Call for better family planning

The May 15 articles that comprised the cover story on the future of food (“The cow loves robots”) – about the increased intensification, mechanisation and expansion of the area of food production – justified this approach by saying the world’s population is forecast to increase to close to 10 billion by 2050, up about 2.2 billion from today.

If as much effort and ingenuity were put into the real solution to the problem, namely education to decrease family size so that the world’s population would decrease by 2050, everybody’s living conditions could be improved. We would be a more egalitarian society and people would be encouraged to help each other and not to exploit situations to make themselves rich.

Nicholas Martin
(Auckland)

TRAGIC STORM REMEMBERED

I well remember the storm that arrived on the Friday evening just before the Mt Ruapehu tragedy of 1990 in which six military personnel died (“Great courage”, May 1). I went skiing at Whakapapa on the Friday morning, which started off as a beautiful day. By 11am, however, the weather had started pushing in from the north. It was a typical northerly storm, with cloud starting to wrap around the