant production. Highly populated Western Europe and South Central Asia, on the other hand, each consume 70% of the greenery they produce. North Americans, for example, consume up to four times per person than their counterparts in China.
. . Increased efficiency in food harvesting, as well as wood processing and paper recycling, could prevent excessive over consumption of resources. For example, industrialized nations can produce one ton of milled lumber from 1.3 tons of raw trees, whereas developing nations require at least two tons of raw materials due to less efficient technology.
. . While the NASA study does look at the total land-based biomass available for human use, it is still an incomplete picture of our species' consumption of the planet. The study fails to take into account the food contributions from the oceans through fishing.
. . "Obviously, we eat a lot out of the oceans", Ricketts said, adding that future human consumption maps will have to take that into account. Such inclusive maps should also include fresh water supplies. The study also lacks an accurate projection of the world's annual consumption of fossil fuels such as oil or coal, on which so many countries depend. Once those fuel supplies have been exhausted, countries will have to find alternatives or else ramp up their lumber consumption through wood burning.

June 28, 04: Bad news: Men trying to boost their fertility may soon receive help from an unusual source --a plant grown for centuries in East Africa and the Middle East. The leaves of the khat plant, which is also known as qat, are chewed for the feeling of euphoria they produce. But scientists at King's College London have discovered that they also contain chemicals that help sperm mature and fertilize an egg.

June 28, 04: Desalination of sea water and low quality ground water is now a realistic part solution to Australia's long-term water crisis caused by changing weather patterns, scientists say. They said that as the cost of the technology falls and Australia's need for water continues to rise, desalination can now be undertaken economically and on a scale large enough to be a viable option.
. . Experts say Australia, thought until recently to be emerging from its worst drought on record, now looks like it may not have ended at all. The Murray-Darling river is no longer flowing into the ocean and the river mouth is also taking in salt water.
. . Australia, along with New Zealand, makes up the world's driest inhabited continent yet is one of the world's highest consumers of water.
. . Desalination has long been considered too costly, but CSIRO scientist Tom Hatton said costs were declining at an average rate of 4.0% a year.
. . Desalination is now used extensively on the Saudi peninsula, while Israel has around 50 desalination plants, and Texas and Florida.
. . Technically, the process is even easier with salty, low-quality ground water. It would work by reverse osmosis --forcing sea water through a membrane to trap the salt-- and could be operating within two years.

June 28, 04: The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and a Mexican foundation unveiled a 14-million-dollar water conservation plan in a bid to curb unchecked consumption endangering farmland and the environment. Key areas WWF considers "conservation priorities": the Conchos and San Pedro Mezquital rivers in the northeast and the Copalita and Zimatan rivers in the south.
. . WWF warned in a statement that over-consumption could lead to a "crisis" as 84 of 654 aquifers in Mexico are being "over-used." "In rural areas, only 68.7% (11 million) of the population has access to drinking water."
. . Mexico's growing population has led to an increase in consumption, "threatening the survival" of plants and wildlife, WWF added.

June 25, 04: [Horrors!] Conservative politicians are urging German men to have more sex to boost birth rates or risk being labelled "limp" abroad, a newspaper has reported. Johannes Singhammer, a member of parliament and father of six, said Germany's ageing population needed to produce more offspring to sustain its overstretched pensions system.
. . Germany will have the world's oldest population by 2035, according to a report in Der Spiegel weekly.

June 22, 04: Dam building poses a serious threat to some of the world's largest rivers, with China's Yangtze at greatest risk, WWF International said. "Much of the water provided by dams is lost, mainly due to inefficient ... irrigation systems, which globally waste up to 1,500 trillion liters of water annually. This is equivalent to 10 times the annual water consumption of the entire African continent", the report said. The report said 60% of the world's 227 largest rivers have been fragmented by dams. "(This) has led to the destruction of wetlands, a decline in freshwater species -- including river dolphins, fish, and birds -- and the forced displacement of tens of millions of people."
. . The report identified China's Yangtze River as most at risk, with 46 large dams planned or under construction along its waterways.
. . The La Plata basin in South America and the Tigris and Euphrates basin in Turkey and the Middle East are also undergoing major dam works. "Degradation of the water sources in this (Tigris and Euphrates) basin is of particular concern for the biologically rich wetlands, such as the Mesopotamian marshlands in Iraq, that host a myriad of species." Some of the planet's most threatened mammals, such as the Ganges River dolphin, and dolphins and porpoises in the Yangtze, are at risk from habitat destruction associated with dam construction.
. . "Dams disrupt the ecological balance of rivers by depleting them of oxygen and nutrients, and affecting the migration and reproduction of fish and other freshwater species", it said. The report says communities living downstream often suffer the most from dams, but the construction can be accomplished in an ecologically friendly way. "Good site selection, such as avoiding building dams on the main stem of a river system, and better dam design can play significant roles in minimizing impacts", it said.

June 21, 04: Farmers of the world must shift quickly to growing plants for industrial uses such as oils and plastics to replace petrochemicals as the climate warms and crude supplies run out, British scientists said. "In the next 20 to 50 years, we have to reverse our dependency on fossil fuels." "We have to get more productivity out of less land."
. . Not only is oil running out, but the world's population is predicted to grow sharply over the next half century and has to be fed. This will put huge strains on the world's economy.
. . The report noted that plants could produce plastics, fuels, oils, medicinal drugs, insulators, fibers and fabrics, many of which are currently made from crude oil. Smith said it was not just a matter of genetic manipulation of existing crops --although that too had a place-- but of making better use of plants currently grown for food.

