Nothing new under the sun

Yesterday I commented on the state of the earth's population as it is set to reach seven billion in about three days. In that post I voiced the opinion that the desire for a sustainable population is a good thing but that the methods that would be required to truly bring it about would be of a rather bloody nature.

 Today the BBC posted a decent article detailing the history of population control. Beginning with Thomas Malthus in the early 19th century and continuing on till the present day. One of the main thrusts of the article was to point out the fact that much if not all the major efforts at population control had been imposed on poor people and nations by richer people and nations. It's always been a top-down situation where those without say suffer the most. For much of the past two centuries the main focus of population control has been to protect the economic hegemony of the West.

Massive populations in the Third World were seen as presenting a threat to Western capitalism and access to resources, says Professor Betsy Hartmann of Hampshire College, Massachusetts, in the US. 

"The view of the south is very much put in this Malthusian framework. It becomes just this powerful ideology," she says. 

In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson warned that the US might be overwhelmed by desperate masses, and he made US foreign aid dependent on countries adopting family planning programmes. Other wealthy countries such as Japan, Sweden and the UK also began to devote large amounts of money to reducing Third World birth rates.

As I stated yesterday, the best way to help reduce the populations of poorer countries is to raise the economic realities of those countries. This isn't my idea, and its not new.

Critics of population control had their say at the first ever UN population conference in 1974. Karan Singh, India's health minister at the time, declared that "development is the best contraceptive".

This coming from the country that forcibly sterilized millions of its poor people in the mid 1970s.

In June 1975, the Indian premier, Indira Gandhi, declared a state of emergency after accusations of corruption threatened her government. 

Her son Sanjay used the measure to introduce radical population control measures targeted at the poor. The Indian emergency lasted less than two years, but in 1975 alone, some eight million Indians - mainly poor men - were sterilised.

Another famous example of enforced population control is China's famous One Child Policy.

The One Child Policy is credited with preventing some 400 million births in China, and remains in place to this day. 

In 1983 alone, more than 16 million women and four million men were sterilised, and 14 million women received abortions.

Of course, it was not without its faulty consequences.

But modern technology allows parents to discover the sex of the foetus, and many choose to abort if they are carrying a girl. In some regions, there is now a serious imbalance between men and women.

Some point to these examples as a means of learning from the past in order to improve population control efforts going forward. Of course the term 'population control' was deemed to have negative authoritarian connotations and so they adopted such terms as 'women's rights and reproductive rights'. Some see women as being the magic silver bullet to end the world's population problem.

According to Adrienne Germain, that is the main lesson we should learn from the past 50 years. 

"I have a profound conviction that if you give women the tools they need - education, employment, contraception, safe abortion - then they will make the choices that benefit society," she says.

I'm a bit skeptical of this.

So lets look at what would be an ideal situation; Canada. A place of vast economic prosperity where women's and reproductive rights are protected.

If a country wanted to simply maintain their population growth at zero (simple generational replacement - two parents have two children - population does not grow or decrease) then the birth rate for the country should be 2.33 per woman. Its been noted that economic prosperity helps to bring down fertility rates as does the protection of women's and reproductive rights.

So Canada, an economically and socially healthy country could be see maintaining the status quo as being sustainable. The Canadian birth rate is 1.58. Canadians are breeding themselves out of existence. How is that a benefit to society?

 At some point a tipping point will be reached when economically rich nations can't make up their lack of numbers by bringing in people from impoverished nations to meet the societal need for workers. As was seen during the immediate aftermath of the black death, as the population fell, there were less workers who were able to earn higher wages due to the decrease in the labour supply.

If economic prosperity reduces fertility rates and lower fertility rates reduce the labour supply pushing up wages, it would seem that rich nations could see a demographic downward spiral that could place their societies in peril.

Lets hope that the women in such societies recognize this pattern and alter their birth rates accordingly. So it would seem that the solution for the world's population problem is the leveling of the economic playing field that would help to decrease the fertility rates of those impoverished nations driving world population growth.

In 1968, the American biologist Paul Ehrlich caused a stir with his bestselling book, The Population Bomb, which suggested that it was already too late to save some countries from the dire effects of overpopulation, which would result in ecological disaster and the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in the 1970s. 

Instead, governments should concentrate on drastically reducing population growth. He said financial assistance should be given only to those nations with a realistic chance of bringing birth rates down. Compulsory measures were not to be ruled out. 

Western experts and local elites in the developing world soon imposed targets for reductions in family size, and used military analogies to drive home the urgency, says Matthew Connelly, a historian of population control at Columbia University in New York.

That was then. Now they are trying to get away from such heavy handed control mechanisms and its perhaps not surprising to see where they are looking for solutions.

Meanwhile, Paul Ehrlich has also amended his view of the issue. 

If he were to write his book today, "I wouldn't focus on the poverty-stricken masses", he told the BBC. 

"I would focus on there being too many rich people. It's crystal clear that we can't support seven billion people in the style of the wealthier Americans."

Economic redistribution.

Its not the poor that are the problem. Its the rich.

 I think that Chairman Mao and Brother Stalin would be happy to see the West finally see the light.

 Of course they both already did their part for reducing the world population by murdering tens of millions.