Have you done a lot of household surveys on the reproductive decision making among people who live in mud huts? There is tons of literature on how families determine their optimal family size, and it is indeed a complex decision rooted in practical economics. Do you really think the poor are exempt from the basic laws of economic choice?
While there is some global “unmet need” for contraception, in most cases a couple’s target family size lines up pretty well with their actual family size, and contraception is more often used as a tool to space and time births rather than as a means to reduce total fertility rate.
Consider an impoverished family of 12 and a wealthy family of 3; each consumes the same amount of resources overall but the latter family obviously enjoys a substantially more comfortable existence. Purely on an environmental basis, do you assert that the poor family is somehow more virtuous, noble, or laudable?
ETA: I think the chief difficulty in advocating family planning services internationally is the widely held belief that to be poor and numerous somehow is a noble objective from which it would be wrong to hinder anyone.
The ratio from poorest to wealthiest isn’t 1 to 4 - it’s 1 to 9. So 300 million Americans = 2.1 billion Sierra Leoneans, and there just aren’t that many sub-1 footprinters in the world.
And no, I’ve said nothing about any virtue or nobility, just took the OP’s stated reason at face value.
Get the death toll high enough, and it may not matter so much who’s killing whom. It may be easier to foment internecine open warfare on class and religious lines than to remake the billions of humans in a green mold.
Those are inevitable outcomes when there’s a severe shortage of resources, so I’m sure your weakness would be indulged.
And the reason they don’t control the population now is that we have the economic means to overcome them. Take away a government’s ability to support high-level health care and a human rights infrastructure that protects the disadvantaged, and we’ll return to the good old days.