As Paul Ehrlich predicted as early as 1968 in his Population Bomb, the demographic
explosion in UDCs, which have seen a population increase of about
3000 million since 1960, has shattered the millenary equilibrium.
Beyond moral statements or rationalisations arguing that a high birth rate stimulates
development (often using insufficient empirical evidence, as is the case with
Simon (1980) or Chesnais (1987)), objectively speaking, a high birth rate is –
together with the expansion of consumerism in DC – the key to the acceleration of
the use, exploitation and degradation of natural resources and the advance of desertification
on a global scale, specially in arid and semiarid regions as the Sahel. It is
also clearly associated with poverty (Panayotou, 2000a) while development, in the
end, improves the ecological indicators on a country level (Panayotou, 2000b).