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FEATURES |
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SOME HAVE
BABIES; OTHERS, REGRETS!
(Part 5)
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Philip P. Eapen |
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Author's webpage:
http://philip.eapen.googlepages.com
In this series, Philip P.
Eapen examines the claim
that the world is over-populated in the
light of biblical, historical, and scientific
data
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World population reached six billion in the year 1999
and an estimated 83 million people are being added to
that number every year since. Population growth was
rather slow for most of human history. Famines, war,
epidemics and high infant mortality rates ensured that
population growth was negligible. Advancement in
agriculture, food distribution and trade in the
seventeenth century gave rise to a faster population
growth in Europe.
The world population reached one billion by the
beginning of nineteenth century. During the nineteenth
century, Europe’s population doubled; Europeans spilled
over to North America, South Africa, Australia, New
Zealand, and other colonies they held in Latin America
and Asia. The twentieth century began with a population
of 1.7 billion after which world population saw a sudden
increase, reaching two billion by 1930, three billion by
1960, four billion by 1974, five billion by 1986, and
six billion by 1999.
The current distribution of world population clearly
shows that the global human centre-of-gravity rests in
Asia. The “Third World” is the “Majority World.”
Taking population density into account, we get a more
accurate picture of human population distribution in
relation to total available land in every country or
continent. This parameter will indicate that Asian and
African countries are “people rich” while North America
and Australia are “land rich.” Very often, the perceived
“population explosion” in Asian and African countries is
about the high population density – or crowding – in
these lands. Many European or developed regions are as
crowded as some Asian countries while some Asian
countries that have large populations have lower
population densities. For example, the United Kingdom is
more crowded than China; Germany is more densely
populated than Pakistan!
Population Control Movement and its Claims
There are several common reasons given in support of
population control operations. These will be evaluated
in the light of recent findings on the state of the
world’s resources, environment and on the real nature of
“family planning” implemented in various developing
countries. The following subsections explore common
reasons that answer the question, “Why should we control
population?”
1. Will Population Growth Lead to Collapse of Human
Welfare?
An early warning about uncontrolled global
population growth came from Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus,
the English political economist who wrote an “Essay on
the Principle of Population” in 1798. The central thesis
of this essay is that “population, when unchecked,
increases in a geometrical ratio; and subsistence for
man, in an arithmetical ratio.” He argues that unless
population growth is checked, humankind would soon face
starvation. His views received wide acceptance
especially among the upper classes of society because
these “tended to relieve the rich and powerful of
responsibility for the condition of the working classes,
by showing that the latter had chiefly themselves to
blame ...” (John Kells Ingram, A History of Political
Economy, (New York: Macmillan, 1894), 121.) A direct
consequence of Malthusian views was a decreased interest
shown by rulers to for uplifting the poor. The rulers of
nineteenth century believed that “increased comfort
would lead to an increase in numbers.” Thus, poverty was
considered to be restraining mechanism that would curb
the tendency of the poor to multiply.
Before Malthus, the Rev. Otto Diederich Lutken, in 1758,
sought to dispel the idea that the prosperity of a state
depended on its increasing population. (It was Frederick
the Great (1712-1786), a Prussian monarch, who said that
“the number of the population constitutes the wealth of
the State.” Catholic Encylcopedia (1911), s. v.
“Theories of Population,” by John A. Ryan.) Lutken
wrote, “Since the circumference of the globe is given
and does not expand with the increased number of its
inhabitants, ... since the earth’s fertility cannot be
extended beyond a given point, and since human nature
will presumably remain unchanged, so that a given number
will hereafter require the same quantity of the fruits
of the earth for their support as now, and as their
rations cannot be arbitrarily reduced, it follows that
... they must needs starve one another out ...” (Arild
Saether, “Otto Diederich Lutken—40 years before Malthus?”
Population Studies 47/3 (1993), 511.)
Paul Ehlrich’s Population Bomb popularised Malthusian
fears and predicted that the world would witness large
scale starvation deaths in the 1970s. Ehlrich favoured
coercive measures to control the “cancer” of human
multiplication. Environmental agencies carry forward the
Malthusian hypothesis with great zeal. An ardent
supporter of Malthusian predictions once exclaimed, “If
you are not hysterical, that just shows that you do not
understand the problem.” (William P. Andrews, “Facing
the Malthusian Threat: Some Implications of the World
Population Explosion,” Mankind Quarterly, 33/1 (Fall
1992), 121 )
The US Government organised an exhibition in the 1970s
for school children in various parts of the country. It
sought to spread this message: “There are too many
people in the world. We are running out of space. We are
running out of energy. We are running out of food. And,
although too few people seem to realize it, we are
running out of time.” ( Jacqueline Kasun, The War
Against Population (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988), 21.)