June 4, 04: Brazil defended its efforts to fight destruction of the Amazon rain forest despite delays in creating reserves to protect the world's largest jungle.The nation's center-left government has promised to create 33 million acres of environmental reserves in 2004, after Amazon destruction last year reached its second-highest level. But so far, the government has met only a small fraction of its goal.
. . In 2003, 5.9 million acres of Amazon jungle, bigger than the U.S. state of New Jersey, were destroyed as ranchers and farmers advanced on the tropical jungle. The Amazon encompasses an area just under half the size of the continental United States. Around 15% of the jungle has been destroyed so far. Brazil's Atlantic rain forest --once a third the size of the Amazon-- has been cut to 7% of its original size.
. . Environmentalists fear deforestation of the Amazon because it is the world's biggest reservoir of fresh water, home to up to 30% of the world's plant and animal species, and a source of medicines.

June 2, 04: Farmers fighting rice-eating rats on Indonesia's Sumatra island have a new weapon in their arsenal —-a flock of owls. Local officials released 30 of the birds of prey in villages last week. They have since killed around 150 rats each night. Elsewhere in Indonesia, authorities have released snakes to combat rats that attack crops of rice, the staple food for the country's 210 million people.

May, 04: Riots that dominated a G8 summit in Genoa in 2001 suppressed the sex drive of its residents and led to a sharp decline in births in the city, a study showed.
. . In the ninth month after the riots, birth rates dropped off 29% compared to the average birth rate on the same dates over the three previous years, the study carried out by San Martino hospital showed. Even 11 months after the clashes, birth rates were 20% lower. "Violent demonstrations can cause a stress reaction with negative consequences for sexual drive and reproductive activity."

May 15, 04: The world's cod stocks could be wiped out by 2020 because of overfishing, illegal catches and oil exploration, the environment group WWF said. WWF —-the World Wide Fund for Nature-— said the world's largest remaining cod stock, in the Barents Sea, is under particular threat. In the report, WWF said the world's cod fisheries are disappearing fast, with a global catch that declined from 3.42 million tons in 1970 to 1 million tons in 2000.

May 12, 04: Deforestation is endangering about a third of the world's 1,200 bamboo species and threatening rare animals such as giant pandas and mountain gorillas that depend on the plants for food and protection.
. . A joint report by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the International Network for Bamboo and Rattan (INBAR) warned that it would also harm a $2 billion a year bamboo industry and the millions of people who use the plants for food, housing, furniture and handicrafts.
. . "There are about 1,200 species of bamboo in the world and we think about a third of those may be threatened by the reduction of forest habitat within their ranges."
. . The fates of Asia's giant pandas, which eat only bamboo, Africa's mountain gorillas, Madagascar's golden lemurs and the mountain tapir in South America as well as other animal and bird species are linked to bamboo. "The mountain gorilla in Africa, at some times of the year, get between 70-90% of their diet from bamboo shoots."
. . Bamboo, which is a giant, woody grass, is called the "wood of the poor" in India and the "friend of the people" in China because of its diverse use in everything from food and cooking to furniture, paper, musical instruments, boats and houses. A single bamboo clump can produce up to 9 miles of usable pole in its lifetime.

May 5, 04: North Korean farmers growing crops on mountainsides in a desperate attempt to ease food shortages are devastating the environment and could set the stage for a future hunger crisis, a U.N. World Food Program official said.
. . The erosion of topsoil, which is swept into stream and river beds as well as sewer systems in populated areas, deprives farmers of soil that might otherwise be terraced and cultivated and increases the chances of flooding that "can lead to food insecurity problems.
. . North Korea's communist regime has relied on foreign aid to feed its people since revealing in the mid-1990s that its state-run farming industry had collapsed following decades of mismanagement and the loss of Soviet subsidies.
. . About 41% of North Korean children under the age of 5 are seriously undernourished. "Their immune systems are not as strong as they should be, their mental capacity is not as developed as it should be.

May 3, 04: Bamboo farmers in east China's Anhui province are mobilizing against armies of rhesus monkeys, who attack their fields in a veritable "war of the species". They cannot kill the monkeys, as the government has launched a campaign to protect the rhesus species, now considered "nearly endangered". Instead, they have hired laborers whose only task is to drive the monkeys off the fields by peaceful means, an onerous task as they sometimes come in groups of 200 to 300.

Apr 30, 04: A koala population explosion on an Australian island has prompted calls for 20,000 of the marsupials to be shot, to stop them destroying their island habitat and end a koala famine. Some 30,000 koalas on Kangaroo Island, off the coast of the state of South Australia, are stripping the island of its native gum trees, destroying the ecosystem and causing a koala famine, say environmentalists and national parks officials.
. . The South Australian state government has rejected calls for a cull, preferring sterilization and relocation. The Australian Koala Foundation also opposes a cull of the koalas, which on the Australian mainland are struggling to survive as urban development destroys their habitat. Kangaroo Island tourist operators say a koala cull would severely damage the island's tourist industry.

Apr 10, 04: About one-sixth of Brazil's Amazon forests have been destroyed since the 1970s, equivalent to a solid forest the size of France and Portugal combined. Environment minister Marina Silva said the huge loss of forests, equivalent to 653,000 square kilometers (a quarter of a million square miles) was "intolerable." In 25% of deforestation cases, forced labor is used, according to D'avila.
. . Half a million hectares (1.2 million acres) cleared in Maranhao, Tocantins, Para, Mato Grosso and Rondonia states have today been abandoned, said D'avila. "These are public lands and should be recovered by adequate policies, avoiding new deforestation."

