Population, rural decline

Stanley Temple and his graduate student, John Coleman, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, completed a four-year study of the impact of free-ranging domestic cats on rural wildlife. They monitored about 30 radio-collared cats for various periods of time. They calculated that in Wisconsin alone, cats kill 19 million songbirds and 140,000 game birds in a single year. Cats can be a major threat to bird populations, especially around farms. They estimated that the Western meadowlark population is declining at the annual rate of 8 percent. 

Opium cultivation in Myanmar continues to decline. Since 2002, the year of the first joint GoUM/UNODC survey, opium poppy cultivation has fallen 73 per cent. Remarkably, no opium cultivation was observed in the Wa region in 2006. In 2005, this region contributed to 30 per cent of the national opium poppy cultivation. The decline in cultivation poses serious challenges for the rural population in the remote areas of this region, who do not have viable alternative income strategies. 

The large majority of researchers support the following statements [9] autochthonous urban population is spared rural way of life, i.e., agricultural activity is needed for exposure to the agent(s). Separation from an endemic focus early may prevent the disease, while immigration to an endemic area provides risk of disease development, providing that the exposure was sufficient. Prevalence of the disease has been stable over many years, but now appears to decline in most affected settlements. Incidence rates are shifting towards... 

See Browning, Byzantine Empire, pp. 70-72. See also Lilie, Byzantinische Reaktion, pp. 201-54, who argues on the basis of grain supplies for Constantinople and of government-sponsored population migrations that both the urban and rural populations of the Byzantine Empire declined in the seventh century. 

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