Challenges loom as world population hits 7 billion

APvia Yahoo ^ | October 17, 2011 | DAVID CRARY

[Beaten Valve]

She's a 40-year-old mother of eight, with a ninth child due soon. The family homestead in a Burundi village is too small to provide enough food, and three of the children have quit school for lack of money to pay required fees.

"I regret to have made all those children," says Godelive Ndageramiwe. "If I were to start over, I would only make two or three."

At Ahmed Kasadha's prosperous farm in eastern Uganda, it's a different story.

"My father had 25 children — I have only 14 so far, and expect to produce more in the future," says Kasadha, who has two wives. He considers a large family a sign of success and a guarantee of support in his old age.

By the time Ndageramiwe's ninth child arrives, and any further members of the Kasadha clan, the world's population will have passed a momentous milestone. As of Oct. 31, according to the U.N. Population Fund, there will be 7 billion people sharing Earth's land and resources.

In Western Europe, Japan and Russia, it will be an ironic milestone amid worries about low birthrates and aging populations. In China and India, the two most populous nations, it's an occasion to reassess policies that have already slowed once-rapid growth.

[laweeks]

It takes a lot of farmland to feed those 7 billion people all hypothetically living in Texas.

Sorry, allmendream, I had the wrong arable land figure before:

Well, let's see:
288,581 sq miles of inhabitable land in Texas
12 million sq miles of arable land. (This from a tree-hugger website too)
Equals 41.5 sq miles of arable land per person.

Plenty of land to grow my food . . . . even Mooch-elle couldn't eat all the food grown on that much land . . . I guess.

[allmendream]

Wow, how stupid Texans must be for not putting enough arable land into production to feed 7 billion people./s