According to the most recent available statistics, the earth’s population has passed 7 million. The debate over the threat posed by overpopulation has raged for decades and the true magnitude of the situation may not be known for some time. However, there have long been observable, measurable consequences to the environment, living space, replenishable food supplies and other basic resources. In Brazil, all of these problems are in evidence to varying degrees, but poverty remains the overriding factor. While it cannot be argued that overpopulation is the cause of myriad social and political problems, in Brazil it is part of an immutable truth. “A focus on overpopulation, it has been argued, implies that this is the cause of poverty, whereas it is rather an effect of poverty” (Patai, 1993, p. 359). The implications of this are profound for Brazil and its more than 200 million inhabitants and mirror the challenges faced by other overpopulated countries, such as India and China. As a developing nation, Brazil seeks to resolve the destructive symbiosis between poverty and overpopulation. But the impacts of overcrowding and environmental destruction continue to prevail in South America’s largest nation.
Northeast Brazil have for the past 30 years gradually been driven across the border into Venezuela and other parts of the Amazon region due to overcrowding and insufficient food resources. Jose Altino Machado, president of Brazil’s Union of Amazon Mining Unions, said 15,000 Brazilian garimpeiros now work as miners in Venezuela, 10,000 in French Guiana and 6,000 work as miners and shopkeepers in Guyana (Brooke, 1992). Others have made their way to Bolivia, Colombia and Peru (Brooke, 1992). At the root of the situation lies the problem of living space. In Brazil’s Roraima state, hundreds of thousands of displaced miners were forcibly moved off Yanomami Indian reservation lands during the 1980s, spurring a migration that has caused conflict with citizens and government officials in nearby countries (Brooke, 1992). Violence periodically flared up, and Venezuelan troops imprisoned or killed garimpeiros in order to stem the tide of migration. Clearly, overpopulation in Northeast Brazil has caused overpopulation, with all of its attendant problems, to spread throughout much of South America.
Overcrowding in Brazil’s rural areas has also forced waves of overwhelming migration into urban centers. In Rio de Janeiro, the housing problem has reached a critical point. With living space at a premium in Brazil’s largest city, hordes of impoverished Brazilians from the countryside live in favelas, rows of makeshift huts that have been built into the hillsides surrounding the city. Favelas have been a part of Rio’s landscape since the late 1800s; today, there are some 500 favela communities, or neighborhoods, within greater Rio de Janeiro, comprising endless lines of wood and sheet metal shacks (Macalester.edu, 2011). In fact, favelas make up about one-third of Rio’s total population (Macalester.edu, 2011). Such improvised squatter communities represent significant sanitation and environmental problems. They also exist directly alongside older, more affluent communities.
In addition to poor sanitation, faveladors suffer from a shortage of water, which most must acquire by tapping into the nearest water main. Only about 50 percent of faveladors have access to indoor toilet facilities, which are improperly routed and run through open ditches into nearby roadways (Macalester.edu, 2011). Garbage disposal is generally accomplished by incineration, which frequently causes nearby wooden shacks to catch fire (Macalester.edu, 2011). Not surprisingly, electricity is in scarce supply and, when available, does not generate enough power to adequately light each dwelling (2011). Overpopulation exacerbates the chronic employment shortage in Rio, with faveladors forced to commute long distances to more prosperous parts of the city for work. If overpopulation is an effect of poverty, then Rio de Janeiro’s favelas are one of Brazil’s most overt examples of the interrelationship between the two.
Poverty and overpopulation have also created an alarmingly high occurrence of homeless children. Minimal living space, resources and a persistently underperforming economy create situations in which children are forced to seek subsistence on the streets, or are forced away from home by abusive home situations (O’Haire, 2011). With 20 percent of Brazil’s population controlling 65 percent of the country’s wealth, there is little opportunity for financial prosperity for any but a small percentage of the country (2011). Thus poverty creates a self-perpetuating cycle of misery. “Poverty is one of the reasons that lead children to the street. The process of children going to the streets to work in legal or illegal businessescontributes later to the phenomenon of street children” (Fernandes &Vaughn, 2008, p.671-2). Poverty and overpopulation leave many of Brazil’s families and their children in the most basic survival situations.
