Madam, - Paul McCarthy (Letters, July 24th), asked how your previous correspondent, Eamon Delaney "would regard reckless population growth. . . being posited as the main cause of the Great Irish Famine". I would like to make a couple of points in response.
Firstly, even at the peak population of about eight million just before the Famine, Ireland was by no means densely populated.
That equates to about 94 people per square kilometre, which is well below the current EU average.
If the current population were eight million, Ireland would still not be among the 100 most densely populated countries on the planet (based on the UN World Prospects Report, 2004).
Given that Ireland enjoys a virtually ideal climate for producing food, as well as fertile land and extensive fishing resources, it would actually be capable of sustaining an above average population density (just as Britain does).
As such, it would be absurd to suggest that the pre-Famine population in Ireland was unsustainable, especially in view of the fact that huge quantities of food were exported from Ireland during the Famine.
By contrast, the terrain and climate in Ethiopia are far less hospitable, plus it's land-locked, so the population density that it can sustain is greatly reduced.
Secondly, with regard to Mr McCarthy's mockery of Mr Delaney's "attempt to portray the environmental footprint of a largely agrarian society in a negative light", perhaps he is unaware that nearly 20 per cent of all global warming-causing emissions come from animal agriculture, which is more than the combined emissions from all forms of transportation globally (according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation).
Ethiopia is currently the 10th largest producer of livestock in the world, and one can only guess how much more livestock it will produce if the population doubles again as predicted.
Population growth is a major problem - both for Ethiopia itself and the planet as a whole. - Yours, etc,
DES McCONVILLE, Hayburn Crescent, Partickhill, Glasgow.
Madam, - Eamon Delaney (Letters, July 23rd) makes some wild and completely unsubstantiated claims about so called "reckless population increases in Africa" and the link between the population of Ethiopia and that country's precarious food security.
Dr Jacqueline Kasun in her book, The War against Population, states that "population estimates in Africa are highly unreliable"; for example the most carefully planned and executed census ever in Nigeria in 1991, found fewer than 90 million people compared to the previous estimate by "western experts" of 122 million. Wild overestimates of populations in Africa are encouraged by the environmental and population control fundamentalists.
These alarmist scare tactics also serve to stoke the glowing embers of an underlying racism where African men women and children are described in utilitarian terms and gross caricatures are promoted which serve to dehumanise them.
Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize for economics in 1998, argues that famines are not caused by actual food shortages but by institutional failure. Western journalists blamed the Ethiopian famine on "over-population".
However, the truth is that the Ethiopian government caused it by confiscating the food stocks of traders and exporting them to buy arms (sounds familiar in the context of Irish history!).
The merciless policies of Ethiopia's leftist dictatorship caused the tragedy, not its population. A working democracy is a necessary precursor to national food security; the positive example of India bears this out.
Africa has only one fifth the population density of Europe and has an unexploited food-raising potential that could feed twice the present population of the world using existing food technologies, according to Roger Revelle of Harvard. On a recent visit to southeastern Nigeria to build a new school (a hand-up not a hand-out), I learned that with the year-round growing conditions, the fertile soil and the abundant rainfall, any sort of basic agricultural development could result in up to four crops per year. - Yours, etc,
RAY McINTYRE, Mullingar, Co Westmeath.