famine as population control

There is an article today in the NY Times about the food crisis in Niger (here). I don't mean to sound cold hearted, but what did they think would happen when each woman in the country has an average of 7 children, and how do they think simply sending in more food, or helping more of these people to live, is going to resolve this problem. If more babies live, that will just create more people 16 years from now who are going to be having more babies.

The math here is obvious. Unless you have a steadily increasing food supply, you can't have a steadily increasing population. That means that the number of births per year can't exceed the number of deaths. If women are having an average of 7 babies over the course of their lifetimes, 5 of those babies must die if the population is to remain the same. Famine is one way for these babies to die. War and disease are other ways (they don't have to die as babies, they just have to die before they produce babies of their own).

It seems tragic that these deaths must happen, but think about it for a second. Our ancestors must have lived for thousands of years under similar circumstances. There was no birth control for them, so they must have produced roughly as many babies per woman as is happening now in Niger, and that means that they must have had a similar death rate. This is simply the natural state for our species. The situation in Niger right now is somewhat exacerbated by two factors. First, a drought this year reduced the level of population that the land could support, requiring that more people must die in order to bring the population level down to the new limit. Second, humanitarian aid from previous years also allowed the population to increase beyond the limit that the land could support.

So what's the solution? I don't know. First, I don't think throwing more aid into Niger is going to help. It's only going to make the situation get worse down the road. I think that providing free birth control would be a good start, but it may be difficult to convince people to use it. I suppose it's possible that they might see some logic in only having two babies, and then focusing all your efforts on insuring that those two survive, but I've heard that that isn't usually what happens. I've heard (and I'm not an expert on this, it's just what I've heard) that it takes about a generation of high infant survival rate before people become confident enough that their babies will survive that they will be willing to risk only having two babies.

Another solution might be to just let them be. Let them starve. I know it sounds cold hearted, but it might be arguable that it is better to live only a few short years than to never live at all. Also, by having a high birth/death rate, you increase the selective pressure on your gene pool, thus insuring a genetically stronger population. And besides, this is the natural state for our species. It's tragic, but it's the level of tragedy that exists for all species that care about their children. It only seems unusual to us because we've managed to break that cycle in our society, through a combination of low mortality rate, and a low birth rate to match it, and that, as I've mentioned in previous posts, is going to cause a problem for us through a gradual entropy of the gene pool.