Wednesday, January 20, 2010

A little Randomness

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Every once in a while I like to do a random post of personal interest to myself. I will hide the details below the fold, but in short, this post is about overpopulation and arable land.

I've taken the amount of arable land, and applied an arbitrary number to it based on my personal observations, and decided that 1 sq KM of land can support 1,000 people. Using this as a base, I decided to find out which countries are over populated. Using some stats from Wikipedia, I've put the results below.



First note that I've decided to only use countries with over a million people, and even then to only list a few of them that are of particular interest. and even then, only note ones that are overpopulated (or underpopulated) by a good margin. Note the percentage noted is the inverse of the population that can be supported. Hence, a nation that can support 1 million, but has 10 million, will be listed as 90%.

Overpopulated by
Gaza Strip - 92.44%
Israel - 52.42%
Switzerland - 47.38%
Belgium - 19.90%
Ecuador - 99.64%
Netherlands - 54.65%
South Korea - 66.53%
United Kingdom - 7.15%
Egypt - 62.52%
Japan - 65.80%
Bangladesh - 48.61%

And some countries are, by these numbers, underpopulated. Here is a list of those.
Iraq - 117%
Afghanistan - 162%
France - 201%
Brazil - 214%
United States - 458%
Canada - 1,183%
Australia - 2,231%

And lastly, if the countries had as many people as they could "support" they would have this many people, above and beyond their current population.

USA - 1,354 million
Russia - 1,075
Australia - 448
Brazil - 400
Canada - 383
India - 358