• Muad'DibberA
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    1 year ago

    Galeano, in the introduction to his Open veins of latin america, states that the only reason south america isn’t as densely populated as Europe, is intentional underdevelopment, and colonialism. The European powers intentionally depopulated the indigenous of many of these countries by turning their economies into mono-crop / mono-mineral mercantile export ones from the 1500s onward.

    I’m sure someone has tried to figure out earth’s carrying capacity, but we’re not even remotely close to it. There isn’t even any vital resource whose production doesn’t scale with population growth.

    The fear-mongering about population growth is really only coming from euro-amerikkkan capitalists and white supremacists like Bill gates, who are mirroring their 1800s counterparts with population control attempts in places like Africa. Bill Gates openly says he’s trying to stop “population increase in places we don’t want it”, showing his fear of the growth of potentially threatening non-white populations.

    • @knfrmity
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      361 year ago

      I recently learned that of the reasons for this neocolonial population control is to make sure that over-exploited regions don’t become problematic once their natural resources are fully extracted.

      Over-exploited countries are essentially forced to be dependent on the US for food. They pay for that food with some of the money generated via resource extraction. They have no agriculture of their own beyond cash crops like cocoa or coffee, which obviously cannot feed people. So once those resources are gone, the money to import food is gone, and these countries will have to experience some pretty serious population reduction before local agriculture can sustain the remaining population.

      It’s not just individual malthusian billionaires peddling this either, this has been official World Bank and IMF policy since the seventies at least.

      • lemmygrabber
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        201 year ago

        The reason they do this is something that is completely overlooked in the general consciousness of the imperial core. A vast variety of products used there cannot be grown there. Most obvious examples are tropical products like fruits etc. If you read Patnaiks’ theory on imperialism, they posit that the point of the system is to suppress wages in the third world so that cost of the products that are grown natively remain low and the profit margins of corporations and the standard of living in the imperial core can be maintained. IMF and World Bank policies of cutting social spending are for this reason.

        World Bank loans are dollar denominated for this reason as well. It forces third world countries to sell their produce and resources on the global market for dollars to pay back these loans with as you said. Turns out the whole Chinese debt trap thing was just projection.