Just a (densely-populated) blip in the $94-trillion global economy

For long, the voices of those proposing population control have been drowned out by the lay conservatives with big megaphones. With their perches in the academe and their impressive creds, these lay conservatives opposed to population control have short-circuited efforts to rein in population growth, both the official mandates of the state and the work of nonprofit groups involved in population control.

And our political leaders simply folded up. Population explosions became yearly — and predictable — occurrences in our land-short nation. Population control receded into the catacombs of forgotten policies as the advocates of uncontrolled, unregulated population growth gained primacy in the policy debates. (The great irony is that most of these advocates are celibates.) The biggest metropolis, Metro Manila, and one of the most populous in the world, has the dueling features of exclusive gated communities with pieces of property in the billion-peso level on the one hand and shanties of cardboard boxes and rotting GI sheets jamming esteros and river banks on the other. The teeming squatter colonies even go by a politically-correct name — informal settlers — as if the less candid name can ease the wretchedness, the misery and the literal stink of their humdrum lives.