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Problems a newly-independent state is confronted with.

Overpopulating

For decades the population explosion has been giving people nightmares. Figures and numerous facts prove that there are already, and certainly will be, too many people. Simply calculating the lengths of time necessary to double the world’s populating is enlightening. Currently, the world’s population increases by three every second and by a billion every decade. With figures such as these, the gloom has been understandable.

World’s population is still rising fast, but many scientists think that it is already plain, that the worst forecasts will never become reality. Far from reaching fifteen billion, nearly three times today’s figure, the odds are that it may never get to ten billion.

In Chinŕ, this is the result of tough government policies on family size, but, in many countries it has been achieved without coercion. In most of Europe, the birthrate is now well below replacement level.

The change has come about because of dramatic drops in fertility in many countries. Because of the population-food imbalance necessitates “at any price” a growth of agricultural production, methods often harmful to the environment are used without judgment. Examples abound.

Falling fertility and successes such as these show that there is at least a case for feeling optimistic about the future. Paradoxically, the greatest problems may come not from soaring populations but from the declines now beginning to become evident in some developed countries.

As a result, a good part of humanity suffers from malnutrition or from undernourishment. Some think that recent scientific discoveries applied to agriculture and known under the name of “green revolution” will resolve the problem. Nothing is less certain. Promoters of the revolution themselves believe that it can offer only a respite of ten or twenty years. In underdeveloped countries, although predominantly agricultural, the lag in food production in relation to demographic growth increases more and more. As the crisis worsens, these countries will have to import food.

The constructions of colossal dams to irrigate hundreds of thousands of acres can in fact provoke catastrophes. Thus, the Aswan Dam currently prevents the deposit of fertile silts brought each year by the flooding of the Nile. The result will obviously be a decrease in the fertility of the Delta lands. Moreover fertilizers, synthetic pesticides, DDT can be devastating, transforming ecosystems, necessary for the conservation of the environment, into simple ecosystems. So monocultures are a case of mutation.

Certain situations are perceived as dangerous only when they become critical enough to cause numerous deaths. Smog is an example. Many deaths provoked an awakening of conscience and resulted in decisions which have proved efficacious. But smoke presents still other dangers: namely, it destroys plants which offer little resistance, and whose oxygen production is indispensable to us and it changes the earth’s thermal equilibrium.



For these forms of pollution as for all the others, the destructive chain of cause and effect goes back to a prime cause: too many cars, too many factories, too many detergents, and too many pesticides, inadequate methods for disinfecting sewers, too little water, and too much carbon monoxide. The cause is always the same: too many people on the earth.

Optimists believe and often assert that science will indeed find solution to the problem of overcrowding, namely by proving the means to immigrate to other planets. But this solution is totally utopian. In effect, even if it should become possible, 50 years would be sufficient to multiply to the point of population all the planets with a density equal to that of the Earth.

Although the most likely peak figure was predicted to be 10 billion, much lower figures were not ruled out.

Those who have painted a rosy picture of an environment recovering its natural beauty as the impact of human numbers declines could find that the opposite is nearer the truth.

 

problems a newly-independent state is confronted with.

Chinese people say that the worst thing is to live in the time of changes. With a rich choice of possible ways of further development comes a bunch of problems as well and it is especially time as for the newly-independent states. I’d like to illustrate this on the example of Samoa.

The sound of progress frightens the Samoans. For most of their 50 years life time has stood still. They have worked the banana plantation and respected the custom that the family chiefs represented absolute authority.

They owned all the land communally, they elected a parliament and they administrated justice in each village, thus leaving few duties for the nation’s 219-man police force.

No doubt, Samoa is a poor country and changes must come, but the Samoans do not want them so fast. They do not want their children to go to New Zealand to look for big money, but to stay them and work the plantations as they always have done.

The confusion is shared by many of the Samoans – and undoubtedly by the people of other newly independent, developing nations as well. The capital is teeming with people wanting to help: experts from the USA, investors from Japan, analysts from Asia and civil engineers from New Zealand.

Already streets are being torn up for a new road system. The hospital is being rebuilt with a loan from New Zealand. A new Government hotel has opened to promote tourism – an industry the county is not quite sure it wants. Loans from banks will modernize the communications system. Japanese investors have opened a sawmill and are building houses. When these and many other development schemes are turned into reality and Western Samoa, one of the world’s poorest nations in cash terms, is forces into the 21st century, what is to become of its culture?

Most Samoans want the modern amenities, but they don’t want to throw away their culture. there is no easy answer because in many ways the culture retards development. The question people are asking is, what is a balance between the past and the future.

The tradition of communal land ownership stultifies individual incentive and has resulted in neglect of the land. The exodus to New Zealand – and the money the emigrants send home – create a false economy and results in thousands of Samoan families ignoring the land and living off the earnings of their expatriate children. They, together with thousands of other Samoans in New Zealand on temporary work visas, send home about 3 million a year. The money provides a boost to Western Samoa’s agricultural economy, but it also is inflationary, and the inflation rate has been 35 per cent in two years. Nevertheless, Western Samoa has traveled a long way in the 12 years since independence. It has political stability and a people who are 90 per cent literate. It offers investors a cheap labour force, and a land that is 80 per cent uncultivated. And at the same time it offers visitors the most uncorrupted Polynesian culture left anywhere today.


Date: 2015-12-11; view: 1351


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