The environment
Brazil is home to the largest rain forest on earth, a biological dynamo which produces more than 20 percent of the planet’s oxygen (Taylor, 2004). Population growth has led to an increasing amount of clear-cutting, the result of new hydroelectric dams, corporate enviro-business, subsistence agriculture carried out by landless settlers and other damaging activities (2004). This region also contains an enormous range of animal life, which has become a primary food source for the nation’s large rural population. In the state of Amazonas, which has a population of nearly 600,000, the average yearly kill rate for food is 2.8 million mammals, 530,000 sea birds and 200,000 reptiles, with a total of about 3.5 million vertebrates killed for food each year (Zuckerman and Jefferson, 1996, p. 49). Many among these are endangered species, including manatees which, though being declared illegal, are still hunted for food and profit (Zuckerman and Jefferson, 1996, p. 49).
Brazil is one of many overpopulated, under-developed countries that consider their natural resources as a means for economic growth (Taylor, 2004). The Brazilian government has encouraged its citizens to settle the Amazonia region, in part to officially “claim” it from the native Indians, but also to open up new areas needed for living space (Taylor, 2004). As such, overpopulation has a complex effect on Brazil’s unique environment with animal life, native populations, the rain forest and arable lands being increasingly compromised at the expense of government-introduced development program aimed at alleviating the country’s population-
growth problem. “Governments see planned colonization of forest land as a solution to pressing problems of poverty, overpopulation, and inequities in land distribution” (Fearnside, 1986, p. 7). However, overpopulation in Brazil is not the only source of the problem.
The worldwide population explosion and the globalization of the world’s economy have caused international business interests to exploit Brazil’s abundant natural resources. With more people to provide for (and sell to), governments and corporations partner find themselves in the business of seeking cheaper resources. In places like Brazil, where governments seek ways to reach solvency and develop economically, resource exploitation becomes a comparatively quick and easy way to achieve those goals. Thus, overpopulation becomes more than just a problem of unrestrained growth within Brazil but a pressure exerted on the country’s economy and natural resource assets from beyond its borders.
Disease
In 2007, it was reported that half of the world’s population lived in urban areas. It is believed that by 2025 that number will climb to two-thirds (Cornell.edu, 2011). With so much of Brazil’s population concentrated in urban centers like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, and with inadequate sanitation and health services available to the country’s vast impoverished population, numerous diseases are a fact of life. There is a direct correlation between dilapidated, too-heavily populated cities and disease. “These high density areas have intensified the volume of disease and pollution,” and show a clear interaction between environmental degradation and widespread illness (Cornell.edu, 2011). With raw sewage flowing openly in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and in other cobbled-together urban areas, the most vulnerable members of society are prone to countless viruses and to many other disease threats that science has not identified yet.
In fact, it is thought by some researchers that a source like raw human sewage could help unleash a disease, or diseases, capable of drastically reducing the planet’s burgeoning population. “Whether it is a parasite or other disease that eventually halts the inexorable increase of the human population, once conditions are right for its spreadwill not only halt further growth but will bring the population back down to, or even well below equilibrium level” (Cornell.edu, 2011). One factor that can make human populations vulnerable to catastrophic disease is women’s lack of access to reproductive health services and basic health information, a problem which, in Brazil, is the source of urban overcrowding, malnutrition, unemployment and the spread of disease (Zuckerman and Jefferson, 1996, p. 82).
Conclusion
In Brazil, as in other parts of the developing world, poverty and overpopulation are the twin engines of a self-perpetuating cycle. The characteristics of poverty, such as urban overcrowding, resource exploitation and the inequity of wealth and property distribution are all daunting problems in Brazil. Thus, Brazil remains mired in the cycle of poverty, of which overpopulation is a chronic effect and the cause of a vast array of socio-economic factors. Globalization, with its potential for improving quality of life for the world’s poor, and recent attempts to control population growth in Brazil hold promise for the future. But until Brazil attends to fundamental, internal problems that keep the country’s underclass rooted in poverty, overpopulation and its symptoms – unemployment, poor health and squalid living conditions – will remain commonplace in Brazilian life.
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