[Reichhardt]

The childhood mortality rate in Mali has fallen from 37% in 1970 to 9% in 2020. The fertility in the same period fell only from 7.13 to 5.78.

The number of surviving children has thus increased from 4.49 to 5.25, thanks to medical advances and international aid.

As we donate aid and food, the population will continually increase until either our generosity is exhausted or some other environmental limit is hit.

Mali has 37% of its population without access to contraception. We should be donating education, contraception and abortion for women, not food aid.

[woodruffw]

This is again missing the big picture: the single easiest way to ensure that Mali's birthrate goes up instead of down is to make it as economically advantageous as possible to have large families. Famines tend to do that.

Talking about it in terms of ratios masks the actual material conditions we're talking about: withholding food would mean hundreds of thousands of pointless deaths; pointless because it undermines the actual macro trend we're seeing of rapidly falling birth rates. Infant mortality is a red herring: it's fallen faster than birth rates in every country that has undergone a development shift because it's the bellwether for the latter.