IN THE year 2000, the population of Manila, capital of the Philippines, was just under two million.

Today, only a decade later it has multiplied ten fold.

This massively over-populated city has four mothers and babies occupying each maternity hospital bed, and primary schools each teaching their 6,000 pupils (yes you read that correctly) in shifts.

Even its cemeteries are overflowing – not only with the dead, but also the living, who use it as a home.

Some of this city's tower blocks house around 17,000 people (and again you read that correctly) with ten more occupying a single room (if that is, they're "lucky" enough to have one).

Almost all of these unfortunates, as this programme pointed out, live in abject poverty and their children along with orphans can often be seen scavenging for scraps of food on the city's rubbish dumps.

While it is true (and tragically so) that none of these atrocious deprivations are unique to Manila or indeed the Philippines as a whole, there is one significant factor that leaves me at least shaking my head in disbelief.

It is that Manila is a Catholic country and that, as we were informed, it's politicians, ever mindful of the Catholic vote, refuse to provide contraception (read the last sentence once more and weep for the stupidity, the cruelty and the injustice of those who ought to know better).

If as it is feared, the over-population of Manila is a warning to all of us of things to come, it would be unforgivably irresponsible to ignore it. Yet to my knowledge Sir David Attenborough is one of the very few people to have discussed at length (in another recent television programme) the profoundly serious world wide implications of this problem.

Why then are other public figures, not least politicians, so silent on this matter?

Do they think it will simply go away? Currently the population of the world is almost seven billion, and by the middle of the century this will probably increase by another 50 per cent. If poverty is the "greatest of evils and the worst of crime" as George Bernard Shaw concluded, then encouraging overpopulation (by being against contraception) will only exacerbate that evil.

What is needed to solve this problem (that is, overpopulation) and it doesn't take an Einstein to work this out, is for politicians and religious leaders to exercise some common sense, some common justice and, if I may say so as an atheist, some Christian compassion.

What the downtrodden and the dispossessed of the Philippines and of other deprived Catholic countries do not need – and there are more than one billion Catholics in total – is an ecclesiastical command that inexorably perpetuates their miserable and hopeless predicament.

And no this is not just another rant against religion. Rather it's a shout against complacency and inexcusable senselessness.