Population Increase- Explosion of People!

"An Economic crisis has been a fact in Egypt for the last 5 decades. The day to day life of an average citizen has suffered going from bad to worse all the time."

POPULATION INCREASE-

Explosion of people!

Egypt, officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is one of the most important Arab countries, with its famous capital city, Cairo. Most of Egypt's terrain is desert, divided into 2 unequal parts by the Nile River. The valley and delta of the Nile are the main centers of habitation.

Egypt is dependent upon foreign military and economic aid, quite strongly. From 1955 to 1972, Egypt relied primarily on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and other Communist countries. Recently the Egyptian government developed close political ties with the United States, particularly after the United States helped facilitate the 1979 treaty with Israel. Egypt receives substantial economic and military aid from the United States.

Egypt has many environmental problems and some of them complicate efforts to promote economic and social development, such as water quality and quantity, soil loss and environmental effects of tourism. The size and rapid growth of Egypt's population have caused additional environmental problems. Overcrowded cities and streets are filled with externalities such as, pollution-spewing cars and trucks, public transportation is poorly developed and factories contaminate the air.

None of Egypt's environmental difficulties are impossible to solve. Egypt is a small country relative to the size of the world economy, it has great historical traditions and continuity as well as an excellent location and a skilled elite. However, in an economy short of financial resources, it is often hard to find the political will and money to invest in long-term environmental protection.

The main problem is that although Egypt's economic growth is considerable in some areas at the present, it has not been reliable or fast enough and this is due to one of the major problems Egypt is facing: "POPULATION INCREASE".

Egypt suffers from the basic economic problem, which is of course scarce resources on one hand and unlimited wants and needs on the other. Its resources are not enough to sustain its population and the number of people increases as quickly as ever!

Some scholars believe that the current engineering projects that have been designed to increase the amount of arable land (land fit to be cultivated) will relieve the consequences of high population density in the Nile Valley, which will decrease the need to reduce birth rates.

The fertility rate (birth rate), which is measured as the ratio of the live births in an area to the population of that area, has fallen from 7.2 babies per woman in the 1960's to 3.4 babies in 1998.

However - Egypt's population is STILL growing by around 1.5million people, which is equivalent of the population of a country the size of Kuwait! Therefore Egypt MUST sustain this decrease in birth rate.

This figure shows how the population is growing by 1.5million people:

(FIGURE 1)

An average Egyptian woman gives birth to 3.4 children in her lifetime, this could be a choice she makes but sometimes it is a problem of unmet levels of contraception and this leads to a rate above the rate needed to stabilize population. This mostly happens in Upper Egypt, in poor, rural areas, which are the least able to support this population growth. The United Nations (UN) predicts that population will increase from 62.3million in 1995 up to 95.6million by 2016.

This high birth rate is very costly for Egypt; it prevents economic development, increases health risks for women and children and dissolves the quality of life by decreasing nutrition, employment and scarce resources.

Some comparison could be made to help prove and show clearly the problem Egypt is facing due to population growth.

The United Kingdom (UK), a developed country and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will be used to compare with Egypt, as follows:

2002 Estimate

Egypt UK UAE

Population 68,359,979 59,511,464 2,369,153

Population growth rate (%) 1.72 0.25 1.61

Birth Rate per 1000 25.38 11.76 18

Death Rate per 1000 7.83 10.38 3.68

Infant mortality rate per 1000 62.32 5.63 17.17

Total birth rate children/woman 3.15 1.75 3.29

Literacy (total) (%) 51.4 99 79.2

(Figure 2)

These figures help me raise some questions, How is it that Egypt has the birth rate, nearly double that of the UK and around 7 times larger than that of the UAE - which is also an Arab country? Infant mortality rate is so much higher than those two countries, by over 45/1000 children compared with the UAE and 57/1000 as compared to the UK?? This shows that something is terribly wrong and that infants as well as mothers are very highly uneducated and in health risks. Some people desire large families this is because in some areas infant mortality rates are high and parents choose to have a large number of children hoping that some may survive. Literacy levels in the UK are estimated to be 99% and in the UAE around 79%, while in Egypt, literacy totals to 51.4% of the total population.

This is a huge problem, because literacy is so low, people unaware of how their increase in birth rate will lead to the problem of unemployment and that population increase triggers this problem even further.

The following 2 pyramid graphs, using age and gender as scales, show clearly how population was in the year 2000 and how they will be approximately by 2050 if population is not sustained:

(Please Turn Over)

(Figure 3)

On January 14th, 2002 Egypt's Prime Minister, Atef Abeid, said that the population of Egypt was to increase to 123 by 2019 and that there were 800,000 new job seekers every year and that this number will increase as population increases.

Dealing with population increase will help solve many