Brave New World?

Perhaps not quite the way Orwell foresaw it, but a new world order appears to be in the making. This is not an overweening situation of a singular government gone amok, but rather a scenario whereby governments formerly in the ascendancy, along with their respective countries, will be taking a back seat to the growing potency and strengths of emerging economies and political strengths owing their position to their huge populations and surging GDP.

And we thought we were straining the capacity of the world to absorb our collective populations before. Worrying whether these populations could be sustained and fed and then wringing our collective hands about the undeniable damage our economic growths were doing to the environment. In first-world economies virtually everyone is well fed and content, able to satisfy their cravings for ever-greater material acquisitions.

Including, needless to say, personal vehicles of every description. And the immense fleets of transport trucks to convey food products and hard goods to eager consumers. Manufacturers working diligently to produce greater numbers of non-essentials and poorly designed, badly manufactured goods, deliberately fashioned to last as long as their questionable warranties; built-in obsolescence. Garbage, we've got lots of it.

And the steadily-catching-up third world wants the opportunity to live the same wasteful lifestyles. Why wouldn't they? It's seen as an ideal. Luxuries become commonplace. After all, it's from the third-world countries that most of these goods now emanate, manufacturers having cleverly understood that to maintain low prices and increase distribution that was the source for cheap labour. While the underprivileged and underpaid workers only produce these goods for markets abroad, they too aspire to ownership, and their turn will come.

It's already started, in fact. China's growing middle-class can attest to that. The World Bank estimates that these developing countries are set to double their share of world production and consumption to 40% by 2050. In a world that is facing shortages of fresh water, depletion of fossil fuels, emerging biofuel sources placing further strains on food staples like grain all over the world, along with increased prices for prepared foods.

We're not in shortage mode yet. And the world's population - more specifically the populations of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East - is growing apace; future population growth statistics will represent population growth in those countries. Europe and North America, Japan and Russia represent ageing societies, incapable of reproducing to balance their geriatric populations, other than by immigration.

It is still the West and the developed countries where the world's wealth continues to grow. In the steadily-growing populations of the Middle East, Latin America, Mexico, Africa, jobs remain scarce, education elusive, resulting in youth unable to find employment. Deprived existences with insufficient food and shelter, and a growing sense of anger at their plight. A certain formula for discontent, anger, poverty and conflict.

The avoidance of conflict, of shortages of fundamental human requirements has to become a priority for all countries of the world, to achieve a reasonable balance, to offer opportunities, to give up a little, to give a little.

The pain of it all.