The World Watch State of the World report of 1998
expressed fears that the world is on the threshold of a
large scale shortage of grain. (Lester R. Brown,
“Struggling to Raise Cropland Productivity,” in State of
the World 1998 ed. Linda Starke (New York/London: W.W.
Norton & Co., 1998), passim.) It claims that the world
grain productivity slowed down in the 1990s; a bleak
picture of scarcity is portrayed in the report. Brown
calls for major investments in agriculture as well as in
population control.
Closely related to the worry about shortage of food is
the worry about running short of resources such as
forests, energy, mineral resources, and water. Rev.
Lutken had mentioned this in his writing on the adverse
effects of a growing population—the “other necessarily
attendant inconveniences, to wit, a lack of the other
comforts of life, wool, flax, timber, fuel, and so on.”
Therefore, he concludes that “... the wise Creator who
commanded men in the beginning to be fruitful and
multiply, did not intend, since He set limits to their
habitation and sustenance, that multiplication should
continue without limit.” (Arild Saether, “Otto Diederich
Lfitken—40 years before Malthus?” 511)
Over the past years there has been no dearth for
doomsday predictions. The message that the world is
going from bad to worse is so widespread and taken for
granted in many quarters. The pertinent question is, how
sure are we about our estimates of the carrying capacity
of planet Earth? How true are these doomsday
predictions?
Worldwatch Institute presents a gloomy picture of the
world in its State of the World report: “While economic
indicators ... are consistently positive, the key
environmental indicators are increasingly negative.
Forests are shrinking, water tables are falling, soils
are eroding, wetlands are disappearing, fisheries are
collapsing, range-lands are deteriorating, rivers are
running dry, temperatures are rising, coral reefs are
dying, and plant and animal species are disappearing.”
(Lester R. Brown, “The Future of Growth,” in State of
the World 1998).
Bjørn Lomborg, after careful research, points out that
the doomsday predictions made by environmental agencies
such as the Worldwatch Institute, Green Peace, and the
World Wildlife Fund, and are then published by the
popular media, lack integrity. (Bjørn Lomborg, The
Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of
the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
12f.) Lomborg belongs to the school of Julian Simon who
wrote extensively to expose various doomsday predictions
related to human population growth. Contrary to the
constant litany of doom, Simon’s main argument is that
things are getting better for mankind: “My central
proposition here is simply stated: Almost every trend
that affects human welfare points in a positive
direction, as long as we consider a reasonably long
period of time and hence grasp the overall trend.”
(Norman Myers and Julian L. Simon, Scarcity or
Abundance? A Debate on the Environment, (New
York/London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990), 6 ).
Lomborg agrees with Simon: “... by far the majority of
indicators show that mankind’s lot has vastly improved.”
There are numerous indicators developed by the UN and
the World Bank that can give us a fair idea about the
state of a nation or the world (the Human Development
Indicators of the UN and the World Development
Indicators of the World Bank.) Before we look at any of
these indicators, it is important to understand the
nature of population “explosion” in the twentieth
century.
The sudden increase in world population in the twentieth
century is primarily due to advances in medical care
that brought down infant mortality and increased human
life-expectancy. (Myers and Simon, Scarcity or
Abundance? 6-7 ) Contrary to what is popularly believed,
“the increase is not, on the other hand, due to people
in developing countries having more and more children.”
(Lomborg, Skeptical Environmentalist, 45-46). Lomborg
cites a UN consultant Peter Adamson’s memorable words,
“It’s not that people suddenly started breeding like
rabbits; it’s just that they stopped dying like flies.”
This, then, is not a problem but an achievement. Simon
observes that while it took thousands of years for human
life expectancy in the developed world to increase from
twenty years to the high twenties, it took just two
centuries for them to increase it to seventy-five years.
Most of this increase took place in the twentieth
century and Simon considers this as the “greatest human
achievement in history”
In the developing world, in the beginning of twentieth
century, average life expectancy was below 30 years.