Apr 8, 04: Ranchers, soybean farmers and loggers destroyed a chunk of the Amazon rainforest about the size of Massachusetts last year, the Brazilian government said. But the government claimed that despite the near-record desforestation, they have kept the destruction from accelerating even faster.
. . The average annual destruction of the rainforst has doubled since the 1990s.

Apr 7, 04: Preliminary figures from Brazil's Environment Ministry showed deforestation in the Amazon jumped to 9,170 square miles in 2003 from 8,983 square miles in 2002. The highest level of destruction was in 1995 when 11,229 square miles of jungle were destroyed.
. . Brazil last month unveiled long-promised plans to halt the destruction A jump in deforestation in recent years was blamed on the growth of soy farming. Many environmentalists now fear cattle ranching is the biggest threat to the Amazon.

Apr 2, 04: Booming Brazilian beef exports could be the main culprit behind a sharp rise in deforestation of the Amazon jungle as cattle farmers cut deeper into the forests, a leading research institute said. The deforestation rate in the world's largest jungle jumped 40% in the 12 months to the middle of 2002.
. . The report, "Hamburger connection Fuels Amazon Destruction", by the Indonesia-based Center for International Forestry Research was released as environmentalists feared the latest Amazon destruction rates could be the highest ever.

Mar 24, 04: For the first time in history, most of the world's population will live in cities by 2007, U.N. demographers said. They said that 48% of the world's population lived in urban areas in 2003 and this was "expected to exceed the 50% mark by 2007, thus marking the first time in history that the world will have more urban residents than rural residents."
. . They projected that the world's urban population would rise to 5 billion by 2030 from an estimated 3 billion in 2003. Conversely, demographers expect the rural population to decline to 3.2 billion from 3.3 billion in 2003 by that year.
. . Tokyo, the world's most populous city with 35 million, was projected to still be the largest in 2015 with 36 million people, followed by the Indian cities of Bombay at 22.6 million and New Delhi at 20.9 million. Next on the list were Mexico City at 20.6 million and Sao Paulo at 20 million.

Mar 24, 04: China has plans for six more dams on the Mekong, all of which are likely to have implications for the 60 million people living in the Mekong basin, an area the size of France and Germany. The impact is likely to be highest in deeply impoverished Cambodia, where the river's annual floods create the world's fourth largest catch of freshwater fish and where nearly 1.5 million people are involved in fishing.
. . It could also sound the final death knell for animals such as the critically endangered giant Mekong catfish, the world's largest freshwater fish and one of the roughly 1,500 different species unique to the southeast Asian river system.

Mar 22, 04: The world population increased by 1.2% in 2002 to total more than 6.2 billion, but its rate of growth has slowed down, the US Census Bureau said in a new report.
. . The rate of increase translated into a net addition of about 200,000 people per day and 74 million per year in 2002. The rate of growth is well below the high of about 2.2% a year experienced 40 years ago. The slowdown in global population growth is linked primarily to declines in fertility.
. . In 1990, women were giving birth, on average, to 3.3 children over their lifetimes, according to the study. By 2002, the average had dropped to 2.6 children -- slightly above the level needed to assure replacement of the population. The bureau projects the level of fertility will go below replacement level before 2050. In 2050, there will be more than three times as many people age 65 and older as there are today.
. . US demographers also projected that a number of African countries will experience levels of mortality during this decade that will lower the average life expectancy at birth to around 30 years by 2010, a level not seen since the beginning of the 20th century. Much of this decline in life expectancy is likely to result from AIDS.

In Zimbabwe, around 25% of their 11.6 million people are HIV positive.

Aborigines now number 400,000 in a population of 20 million, and they live an average of 20 years less than other Australians. Aborigines make up nearly 20% of the nation's prison population, despite numbering only 2% of the nation's people.

Feb 6, 04: Government officials are hoping that more Singaporeans will be led to the bedroom this year to help remedy the city-state's need for babies. The Deputy Prime Minister said the falling birth rate is among the administration's top three priorities for 2004. Singapore recorded its lowest-ever birth rate last year, with just 37,633 babies born.
. . Singapore, a self-confessed "nanny state", is well-known for its behavior modification campaigns — where it advises citizens on everything from flushing toilets to speaking proper English and waving at a fellow motorists.

Jan 25, 04: Manila, now considered a "mega-city" with a population of over 12 million --3.4 million slum dwellers. The Philippines also has one of the highest rates of urbanization in the world, with an annual growth rate of 5.1%. Urban dwelling is projected to increase to 60% by 2010 if no measures were taken to stop migration from rural areas.
. . The third blaze in recent years hit the dockside maze of scrap metal sheets, cardboard and plywood, but people always returned to the area to "squat" and wait for state doleouts until the next tragedy.

Jan 19, 04: The Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro, notorious for its teeming slums, will mail contraceptive pills free of charge to women, including teenagers, in poor neighborhoods. The city's health secretary, Ronaldo Cezar Coelho, said on Monday the program, which starts in February, was not intended to push birth control in poor areas but to give low income women the same opportunities enjoyed by richer women.

The United Nations wants to study links between the environment and human conflict to see how future wars might be sparked by factors like global warming, a senior official said. Pollution, droughts, floods, storms, desertification and rising sea levels are among possible triggers of wars in a world with more and more people competing for limited resources.

Jan 15, 04: Rapidly running out of burial space, authorities in England and Wales are contemplating digging up the dead to make room for more. Extra space may be created in packed cemeteries by exhuming remains and re-using old plots following a review of antiquated burial laws.One option under review is the exhumation and reburial of bodies in deeper graves to allow coffins to be laid on top, a method known as "lift and deepen". Alternatively, ancient remains may be moved to more distant sites so that the newly dead can be buried closer to their homes.

