[Slapshot68]

If they can’t afford food/shelter etc on $2/day, what makes you think they can afford birth control? Or are you talking about abstinence?

I would like to point out, however, that this ethanol idiocy is partly to blame for the rising food prices. Also, it seems that no matter how much money the West throws at 3rd world nations, poverty increases.

[hermgem]

Contrary to U.S. media spreads, Europeans did not engage in producing ethanol.
The media over there came out strong upfront that ethanol is toxic for food pricing, has a negative yield of input versus output (uses more energy to be produced than yields) and was openly accused as farmer enrichment.
The former world's bread basket, the U.S.A. now serves as a wealth transfer vehicle to farm states assuring Democrats their “deserved” rewards with congressional seats while the world goes hungry.

[calex59]

The answer is in the old saying: Give a man a fish and you will feed him for one day, teach him to fish and you will feed him for a lifetime. I didn’t get the quote exactly correct but you should get my drift. Does anyone remember the book “The Ugly American”? This book has been around for a long time but it demonstrates the difference in sending foreign aide and sending people with knowledge to teach others how to take care of themselves.

[Brilliant]

I would not have difficulty with the idea of shipping condums to them if they’d use them. A lot of these poverty stricken nations are that way because they have 100 times the population that their nation can support, given their low capital base.

And we’ve seen with China that it tends to backfire if we help them develop. With their large populations, they would just put further strains on existing resources, like oil, minerals, fishing, etc.