China’s One Child Policy (OCP) might have been influenced by Confucius and other Chinese writers who believed that “excessive growth may reduce output per worker, repress levels of living for the masses and engender strife.” The OCP requires every family to have only one child, and failing this, punishment with fines and sometimes, illegal forced abortions and forced sterilizations. The OCP was introduced in 1979 as a tool of population control, to check rapid population growth rates. Recently, there have been suggestions that the OCP might be outliving its intentions. Population growth has stagnated and an official report states that there is a dearth of 15-59 year olds in China. As of 2011, the number of births prevented by the OCP was cited at 400 million.
Many children under the OCP do not understand what siblings mean or trustworthiness. Flickr.com/blondie478On the economic front, it is touted as being responsible for the high savings rate of the Chinese. What the economy really needs is a move towards consumption so as to keep its growth going. Increasing consumption patterns would also make her enviable for foreign investment. Not only that, the children born under OCP do not understand what a sibling means. If this is foreboding, only time will tell.
Children under OCP lack characteristic for entrepreneurial prowess.
Social scientists from Australia who studied Chinese citizens born under its One Child Policy (OCP) and just before have released a report that OCP has not only dramatically re-shaped the population, but it has produced individuals lacking characteristics important for economic and social attainment[sic]. Children born under OCP were found to be significantly less trusting, less trustworthy, more risk-averse, less competitive, more pessimistic, and less conscientious individuals.
Advert
According to one of the scientists, Professor Cameron: “Our data show that people born under the One Child Policy were less likely to be in more risky occupations like self-employment. Thus there may be implications for China in terms of a decline in entrepreneurial ability.”
If the OCP foretells social problems for China, many writers have also cited it as an impediment to China’s growth. Within some years, China might have to rely on other Asian countries for young people who will maintain its huge industrial resources, otherwise it might either have to relax its population control laws or abolish them. By about 2025, the Chinese population will be one of senior citizens. Children will have to save more to care for their elderly parents. According to an online Yahoo news report, if young men cannot find marriageable partners, if the gender ratio continues to be skewed in favor of sons and societal expectations makes it more so, social instability might be in the offing.
China’s foreign investments are increasing, especially in Africa, and one wonders what will happen if other countries finally catch up with her export surplus model?
There are signs that China might intend relaxing its strict OCP policy. Renmin University’s Gu and the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy published a study in 2008 on two-child policy programs in four regions. Conclusion: while freedom to decide on a second child would reduce the gender disparity in China, the high cost of having children is a scary prospect for the average Chinese. The next year, the National Population and Family Planning Commission decided, as a first step, to expand pilot programs to relax the policy in four to five other regions, although the proposal was dropped for lack of a leadership consensus. These are signs that a reform of the policy might be imminent.
Is China interested in leadership lessons from the West?
The question is: Is China interested in taking leadership lessons from Western countries, even renowned Western academics? There is no conclusive official data that China is going through economic strains, or that its citizens are ready to relinquish control of its massive export oriented industries to other countries. By the way, Chinese citizens who are more likely to face high fines or punishment due to the OCP cannot influence public opinion or policy.
Where reports suggest that the Government is ready to relax OCP, for how long will this last? Will those provinces return to old ways? According to Yahoo news online, in Jiuquan, though the one-child policy is relaxed, women are still subject to strict family planning rules. They are fitted with intra-uterine devices after their first child, sterilized after their second and whoever defies the two-child quota pays a 30,000 yuan fine.
Advert Fast and Free Expedited Shipping on orders over $59 offer applies to Bookbyte inventory only
No matter how poisonous it is to the brain, especially to infants, children and fetuses, mercury pollution seems unavoidable, especially if you live in a developing country where regulation and alternatives seem nonexistent or very expensive. Name it – either from plants manufacturing chlorine bleach, detergents or shoes, or firms where Polylvinyl Chloride (a.k.a PVC) is part of the production process, then mercury pollution is part of the problems we have to bear.
Advert
According to the environmental protection agency (EPA), the waste that is left for many days in your kitchen, medical waste and incinerators that are used to burn these wastes also emit mercury into the atmosphere. In countries with coal mining industries, mercury is emitted into the atmosphere through coal-fired plants, or cement industries that fire kilns run by coal. The worst culprit, tralala!, is gold mining. Thousands of pounds of mercury are released when that wonderful metal is heated for separation and not only into the air, directly into underground water.
