Over-, under- & optimum population; population & food

Population is not just about how many people there are, but whether there are too many, too few, or just the right number for the resources a place actually holds. In this AS lesson we distinguish the three great ideas of population geography — optimum population (people best matched to resources, giving the highest standard of living), overpopulation (too many for the resources) and underpopulation (too few to use them) — and read them off the classic standard-of-living-versus-population graph. We work through the causes and consequences of having too many or too few people, weigh the famous argument between the pessimist Malthus and the optimist Boserup, and learn to evaluate these concepts as relative, shifting ideas rather than fixed figures. We then turn to the unequal way the world shares its food, naming the problems precisely — quantity of food, famine, malnutrition and adequacy of diet — tracing their causes (poverty, conflict, climate and trade) and their solutions. We finish with a real population policy, China's one-child policy, and judge how well it worked — all grounded in Namibia and the wider SADC region.