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The real trick is that the existing cultures themselves will have to quickly reconfigure so that this doesn't simply shift the problem laterally. For example, initiatives to dig wells in various African countries have turned out to result in other problems. Some nomadic cultures began staying put, and then they started overusing all the other resources. The scarcity of water was a control in itself, limiting how long groups stayed in a given area. Removal of that control has led to desertification of areas surrounding the wells. And it also brought disparate groups into contact with each other for longer periods of time, which led to more disease outbreaks. Nomadic groups had fewer and briefer encounters with others before, limiting the spread of disease from one group to another. Another example is the grave humanitarian crisis in Somalia. Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to starve to death in the next few months. Due to raging conflicts, humanitarian aid cannot be effectively distributed. However, even if the crisis could temporarily be averted, the problem with food aid is it undermines any possibility of local production. Farmers can't compete with free food dumped on the market, so they stop farming. Not being self-sufficient, now you're looking at not only providing aid, but ever-increasing aid as the population grows, which means if you stop for any reason -- including civil war flaring up again -- now even more people die: the ones you saved, and the children they have had in the interim. See http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363663,00... Cultures with high child mortality compensate by having high numbers of children. Once you get rid of the main causes of child mortality, you have to either stop having so many kids, or dramatically increase food production. Otherwise curing Malaria can result later in all the problems that accompany a lack of resources: bigger famines, increased civil strife and warfare. |
Much as what happened in Europe, this tends to self-regulate over a few generations: high natality is a requirement in high-death and low-income situations, where you need many children to have some survive (and help you in old age), and children are hands that can work and provide wealth.
As mortality decreases you need less children as they'll pretty much all survive, and as wealth increases you want less children because raising them to your society's standards gets more expensive and there's a much bigger investment in each child.
Of course there will be 2-3 generations with high natality and low mortality, and an explosion of younger generations (likely leading to a few revolutions). But there's little you can do about that in the short term.