Life expectancy has risen so rapidly in these countries
that it is projected to cross the 70 year mark by 2020.
However, the good new of increased life-expectancy has
become bad news for those who are interested only in the
relative populations of Whites and Blacks, or, for that
matter, the relative populations of the developed world
and of the still-developing world. The issue then is not
that there are too many people but that there are too
many of them. This too is a pointer to a deeper
spiritual disease that underlies modern anti-natalist
claims.
An important human welfare parameter that contributed to
the rise in life expectancy is infant mortality. In the
developed world, the percentage of infants that did not
survive fell from six percent in 1950 to less than one
percent in 2000. Although developing countries have an
infant mortality of six percent currently, it continues
to fall and is expected to halve by 2020. Thus, the
“scary” population explosion in the Majority World is a
direct result of the advances these societies achieved
in terms of primary health care.
Malthus and his supporters were wrong in assuming that
food production would not keep in step with human
multiplication. If resources were finite, and if there
was no possibility for increasing a resource base, then
the doomsday predictions of Malthus and his supporters
would have come to pass. The resource base, however,
kept increasing with increasing population. Babies came
– with hands to work and minds to innovate – not just
with mouths to consume resources. Ehlrich’s warning that
“the chances of successfully feeding and otherwise
caring for an expanding population are being
continuously diminished” does not stand up to facts.
An FAO study had this to report about global food
production/consumption:
“How has agriculture responded to these increases in
world population? ... Production grew faster than
population. Per caput production is today about 18
percent above that of 30 years ago. Food availabilities
for the world as a whole are today equivalent to some
2700 kilocalories per person per day ... up from 2300
calories 30 years ago. And this is counting only food
consumed directly by human beings. In addition, some 640
million tonnes of cereals are fed to animals for
producing the livestock products which people consume.”
Not only are we living longer; we are better fed now
than was a smaller global population several decades
ago. For instance, take the World Food Summit findings
about the number of people who are starving today in the
world. (A person is said to starve if his/her daily food
intake is not sufficient to sustain light physical
activity.) The percentage of starving people in 93
developing countries has decreased from 35% in 1970 to
18% in 1996, and will drop to 12% in 2010. Even though
things can and ought to get better, the trend shows that
things are getting better. This improvement has occurred
in spite of the doubling of the world population during
this period. Julian Simon is jubilant about this
development:
In the early nineteenth century the planet Earth could
sustain only 1 billion people. Ten thousand years ago,
only 4 million could keep themselves alive. Now, 5
billion people are living longer and more healthier than
ever before. This increase in the world’s population
represents our triumph over death. I would expect lovers
of humanity to jump with joy at this triumph of human
mind and organization over the raw forces of nature. But
many people lament that there are so many humans alive
to enjoy the gift of life.
Simon’s observation is on the mark. Among those who
complain or worry about rising population, few complain
about their own arrival on earth; neither do they think
of making an early exit to light Earth’s burden.
Instead, they moan about the gift of life that God has
bestowed on each new child!
The costs of minerals and other raw materials indicate
that we are not running short of these resources.
Although economists had shown beyond all doubt that we
are not running out of fuel, minerals or food,
environmentalists’ claims to the contrary led Julian
Simon to challenge such claims with a bet. Simon wanted
his opponents to choose the resources of their choice
and observe prices for a period of ten years. If any of
the prices showed an increase, Simon was willing to pay
$10,000. Although his opponents, all environmentalists
from Stanford University, desired to win easy money,
they lost the bet. All the resources that they had
chosen – chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten –
and others that they left our such as petroleum, wool,
cotton, minerals and food became cheaper. Moffett
comments that the improved methods of detecting mineral
reserve ensured that mineral reserves increased despite
ever increasing demand for these resources. He cites UN
statistics to show how known copper reserves grew from
91 million tons in 1950 to 555 million tons in early
1980s. So successful were Simon’s arguments that,
Moffett notes, the supporters of Malthus are now guarded
in their use of the word “crisis” while referring to the
effects of population growth!
Price of a commodity is an indicator of its scarcity or
availability. The assumptions of doomsday predicators
are proving to be false. The World Bank’s World
Development Report 1984 too did not find resources to be
at risk as a result of rising population.
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This page
is updated on Oct 24, 2009 |
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PRAISE THE ALMIGHTY
10 YEARS CELEBRATION
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