Hindus should give up family planning so that their population does not go down … The population of minorities, especially Muslims, had been rising at such a fast pace that it would be 25 to 30 percent of the total population in 50 years. It would be suicidal for Hindus if they did not raise their population.
– VHP President Ashok Singhal, December 2004
Population growth is one of the factors contributing to global warming … Developing countries, especially those with rapid population growth, promise to worsen this problem [of man-made global warming] as they too develop, using the model of wasteful, energy-intensive Western economies … Stabilizing population growth worldwide … [is a] vital component of slowing, and eventually stopping, global warming.
– "Population and Global Warming Factsheet", US Sierra Club
In a world not characterised by leaders with a great sense of history, nor a great level of awareness, President George W Bush has nonetheless emerged as a figure sui generis. Recently, he unleashed a storm by announcing that the world faced a food crisis due to increasing consumption in India and China. Newspapers in India, generally distinguished in their fierce competition to further US interests in the Subcontinent (if not around the world), were surprisingly quick to denounce the idiocy of this statement. They pointed out, with data, that such rhetoric flew in the face of facts: that food consumption had not particularly increased in these countries; indeed, that Indian per-capita consumption had stagnated, if not declined, and that this was in any case not anywhere near US levels.
President Bush's assumption is in line with a fiction referred to as Malthusianism, named after the 18th-century demographer Thomas Malthus who prognosticated a catastrophe as world population grew exponentially, outstripping food supply. He has since been proven wildly inaccurate, in part due to scientific advances. Today, however, the theory has been salvaged as neo-Malthusianism. What is of further surprise, not to mention worry, is that few commentators, whether in the media, in think tanks or in academia, have pointed out that the US president's specious neo-Malthusian 'logic' influences the dominant thinking in an astonishing spectrum of areas. The issue goes further, as well. For instance, as much as pundits have professed concern with the issue of global warming, heaping praise on Nobel laureate Al Gore, no one has pointed out that Gore's influential report on the issue is equally impacted by neo-Malthusian thinking – by ignoring how consumption by the rich is largely responsible for environmental problems, focusing instead on population growth in poor countries.