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Almost everywhere outside Northern Europe and North America, the apparent consequences of death control are apt to be appalling. In Palermo, 62-year-old Gaetano di Fazio and his wife share their verminous four-room flat (which has neither water nor heat) with 13 children and grandchildren, five of whom sleep in a single bed. In Kerala, on India's southwest coast, 2,000,000 of a total population of 15 million are unemployed. In Egypt, where 25 million people now live on little more cultivated land than 10 million lived on in 1900, per capita income has steadily declined.
Said a so-year-old fellah from the Nile delta recently; "When I was a boy, the people of our village regularly ate meat once a week on market day, and we often ate eggs. Today we must live on corn and beans." Even in the prosperous nations of the West, the population explosion has created planning problems that the politicians and public alike often prefer to ignore. In Paris, Rome, London and Manhattan, traffic engineers have all but admitted defeat against ever increasing swarms of cars. In California, statisticians estimate that Los Angeles County alone ought to spend $7.5 billion on new and improved roads and build at least 775 new 18-room elementary schools between now and 1970.
Men & Formulas. As the world's people have multiplied, so have warnings of disaster. Social scientists argue that poorer nations, with populations increasing as fast as or faster than their agricultural and industrial production, are condemning themselves to perennial and deepening poverty. Physical scientists, such as U.S.
Naturalist Fairfield Osborn, author of Our Plundered Planet, say that mankind is spending the earth's resources at a drunken-sailor rate, will ultimately denude the earth of its minerals and destroy its capacity to produce food.
Convinced—or at least shaken—by those warnings, increasing numbers of experts and nonexperts argue that death control must be offset by birth control. In July 1959, a presidential committee to study U.S. foreign aid, headed by Major General William Draper, implicitly recommended that the U.S. should help poorer nations set up birth control programs, and by year's end, virtually every would-be U.S. presidential candidate had felt obliged to take a stand against Government sponsorship of contraception abroad (TIME, Dec. 7 et seq.}. With or without birth control programs, says Sir Charles Darwin, grandson of the author of the theory of evolution, humanity is going to breed itself into chaos, and if the present increase rate continues, the time will come when there will be "standing room only" signs all over the earth.