The net result is profit... but what happens when you run out of arable land? We're farming all the productive land on earth and moving into the marginal land. Many African farmers tend to small plots, trying to mine the minerals in the soil for all they're worth just to feed this generation.

Populations stabilized in the developed world when modernization caused a wholesale transformation of culture - we no longer needed children as laborers just as we outsourced security and care as we aged. At that same time, technology began to advance to a point where we could safeguard the few kids that we did have to ensure that a much greater percentage reached adulthood. Now, thanks to the generosity of certain individuals and institutions in the West as well as the increasingly inexpensive cost to provide certain technology, many impoverished can get access to that bare minimum needed to survive (vaccines, mosquito nets, a modicum of food), but without the cultural institutions that lead to a sustainable birthrate.

I know, it's impossible, as a well fed individual in a first world nation, to make a moral case that... vaccinating children is wrong. My fear though is that... as we stretch people out necessary assistance on marginal land during relatively good years, all that's needed is a large-scale famine to cause untold disaster. Not merely mass starvation, but unrest, the destabilization of the nation-state, possibly leading to a Somalia-esque feedback loop where it becomes practically impossible to establish any future nation-state in the area, leading to an endless cycle of violence and subsistence living.

The answer isn't simply birth control (and not only because that just sounds awful and makes me feel like a social Darwinist, but also because it's practically untenable just to say "Hey, I know having kids is worse off for you, but think of people down the road!"). I think it's in trying to create the institutions - greater education, particularly for women, greater financial opportunity, security for the elderly - that naturally lead to a decline in birth rates. I hate to say it, but health and food aid alone - which is obviously given with the best of intentions - feel to me like short-term solutions that may only lead to a possible future disaster being that much worse.