(i-mäm'), [key] —n. Islam.
. . 1. the officiating priest of a mosque.
. . 2. the title for a Muslim religious leader or chief.

Jan 14, 04: A Spanish court sentenced an Egyptian-born imam to 15 months in prison for writing a book instructing husbands how to beat their wives without leaving bruises.
. . In the trial, Mustafa argued that much of his advice was based on the Koran, the Muslim holy book. But the court said today's society was "not the Arabian desert of 14 centuries ago", and ruled that some passages violated the penal code and women's constitutional rights.
. . The court also fined Mustafa 2,160 euros ($2,742) and ordered copies of the book to be confiscated, according to the written court order. The court said parts of the book addressing menstruation, childbirth, makeup and clothing promoted sexual discrimination that was "intolerable and criminally reproachable."

Jan 14, 04: Thou shalt not steal, say the Ten Commandments, but it might eventually no longer apply if you are starving in Venezuela. The poor, oil-rich nation is considering decriminalizing the theft of food and medicine in cases where a thief is motivated by extreme hunger or need. A Supreme Court Judge said that the so-called "famine theft" clause should be part of a broad penal code reform measure for humanitarian reasons.
. . The penal reform effort has sparked more controversy by also including possible decriminalization of abortion and allowing voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill.

Dec 28, 03: Farms use as much as 95% of the water in some areas of the West. Growing cities will continue nibbling away at agriculture's share. Many believe that water markets offer a way to get water to cities without completely wiping out farms.
. . In October, California's Imperial Valley, which uses more of Colorado River than most states, agreed to ship some of its supply to San Diego for $3.5 billion over 45 years —-the biggest sale of its kind in U.S. history.
. . The Owens Valley, in the high desert east of the Sierra, became a dust bowl when Los Angeles quietly acquired its water and flushed it down an aqueduct to the city 90 years ago. The 1974 film "Chinatown" was loosely based on what's been dubbed the "water grab."
. . Denver investors bought up Rocky Ford's sugar beet refinery and sold the water associated with it to Aurora 20 years ago. A decade later, brothers Lee and Edward Bass, oil barons from Fort Worth, quietly bought up Imperial Valley land and then tried unsuccessfully to sell the water out from under it. Recently, another Arkansas Valley canal has attracted interest from investors in Denver and New Orleans.
. . Cities have paid as much as 6 cents a gallon for water, some of the state's and the West's highest prices. Turn on the tap in Aurora and out comes water that once grew crops. Three-fourths of the water that helped the sprawling suburb east of Denver vault into the ranks of Colorado's biggest cities was acquired from farmers.
. . "The bell tolls when you create water markets because all this is going to do is shrink the number of farms."

Dec 20, 03: The U.S. population grew by 2.8 million in the past year and is edging toward 300 million, a threshold that should be reached within four years. The South and West added the most people in the year that ended July 1, and Nevada was the fastest-growing state for the 17th consecutive year, according to Census Bureau estimates. The overall population grew 1%, to nearly 291 million people.

Dec 17, 03: Scientists warned that Norway's remaining wild reindeer population is under threat. They said construction projects have encroached on their natural habitat in Norway and forced the animals to smaller areas with poorer food supplies. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in Arendal, Norway, described the situation in Norway as critical. "They've lost 50% of their habitat in 50 years."
. . They found that reindeer retreat from anywhere that lies within 4Km of new roads, power lines, cabins or dams. So they are squashed into smaller, isolated areas with less food and their breeding rates drop. If the situation continues the 30,000 remaining reindeer in Norway, down from 60,000 in the 1960s, will drop to 15,000 by 2020, they said.

Dec 10, 03: Sydney, the state capital, is Australia's most populous city with some four million residents. The ecological footprint needed to sustain each resident has increased by 16% in the past five years, said the NSW Environment Protection Agency report.
. . According to the latest statistics, it takes 18 acres of land to provide the range of goods and services consumed by each resident each year, said the report. "If we want to keep our quality of life and leave the environment in a better or even the same state than it is now, we need to heed the wake-up call."

Dec 9, 03: The human race could have 9 billion people by 2300, Japanese will live to 108, and Africa's population will explode while Europeans could dwindle, the United Nations predicted. [That's assuming we avoid the famine that seems inevitable now.]
. . In its first projection of the world's population in the next three centuries, the U.N. Population Division forecast the rise to about 9 billion from the current 6.3 billion people, providing the trend toward smaller families continues. If fertility levels in the developing world remain at today's levels, the global population would reach 244 billion in 2150 and 134 trillion in 2300, according to the report, "World Population in 2300."
. . "It's like the Titanic with an iceberg ahead", said Joseph Chamie, director of the population division. "You sink because the rates are so low or you simply grow too rapidly because the rates are too high. Either way you have to change course."

Dec 5, 03: French women continued to be among the most fertile in Europe, giving birth to an average 1.89 children per couple, just behind the contraceptive-shy Irish with 1.97 children. [not too bad!]

Nov 26, 03: In a U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization report, titled "The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2003", found that after falling steadily in the first half of the 1990's, hunger grew in the latter half of the decade. Between 1999 and 2001, the most recent period for which data were available, the report found that more than 840 million people, or 1 in 7 worldwide, went hungry. Most alarming of all, the report found, between 1995 and 2001 across the developing world, the number of malnourished people grew by an average of 4.5 million a year.

Nov 5, 03: Environmental destruction led to this week's flash flood that devastated an Indonesian resort village killing at least 100 people, President Megawati Sukarnoputri said. She joined a growing chorus of environmentalists and politicians pointing the finger of blame at rampant illegal logging and overdevelopment for the disaster.

