Cause And Effect Essay on Population Growth Text

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length: 934 words 2.7 double spaced pages everywhere in the world, in every kind of culture, the poorest people have the most children. Does having many children make people poor? or does being poor make people have many children? that is a hot question in the continuous struggle over how to spend foreign aid money. Those who think population growth causes poverty advocate programs in family planning and population education. Those who think poverty causes population growth favor direct economic aid, jobs, capital investment.

Advocates of both sides have come to the village of manupur in the province of punjab in north india to prove themselves right. It is a typical indian village, with a population in 1950 of about 1200, mostly farmers. New seeds, fertilizers, and credit systems have caused wheat yields to quadruple since 1950. In 1953 a team from the harvard school of public health came to manupur to try out one of the world's first family planning programs.

They visited all homes regularly, took a census, registered all births and deaths. They also instructed people about modern methods of birth control and handed out free contraceptives. Many young people migrated to the city to find jobs the ones who stayed inherited smaller and smaller plots of land.

Surely if families knew how to prevent having so many children, they would have fewer. At the beginning of the harvard study their birth rate was about 40 babies per 10 people per year. But the birth rate had also gone down all over the punjab, even where there were no family planning programs. The harvard researchers concluded that the villagers were not so ignorant after all. Family size had always been controlled with crude methods such as abstinence and self induced abortion. Increasing prosperity caused people to want smaller families, because there was less need for children to work in the fields or support parents in their old age.

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The next visitor to manupur was mahmood mamdani, an indian who had grown up in africa and been educated in the united states. Mamdani came to demonstrate that children were the only protection poor people had, and that contraceptives were not needed, not wanted, a totally inadequate substitute for the thorough political and economic revolution he advocated. The poorer the person he interviewed, the more that person needed many children simply to stay alive.

He quotes a carpenter, if i have sons, they will work outside, labor even as animals do, but save. And maybe we will even be able to get some machinery with the savings of the other sons. The villagers informed mamdani that they had never used harvard's contraceptives. Mamdani describes a house where he found small rectangular boxes and bottles, one piled on top of the other, all arranged as a tiny sculpture in a corner of the room. Twelve years after mamdani's visit the next set of investigators arrived in manupur. By 1982 the village's population was 2400, double what it had been in the 1950's. School enrollment had increased greatly 81 percent of the boys and 63 percent of the girls finished the 10th grade.

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