Werner Fornos educates ARC on world population

Today's guest speaker was Werner Fornos (left, with Joe Lott).  Mr. Fornos is with the non-profit Global Population Education, and with the world's population on the rise, he taught us that education is the key to stabilizing this growth.

Within the next year, the population could reach 9 billion people, all of us competing for the same resources.  1 million people will go hungry this year.  But with the grim realization that we have climate issues, we're losing forests, and we have dwindling resources. Mr. Fornos offers some ideas to help:

• Educate women around the world - in countries where the women are educated, the number of children they have is cut in half.
• Reduce infant mortality - in the countries with high rates of infant mortality, families feel they need to have more children to ensure the family continues.
• Universal access to birth control - this does not condone abortion, but makes birth control equally available to everyone who wants it.
• Greater male responsibility - in countries where men take responsibility for their actions, there are less unwanted pregnancies.

European countries have stabilized their population growth and the Central American countries are getting there, but India is still growing, more than 2 million people per month.

Rotary has an action group on Population & Development.  The key to take away from all of this is Education.

Werner Fornos is author of Gaining People, Losing Ground, which will be available in December.