Nov 2, 03: Worsening water shortages will leave Africans poorer, hungrier and even more dependent on aid unless governments do more to help conserve one of the region's most precious resources, scientists said. As Africa's population rises, demand for household water is projected to grow faster than anywhere else on the planet, leaving up to 523 million people without access to clean water by 2025 unless governments invest in better infrastructure.
. . Farmers already struggling to raise crops in arid countries from Ethiopia to Chad and Mauritania are likely to face increasing competition for water, meaning they will have less to sprinkle on their crops, reducing already meager yields.
. . Countries with more plentiful rainfall like Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia and South Africa, must do more to harness the resource and improve management to avoid floods like those that struck Kenya and Mozambique in recent years, they said.
. . And: Africa could face a 23% shortfall in crop yields due to insufficient water supplies, while cereal imports will have to more than triple to 35 million tons in the next 23 years to meet demand, increasing reliance on aid.
. . Water shortages are predicted to affect the livelihoods of one third of the world's population by 2025, perhaps resulting in losses in food production equivalent to the entire grain crops of the United States and India combined.

Nov 5, 03: Indonesian villagers who have released snakes in their ricefields to hunt hungry rats are now worried about human predators hunting the serpents. Anyone found catching or killing the snakes will face a fine.

Nov 4, 03: About 170 people were feared dead as hopes faded of finding alive dozens still missing after a flash flood linked to illegal logging smashed through an Indonesian resort town. Along with the surging floodwaters came hundreds of logs, felled on the slopes of nearby Gunung (Mount) Leuser national park and washed down the river. They smashed into scores of homes, many of them tin-roofed bamboo structures.

Oct 21, 03: Rampant overuse of water coupled with heavy silting and pollution were threatening the vitality of China's historic Yellow River and needed to be addressed urgently to avoid environmental disaster along the waterway, researchers said.
. . Water scarcity is now the number one priority in the Yellow River. The water shortages during the 1990's drought years resulted in no flow in the lower reaches of the river, China's second longest, for up to four months each year. If such a situation is not corrected, it would spell disaster to the agricultural communities in the lower reaches which have depended on the Yellow River water for irrigation purposes for centuries.
. . A drop in water flow would also insure that the river's notorious silt was not washed out to sea but accumulated along the river bed, requiring higher dykes and increasing the danger of flooding.
. . The report also urged better pollution controls along the river as increasing contamination had made 24% of river waters unfit for drinking, even after treatment.

Oct 13, 03: Farmers in northeast Minnesota are using a fertilizer rich in phosphorus, nitrogen and organic matter that can boost crop yields by 80%. Best of all, it's free. The problem, for some, is that it's made of treated human waste, which opponents say is environmentally unsafe and unhealthy for animals and other people.
. . Using human waste as fertilizer is nothing new. Asian cultures have done it for centuries. In Milwaukee, sludge has been treated, dried, bagged and sold to Midwest gardeners for more than 60 years.
. . Since 1992, when Congress banned the dumping of treated sludge in oceans, land application has skyrocketed past incineration and landfilling, the other two approved options for sludge disposal.
. . The EPA promotes spreading it as fertilizer, calling it the preferred disposal option. Incineration is less favored because it requires the consumption of fuels that contribute to air pollution. And burying the stuff takes up space in hard-to-permit landfills.

Oct 6, 03: The number of slum dwellers in the world will double to about two billion by 2030 because of rapid urbanisation and worsening poverty, UN Human Settlement Program warned. Currently, a sixth of the world's population lives in slums.

AUG 26, 03: Bangladeshi parliamentarians, accustomed to bitter arguments and walkouts, have come together to fight a common enemy: rats. Rodent extermination is a brisk business in Bangladesh, where rats eat away an estimated 700,000 tons of crop a year which could feed 3.5 million people.
. . The rice-producing country awards farmers with five kilograms of wheat for every rat they kill and hands out annual prizes for the highest number of rat tails submitted as evidence of rodent eradication.

Poor diets, frequent visits to the sauna and a lack of exercise can affect fertility, they said in a news conference as part of efforts to convince Singaporeans to produce more --as well as healthier and smarter-- babies. About 20% of mothers in Singapore are above 35 years old at the time of delivery.

China has 70 million bachelors unable to find wives. Men outnumber women as a result of a one-child policy which led to many fetuses of girls, traditionally discriminated against, being aborted. Chinese police arrested the director of a psychiatric hospital for drugging female patients and selling them off as wives.

Madagascar is one of the most heavily eroded places on the planet.

July 1, 03: A technique that allows infertile men to have children can transfer the cause of the problem to their children but it does not generate any new genetic defects, scientists said. "However, because of the ability to treat men with severely compromised semen parameters, and who are possible carriers of chromosomal defects, ICSI may allow transmission of these abnormalities to children."

July 1, 03: Former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, renowned for his propensity for gaffes, faced demands for an apology after implying only women who bear children should be eligible for pensions. "I think it is really strange to be told to use tax money to take care of women who haven't even had one child", Mori told a discussion group. "The real purpose of a welfare system is to look after women who have a lot of children, as a means of thanking them."

June 25, 03: Good news! The U.S. birth rate fell to its lowest level since statistics have been kept, with teen birth rates down but the number of births to unmarried women at record-high levels, according to official statistics. In 2002, 4.019 million babies were born in the United States, down slightly from 4.025 million in 2001.
. . The birth rate was 13.9 per 1,000 people, down from 14.1 per 1,000 in 2001 and down 17% from a peak in 1990 of 16.7 per 1,000.
. . More than a third of all births were to unmarried women.

