Population is politics
Francis Win tie
Population has been politics for a long time. In some sense it Probably always has been; but such emotive phrases as the 'Population explosion" or the 'population bomb" derive Mostly from the early 'fifties, When Hugh Moore with his wife and an impressive list of the Plutocratically mighty of America — the Rockefellers and Osmonds in particular — started the campaign for population control whose scarifying Phraseology we are now fairly used to.
It is interesting to see such Phrases applied to our own country by the increasingly vocal lobby who are concerned that if we do not take action to restrain our population growth, We shall not survive. Yet for the More serious population eruptions which are certainly taking Place in the underdeveloped World, a slightly different line Of approach is taken; it is not that they are.in such immediate danger of overcrowding as we are, in Asia, Africa and Latin America; but rather that they are producing too many people to allow them to achieve economic growth. It sounds rather alarming and fairly simple, but that is to forget that ' population is politics.'
And there's the quarrel. For While the US took the lead in Providing aid for family planning, while Robert 11VIeNamara began to expand the World hank in this field, people in the US, in some underdeveloped countries, in Latin America especially, were claiming that this was nothing but a ' neoMalthusian ' doctrine of keeping the underpriviledged from breeding, a doctrine convenient for US imperialism, and Preached by a ruling class who needed the resources of the developing countries to support themselves.
The overall facts of population are of course very striking. The present world population is calculated at around three and a half billion. The UN, which is sponsoring a World Population Year for 1974, is saying that by the end of this century that figure may have reached seven or eight billion, and even assuming that there is some decline in the population brought about by control methods, it is still likely to be six and a half billion. Needless to say, the major factor in this unprecedented expansion is the developing world. Europe and North America have a fairly constant growth rate of about 1 per cent a year. Asia's rate is 2.1 per cent; Africa's 2.5 per cent; and Latin America's a runaway 2.9 per cent. The population of the whole world is growing at a rate of 2 per cent a year, that is to say 70 million extra people at present and more every year. The United Nations Fund for Population Activities expects to be getting in over 100 million dollars a year by 1974, but that is no great sum when one looks at the size of the problem, if we are really setting out to curb that growth rate. So the question to be asked is, if we assume that the world cannot tolerate an increase of this order in the developing nations (a proposition by the way, that it is not easy to prove), then what can be done to slow it down? In a paper called 'Beyond Family Plan ning' in 1969, Bernard Berelson of the Population Council set out almost every imaginable way of reducing the birth rate.
There was a wide range of options, from involuntary con trols such as putting a chemical in a country's water supply to reduce the fertility of those who drank it; or a system of licences to have children, which could be bought; all the way down to more modest proposals like the expansion of sex education in schools. I hasten to add that he rejects the more draconian of these measures as being unacceptable politically and morally; but we should remember that already there is tolerance of those halfway-to-totalitarian measures — the incentive programmes — in many developing countries.
On the one hand there are the incentives for those who, for instance, are prepared to be sterilised: we have seen these in India after they had long been advocated by her Minister of Health and Family Planning, Dr Sripati Chandrasekhar. And on the other hand we have what is perhaps a more insidious development, the system of bonus incentives which are apparently given in some instances to field workers who are successful in ' selling' family planning, It is not difficult to imagine circumstances where this practice could become obnoxious.
More recently in his presidential statement in the Population Council's Annual Report, Berelson has suggested that if it could ever be acceptable, it would help us greatly to encourage women only to breed between the ages of 18 and 35, or 20 and 35 in developed countries, instead of between roughly 15 and 45. He points out, furthermore, that the incidence of anaemia is higher in the younger mothers and of toxaemia in the older. Even granted that the spacing of children would then change, he feels that the reduction would be substantial.
But unless governments are prepared to change laws and impose family planning controls, these and other plans will be little niore than pipe dreams. The main international campaign at present is of a comparatively limited kind — namely a massive propaganda campaign and the supplying of most forms of contraception together with as much as is possible in the way of personnel to advise and to educate. In recent years, let it be said, large numbers of the underdeveloped nations have responded to this on a governmental level. But no one can pretend that the population problem as outlined is going to be solved by these means alone. There were vague rumblings and hints from the World Bank that US help to some developing countries might have to be dependent on their success in stabilising population growth, and there was much talk of the possible cost benefit of family planning in an attempt to provide an economic rationale for the programme. But what has to be admitted as soon as we look at the results is that family planning and population control are not the same thing. Even if it is possible to get a developing community to accept family planning as a way of life, it is a complete fallacy to suppose that family spacing necessarily means that the growth rate comes down to the level the planners are aiming at. Recent work has often shown that even in those circumstances, the desired family size is often not less than four children. Even with a comprehensive family planning and abortion service, we are probably only going to make a small inroad on the actual problem of the population itself.
What actually controls population growth? The critics of American AID programmes say that more attention should be paid to the conditions in which people live and also their own personal needs. It seems to be generally true that the more a country becomes industrialised, the more especially that women go out to work in an industrial and commercial community, the lower the birth rate. This • has happened to us already, but without massive economic help it will not happen in the underdeveloped world. The criticism is that the population programmes too often try to appeal to a bourgeois ethic that does not yet exist, and at the same time there is the threat that if they do not breed less, these people will not reach this happy state whose ethics they only dimly understand. If they , are being realistic, these critics must assume that the massive increase in population that is forecast for these countries can be tolerated and that by, let us say, the end of the century, they will have advanced far enough, with the help of the developed world, to reach the stage where the population growth rate subsides of its own accord, rather as ours has. Whether this will happen is probably anyone's guess. Family planning is one thing; demographic control is another. It seems likely that as time goes on we shall talk more of demographic and environmental control and less of population and pollution, which may seem too emotive a phrase; for we don't seem to stand much of a chance of frightening people into keeping the population down until the reasons for having smaller families form the fabric of society.
Population is politics, as I said; but politics will still, we may be thankful, be about people.
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