Peace and Environment News* November 1994
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Peace and Environment News * November 1994 |
by Louise Fabiani
A lot more than death and taxes are inevitable—at least under the world's present conditions. You can bet your eye teeth that the number of new humans added each year will be around 95 million. Barring any large-scale reversal of death control, birth control may be the only answer.
In many countries, "developing" ones among them, notable progress has been made in convincing women to have children later, space the births more widely, and, over all, have smaller families. But clearly, this is not enough. The population control programs of some countries, such as India, backfired when people realized they had been tricked—coerced into being sterilized—or treated like machines on an assembly line. In China, despite the much-praised one child policy, millions of women still reach child-bearing age every year, the majority of whom will want to exercise their right to reproduce. Zero population growth (ZPG) is a long way off in many countries, especially those with a bottom-heavy demographic pyramid (more young people).
Desperate times call for desperate measures, since polite requests for one- or two-child families in some countries simply won't work fast enough. But how desperate are we? With Earth's biodiversity disappearing at a species an hour, fresh water and air at a premium, deforestation causing land slides—the list goes on—is individual freedom a luxury of richer, cleaner times?
It depends on what political lenses you happen to be looking through.
There is no evidence that the citizens of China, the most populous nation, are more fertile than those of other countries. But at least one or two state-sanctioned incentives to have more children—for agricultural labour, for a stronger army in event of invasion from Russia—made for a large growth rate this century. In 1979, the payoff was a population of 1 billion. That year, a draconian family planning program was instated. Fifteen years later, the count is 1.19 billion Chinese, many still in their reproductive years.
There is little doubt that the numbers would have been far higher without these measures. So, in an important way, they worked. However, human minds, bodies, and social relationships are more complex than "here's a problem, let's fix it." In a democracy, there is, at least in principle, the need to put individual rights before collective ones. In a totalitarian state, the priorities are reversed. The state, perhaps the word of one man alone, determines the goal and how to achieve it. In China's case, the war against population growth (it seems like a war, what with all the strategies and the single-mindedness of the attack) has been waged successfully (the fertility rate has definitely dropped), but not, it seems, without its costs.
A few years ago, Globe and Mail Beijing correspondent Jan Wong ran a series of reports on China's family planning policy. According to her, the emotional and physical well-being of women became lost in the drive to reduce births. Disincentives, such as a complete lack of privileges for second children, turning them into "non-persons," helped enforce the single-child rule. Women who were pregnant with their second child were often forced to abort. If they hid until the due date, the labour was often horrific: rushed by unsympathetic midwives who did not give painkillers. Co-workers were encouraged to tell on each other to authorities. Newborn girls—and China is but one of many countries which values boys much more than girls—were frequently victims of infanticide, especially in the rural areas where sons are needed to work.
China is not the only country with a reductionist approach to population control, boiling down this complex matter to the single issue of numbers. But, as the largest country in the world, its policies and their consequences have far-reaching effects. China realizes that it must achieve ZPG for its own good. Since 1989 and the pro-democracy uprisings, the rest of the world has more cause to be nervous if these numbers don't actually drop. If the rest of the world cares about nothing else, the prospect of 2 billion people shopping and acquiring like North Americans should give them pause. That is because the problem is more than numbers.
The human drain on the Earth's renewable and non-renewable wealth cannot go on forever. The only way it will be stopped is if the problem is dealt with holistically. International ZPG is only part of the solution. Unfortunately, we hear repeatedly that "development" is the panacea for lowering fertility. (Many countries are managing one without the other, so this is a false correlation.) Not only may this belief be unnecessary, it may be dangerous. Development usually means industrialization, which means westernization: the emulation of overdeveloped nations such as ours.
Paul Ehrlich describes the population question using the equation I=PAT, which says that impact of human population is the product of population, affluence, and technology (Impact= Population x Affluence x Technology). If we want to reduce impact, slowing or even halting the growth rate is but one-third of the cure. That is why India, with 900 million people, has much less global impact than the consumption-crazed, technophilic US (260.75 million). Think of almost everyone in the world with a modest western-style livelihood, and what that implies in terms of consumer goods, technology, energy use, and waste. A world with "equitably distributed" wealth like this would be utterly impossible unless (according to Noam Chomsky) the global population stood at 200 million.
The problem is serious. The solutions are complex and perhaps unworkable. Do we just fiddle while the Earth burns? Of course not. We haven't survived the challenges of 2 million years for nothing! Any approach will have to take the following into consideration:
Louise Fabiani is a nulliparous environmental writer living in Ottawa.
Converted November 20, 2000 - Lg
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