June 21, 03: Success rates of fertility treatments are set to rise thanks to a screening technique that allows doctors to select the healthiest embryos. But the technique, known as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), is also controversial because it has been used to select an embryo that is a genetic match to a sick sibling. Couples have been accused of creating babies to save an existing child.
. . Being able to select the healthiest embryo can also reduce multiple births, which can be dangerous for both the mother and child, because fewer embryos will need to be transferred into the woman to achieve a pregnancy.
. . The implantation rate of a single embryo in the womb has increased from about 6% in the early 1980s to nearly 40% today, according to Pellicer.

June 15, 03: Horrors! - A man who has 63 children has married for the 12th time in a bid to make a place in the Guinness Book of Records with 100 offspring. And his name is Dad! Dad Mohammad Murad, 53, wed an 18-year-old on Friday in the emirate of Ajman, just north of Dubai. In line with local tradition, the girl was not named. He had divorced four of his wives while four others had died. His new father-in-law has 23 children from only(!) two wives.

May 19, 03: A leading Hungarian geneticist has stirred controversy by advocating a technique for selecting the gender of babies in order to reverse the falling birth rate in this central European country! Horrors! One successful country, & someone's trying to ruin it!

May 19, 03: An Indian city where an abandoned baby was mauled by dogs last year now hosts an electronic buzzer system to let parents dispose of unwanted infants safely.
. . The "baby-abandonment machine" at a hospital in the southern city of Trivandrum features doors that open automatically when a person enters from the roadside.
. . Of the 11 babies dumped at the machine in the past six months, eight have been girls, the daily said. Girls are often valued less than boys in conservative parts of India, where impoverished parents can ill-afford the wedding and dowry costs expected of them when their daughters grow up.

Apr 30, 03: Horrible news: they may develop a new rice that'll provide food for more people in Asia. (What we DON'T need are more people!!)
. . Australian scientists revealed plans to develop a drought-resistant strain of rice for use by farmers in Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. The University of Queensland has received a ($600,000 US) grant to carry out research.

Apr 23, 03: Russia's population has declined sharply since 1989, but an influx of migrants helped to partially fill the gap, according to preliminary census data reported. The population shrank by 1.3% —-about 1.8 million people-— and now stands at 145.5 million. Russia now has the seventh largest population in the world, after China, India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil and Pakistan. Some 73.3% of Russia's population live in cities, and women outnumber men 54% to 46%.

Mar 30, 03: Severe drought has left more than 10 million people across China without adequate drinking water supply. In Shandong province, one of the most thirsty provinces in China, the drought has dried up more than one million hectares of farmland, leaving 6.25 million poeple without adequate supplies of drinking water. Located along the upper reaches of the Yellow River, Gansu province in northwest China is also suffering a severe drought this Spring, which has caused the water level along its upper reaches to drop to a 50-year low.
. . The water shortage has spread to southern China, where the Yangtze River's water level dropped to the lowest point in 16 years.
. . China is planning to ease the water shortage in the north by building the massive "South-to-North Water Transfer" project, construction of which began in December. The project aims to divert water from China's longest river, the Yangtze, to parched northern regions. But critics have warned of the environmental damage to the Yangtze and areas around it.

Mar 7, 03: Clive James, president of the ISAAA, a non-profit group that backs biotechnology's role in the war on hunger, told a round table debate that the world faced a tremendous challenge to feed people as farmland per head is expected to shrink by a third between now and 2050 due to urbanization and land erosion. [twice the food from 2/3 the land!]
. . The world will need to double food output in the next 50 years to feed a fast-growing population, but water shortages and China's likely dependence on grain imports will intensify competition for supplies, food experts said. He was referring to projections that the global population will climb to nine billion people in 2050 from just over six billion now.
. . He said the use of biotechnology, which can help plants withstand insect attacks and resist drought, was part of the answer but had to be accompanied by more efficient food distribution and population controls to alleviate poverty.
. . Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, said declining water tables in many parts of the world, including the big grain producers China, India and the United States, were pressuring grain output. "Unless population growth can be slowed quickly by investing heavily in female literacy and family planning services, there may not be a humane solution to the emerging world water shortage." Most of the three billion people projected to be added worldwide by mid-century will be born in countries already experiencing water shortages, Brown said.

Feb 27, 03: The United Nations reduced its estimate of what the world's population will be in 2050 by 400 million, primarily because of the impact of the AIDS epidemic and lower than expected birth rates.
. . At the dawn of the new Millennium, the U.N. Population Division forecast that 9.3 billion people would inhabit the Earth at mid-century but a new revision of the estimate projects a lower population of 8.9 billion. "For the first time, the United Nations Population Division projects that future fertility levels in most developing countries will likely fall below 2.1 children per woman, the level needed to ensure the long-term replacement of the population, at some point in the 21st century", said the forecast.
. . By 2050, it projects that three out of four countries in less developed regions will have fertility levels below replacement levels. The Population Division warned, however, that the latest projections depend on ensuring that couples have access to family planning. If fertility in all countries remained at current levels, it said, "the total population of the globe could more than double by 2050, reaching 12.8 billion."
. . But based on the new estimates, the forecast predicts that the population of more developed regions, currently at 1.2 billion, will change little during the next 50 years. Thirty three countries are projected to be smaller at mid-century than today — Japan losing 14% of its population, Italy 22% of its population, and Bulgaria, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Russia and Ukraine between 30 and 50% of their populations.
. . By contrast, in less developed regions, the population is projected to rise steadily from 4.9 billion in 2000 to 7.7 billion in 2050, according to the forecast. The populations of Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Somalia, Uganda and Yemen, are projected to quadruple because of expected annual growth rates of more than 2.5% between 2000 and 2050, it said.
. . In the most populous countries, large population increases are expected even if fertility levels are projected to be low. Between 2000 and 2050, the forecast said eight countries are expected to account for half the world's projected population increase —-India, Pakistan, Nigeria, the United States, China, Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Congo.
. . In the current decade, 46 million people are expected to die of AIDS in the 53 most affected countries, "and that figure is projected to ascend to 278 million by 2050", the forecast said.