Pollution does not only contaminate the waters, air and land, it also makes us sick and sometimes, the costs in ill-health and lost working days run into the billions. So, is it with mercury pollution.
Mercury pollution works by bioaccumulation and bioconcentration.
If ecosystems and food chains were as simple as an artists imagination, there would be less problems from pollution and human negative impacts. Flickr.com/rubyblossomUnlike greenhouses gases like carbon dioxide which directly pollutes your lungs and gives you cancer and ill-health, mercury pollution works indirectly. Mercury pollution works by bioaccumulation and bioconcentration.
Bioaccumulation is the process of taking in a pollutant such as mercury and then storing them in the body . After mercury is released into the air and water through the sources which I outlined above, the eventual media for mercury reaction to take place is water. Whether in soils containing water or in bodies of water, there are some organisms that methylate mercury or add methyl compound to mercury, thereby transforming it to methylmercury (MeHg). Methylmercury, not mercury on its own, is the devil to be afraid of. MeHg is a neurotoxin, damages the brain and impairs neuromotor development. Methylmercury accumulates in tiny plants and animals which are the start of the food chain. By a series, whether short or lengthy, of consumption patterns, MeHg accumulates in the food chain and into our meals.
First, tiny plants (or phytoplanktons) and animals (or zooplanktons) take up MeHg. These are then eaten up by other animals, accumulating it. Eventually big fishes and animals like Tilapia eat these other fishes and also accumulate MeHg. Finally, you and I take up these poisons into our system when we catch and make these big fishes part of our meals. The higher the organism is in the food chain, or the bigger the size of the organism, the higher the amount of MeHg poison you will find in it. This means that by eating big fishes like Tilapia contaminated with methylMercury, you stand a high chance of having it in your system. This process is called bioconcentration, the higher an organism is in the food chain, the higher its concentration of methylmercury.
The cost is extremely high
MeHg pollution attacks the nervous system, whether in adults or children, although children, fetuses and infants are more vulnerable. It damages the nervous system. It can stop your nerves from working well; can affect the workings of your memory such that you can no longer keep attention when needed; it can affect how your limbs work, and furthermore, it can affect how your eyes calculates space such that you could mistakenly fall down from a story building without realizing it. In health and human terms, the cost is enormous.
A team of researchers wanted to find out the effect of MeHg poisoning in 17 European countries by collecting hair samples from mothers and their children. They found that 1.8 million children are born exposed to toxic levels of MeHg, and of these, about 13% (i.e 232,000) are exposed to hazardous levels. By country analyses showed that children born in Portugal and Spain were most exposed, while Hungarian children were the least.
A member of the research team, Prof. Philippe Grandjean, explained that converting the effects of MeHg on developing brains into IQ points would mean that controlling MeHg pollution equates to 700,000 IQ points per year that would be salvaged; translated into monetary benefits, these is equal to between 8 billion to 9 billion euros per year for the whole of the European Union . Controlling exposure levels in European countries is certainly worth the effort.
The task of controlling MeHg is everyone’s responsibility.
Although MeHg seems unavoidable, the task of controlling it is everyone’s responsibility. Reducing exposure to safety limits should be the goal of every country. Many corporations are going green these days. You can encourage your local power supplier to do the same. When buying items like shoes, bags, and detergents, ask about the manufacturing process. Read the labels. Make sure PVC was not used in the production process. Ask experts in your local community about this if you are in doubt. Keep yourself informed concerning health, safety and environmental issues.
Doing the above, as well as other safety measures, will go a long way in either ensuring you are free from MeHg poisoning, or you chose a lifestyle that will ensure your exposure to MeHg is below the safe limit of 0.58µg/g recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO).
As of writing this article, a yahoo online news article reports that [u.n clinches global deal on cutting mercury emissions more than 140 countries have agreed on the first global treaty to cut mercury pollution through a blacklist of household items and new controls on power plants and small-scale mines, the United Nations said on Saturday, January 19.The treaty will take between three to five years to come into effect. This is welcome news for world health. I pray the UN does achieve its goals.
Advert