Feb 5, 03: Singapore's birth rates have tumbled in recent years. In 1990, Singaporean women, on average, gave birth to 1.87 babies in a lifetime. That fell to 1.42 by 2001 -- far below the 2.1 rate needed for a population to replace itself.
. . A 2002 poll commissioned by condom manufacturer Durex ranked Singapore last in a global list of the most sexually active nations. Too stressed from their jobs, they have little drive to make love at the end of the day. The result is that Singaporeans below the age of 40 have sex six times a month, far lower than many other societies.
. . The really bad news: their government is also trying to coax couples to reproduce with a "Baby Bonus Scheme" of tax rebates for those who have two or more children.

Today the five largest cities are Tokyo, Mexico City, São Paulo, New York City, and Mumbai (Bombay); and in 2015, they will probably be Tokyo, Dhaka, Mumbai, São Paulo, and Delhi.

Oct 17, 02: The target of cutting the number of hungry in half by 2015 was set in 1996, and the FAO calculates that the total should fall by at least 24 million a year in order to meet it. However, this would require the progress between 1992 and 2000 to not only be matched in future but increased tenfold. Ambitious plans to halve world hunger by 2015 are facing failure, says a report from the United Nations.
. . Experts predict that it could take a century to meet the target if progress were to continue at the current rate. Jacques Diouf, the director general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), said that progress had "virtually ground to a halt" in the past year.
. . The latest estimate is that in 1998-2000 there were 840 million undernourished people in the world. The report also highlights a separate, and more pervasive, problem dubbed "hidden hunger". Even though people who suffer it may not be technically malnourished, they lack vital nutrients in their diet and their health suffers as a result.
. . Up to two billion people are said to be vulnerable to this. Women and children are particularly hard hit, says the report --for example, up to 140 million children risk sight problems because they do not have enough vitamin A in their diets.

July 22, 02: Bad news: Australian scientists have ended a 40-year search for a gene which they say could revolutionize rice cultivation. The gene isolated by the scientists produces shorter, more productive, varieties of rice. Team leader Wolfgang Spielmeyer said isolating the gene would speed the process of creating new rice varieties and help identify "semi-dwarfing" genes in other cereal crops, such as wheat. The development of new varieties of rice with shorter stems, which produced record crop yields throughout Asia in the 1960s, was called the "green revolution" by scientists. But the gene responsible had not been isolated until now.

July 22, 02: A nonsurgical form of permanent birth control for women gained unanimous support from a group of advisers. The FDA Panel voted 8-0 to recommend approval of Conceptus Inc.'s Essure procedure that places tiny coils in the fallopian tubes without any incision or general anesthesia. The procedure is not considered reversible. It causes tissue to grow and permanently block the tube. It takes 20 to 30 minutes for a physician to insert the coils.

March 22, 02: The world's increasingly grave water shortage means farmers are going to have to produce "more crop per drop" to feed its growing population, United Nations officials said. "Water scarcity and quality will be one of the major problems of the 21st century"; Godwin Obasi, secretary-general of the U.N. World Meteorological Organization. "The global demand for water is estimated to have risen nearly sevenfold from 1900 to 1995, more than double the rate of population growth." "By 2025, just over one billion people will be desperately short of water."
. . The global population is forecast to grow from some six billion now to more than eight billion by 2020, food and agriculture officials say. Pressure on water supplies is ever more intense as the population swells in the developing world. According to the UN, some 1.1 billion people do not have access to safe drinking water. The international community is behind target in its drive to halve the number of severely malnourished people in the world to around 400 million by 2015, the U.N. says.

Feb 1, 02: Scientists at the World Economic Forum predicted a grim future replete with unprecedented biological threats, global warming and the possible takeover of humans by robots.
. . "Extreme pessimism seems to me to be the only rational stance" said Sir Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal.

Over 1,000,000 female fetuses are believed to be aborted yearly in India. There are about 1,000,000 baby girls in orphanages in China. [JKH: this wasn't official, & doesn't enumerate the boys --for comparison-- at all.]

Jan 8, 02: Scientists have developed a new vasectomy technique which cuts the surgeon's scalpel out of 'the snip' and replaces it with short blasts of high-frequency ultrasound. It can block the tubes without making any incisions. The surgeon locates the vas deferens by hand inside the scrotum and attaches a plastic clamp to hold it in place in a pinched fold of the skin. Built into the clip is a curved plastic transducer that emits a tiny pulse of five watts of high-frequency ultrasound, focused a few millimeters beneath the surface of the skin pinched in the clip. Fried said the technique was so simple it could be routinely used without calling on the skills of a surgeon. "This could be especially useful in developing countries where people don't have ready access to trained surgeons and sterile hospitals", he said.

Population Institute Newletter, Nov, 01 State of the World Report: A child born today in an industrialized country will consume and pollute --over his lifetime-- more than 30-50 children born in developing countries. The U.S. alone, with only 4.6% of global pop, emits more nearly 25% of global GH gases.
. . In the 20th century, human pop doubled --from 1.6 to 6.1B. (easy figures to remember) CO2 emissions grew 12-fold, from 534M tons, to 6.59B in 1997.
. . Affluence consules energy & produces waste at far higher rates than poverty. The effects of poverty also destroy environments, but the poor are at the low end of a long chain of cause & effect.
. . The world grain harvest increased by about 1% annually between 1900 & 1997, less than the average human groth rate of 1.6% (in just the developing world).
. . NASA: Greenland's ice-sheet is thinning at a rate of nearly a meter per year! That's about 51 cubic kilometers, enough, by itself, to raise sea level by a meter per century.
. . It takes a thousand times the water you drink . to grow your food.
. . The current world pop increase is 1.3% per year --77M people. Six countries account for half that growth. India (with 21% of the increase), China, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, & Indonesia.
. . AIDS won't stop the explosion (tho Ebola could, if it really gets loose). In Botswana, where HIV is 36%, doesn't much impede the 37% pop increase predicted for 2050.

ICMR officials said only 3% of Indians use condoms while 52% don't use any contraceptive method. Population growth in India --the second largest country in the world after China, with over one billion --slowed during the last decade by 2.52%age points to 21.34% over the previous decade.
. . Indian men may soon be able to buy condoms tailor-made to give a perfect fit. Stung by the high failure rate of condoms, India's Health Ministry has launched a project to study the size of male organs across the country and make condoms of different sizes instead of the single size presently available. The project hopes to bring down the 15 to 20% failure rate of condoms due to breakage or spillage.

Aug 1, 01: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg predicted:
. . The world's population will probably peak at about 9 billion around 2070 before it starts to decline.
. . Demographers at a think tank in Austria calculate that by 2099, the number of people on the planet will have dropped down to 8.4 billion people.
. . They also predict the population will be older, with up to 40% aged over 60 by 2100.
. . "Population aging will be the dominant population issue of this century because the decline in fertility together with further increasing life expectancy in most parts of the world except Africa will result in a significant change in the age structure", said Lutz.
. . In most European countries, people over 60 make up 20 percent of the population. Lutz and his team predict that by the middle of the century, the figure will rise to 35% and reach 45% by 2100.
. . They believe China's percentage of elderly will triple from 10% today to 30% by 2050. In Japan, the elderly will comprise half the population by the turn of the century.

Sept 30, 01: India hopes to glue people to their TV sets at bedtime so that they stop having sex and help keep a rein on the one-billion-plus population, a local newspaper said. Deputies said they were worried that India's population, which crossed the billion mark in May '01, would soon overtake the world's most populous nation, China.
. . As part of its family planning policy, the government has decided to make TV sets cheaper for India's entertainment-starved masses, Health Minister C.P. Thakur said.
. . "Entertainment is an important component of the population policy", the Times of India quoted the minister as telling lawmakers in parliament. "We want people to watch television."

Over 281 million people called America home in 2000, an increase of 13%, or nearly 33 million, from 1990. That surpassed the previous 10-year growth record of 28 million between 1950 and 1960, a gain fueled primarily by the post-World War II baby boom.
. . Much of the gain in 2000 was due to higher-than-expected rates of immigration, especially among Hispanics.

3-29-01: Rats are back in season in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, with tons being brought to the market daily by rice farmers for sale to bars and restaurants.
. . The Tuoi Tre Chu Nhat (Youth Sunday) Magazine said at least three tons of rats were being brought to market daily in the southern province of Bac Lieu.

Oct 20, 00: If people in the developing world consumed as much as those living in the richest countries, the human race would need another two planet Earths to cope, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said. . . The human race is operating 30% above what the Earth can provide without suffering serious damage.

Global Population Too High. January 27, 2000. The New Zealand Press.
A New Zealand scientist from the Central Institute of Technology says the present global population of six billion people is about 30% more than the earth's biological capacity to sustain present standards of living, but growth may not even stabilize at the projected 10 billion by the year 2050. There are 51 billion hectares on the earth's surface, but only 1.3 billion hectares are available as arable land 3.3 billion hectares available as pasture land. <
. . The world needs to immediately reduce by 1/2 its carbon dioxide emissions, yet United Nations' member countries have only agreed to reduce it by 5% by 2012. The United States puts out 20 tons of CO2 per capita, in comparison with New Zealand, which produces about four tons per capita.

The United nations estimates that an estimated 80 million pregnancies a year are unintended, and that nearly 600,000 women die each year in pregnancy and childbirth. Obviously, many of these deaths, and more abortions, are the unfortunate result of lack of family-planning resources.

. . The US Census Bureau's latest set of projections, issued in January, 2000, estimate that with steady levels of immigration, our present population of 275 million (up from 200 million in 1970 and 132 million in 1940) will swell to 571 million by 2100 and with expansive immigration quotas, may hit one billion or more by century's end.

Nearly 800M people go to bed hungry--a lil worse than 3years ago. This can cause physical and mental limitations. Some 200M are severely stunted. Again, more food is NOT the answer.

USA teen pregnancy rate is one of worst in industrialized world. 900,000 girls under the age of 20 get pregnant every year-- 4 times the rate in France Germany and Japan.

A bill to return international family planning contributions to their record 1995 lavels has been introduced by Representative Carolyn Maloney (D - NY) "The health of the planet is connected to the health of women and their families", she said.

Biodiversity hotspots identified.
. Scientists have identified 25 "global biodiversity hotspots" as the world's most threatened biologically-rich land regions, and found that pop in 19 of them is growing more rapidly than it is in the world as a whole. More than 18B people live in these regions that occupy only 12% of the Earth's land surface.

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