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2011-10-28 07:51:30
As the world population reaches seven billion people, the BBC's Mike Gallagher
asks whether efforts to control population have been, as some critics claim, a
form of authoritarian control over the world's poorest citizens.
The temperature is some 30C. The humidity stifling, the noise unbearable. In a
yard between two enormous tea-drying sheds, a number of dark-skinned women
patiently sit, each accompanied by an unwieldy looking cloth sack. They are
clad in colourful saris, but look tired and shabby. This is hardly surprising -
they have spent most of the day in nearby plantation fields, picking tea that
will net them around two cents a kilo - barely enough to feed their large
families.
Vivek Baid thinks he knows how to help them. He runs the Mission for Population
Control, a project in eastern India which aims to bring down high birth rates
by encouraging local women to get sterilised after their second child.
As the world reaches an estimated seven billion people, people like Vivek say
efforts to bring down the world's population must continue if life on Earth is
to be sustainable, and if poverty and even mass starvation are to be avoided.
There is no doubting their good intentions. Vivek, for instance, has spent his
own money on the project, and is passionate about creating a brighter future
for India.
But critics allege that campaigners like Vivek - a successful and wealthy male
businessman - have tended to live very different lives from those they seek to
help, who are mainly poor women.
These critics argue that rich people have imposed population control on the
poor for decades. And, they say, such coercive attempts to control the world's
population often backfired and were sometimes harmful.
Population scare
Most historians of modern population control trace its roots back to the
Reverend Thomas Malthus, an English clergyman born in the 18th Century who
believed that humans would always reproduce faster than Earth's capacity to
feed them.
Giving succour to the resulting desperate masses would only imperil everyone
else, he said. So the brutal reality was that it was better to let them starve.
'Plenty is changed into scarcity'
Thomas Malthus
From Thomas Malthus' Essay on Population, 1803 edition:
A man who is born into a world already possessed - if he cannot get subsistence
from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want
his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food.
At nature's mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be
gone, and will quickly execute her own orders, if he does not work upon the
compassion of some of her guests. If these guests get up and make room for him,
other intruders immediately appear demanding the same favour. The plenty that
before reigned is changed into scarcity; and the happiness of the guests is
destroyed by the spectacle of misery and dependence in every part of the hall.
Rapid agricultural advances in the 19th Century proved his main premise wrong,
because food production generally more than kept pace with the growing
population.
But the idea that the rich are threatened by the desperately poor has cast a
long shadow into the 20th Century.
From the 1960s, the World Bank, the UN and a host of independent American
philanthropic foundations, such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, began
to focus on what they saw as the problem of burgeoning Third World numbers.
The believed that overpopulation was the primary cause of environmental
degradation, economic underdevelopment and political instability.
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.
'Unmet need'
What virtually everyone agreed was that there was a massive demand for birth
control among the world's poorest people, and that if they could get their
hands on reliable contraceptives, runaway population growth might be stopped.
But with the benefit of hindsight, some argue that this so-called unmet need
theory put disproportionate emphasis on birth control and ignored other serious
needs.
Graph of world population figures
"It was a top-down solution," says Mohan Rao, a doctor and public health expert
at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University.
"There was an unmet need for contraceptive services, of course. But there was
also an unmet need for health services and all kinds of other services which
did not get attention. The focus became contraception."
Had the demographic experts worked at the grass-roots instead of imposing
solutions from above, suggests Adrienne Germain, formerly of the Ford
Foundation and then the International Women's Health Coalition, they might have
achieved a better picture of the dilemmas facing women in poor, rural
communities.
"Not to have a full set of health services meant women were either unable to
use family planning, or unwilling to - because they could still expect half
their kids to die by the age of five," she says.
Us and them
India's sterilisation 'madness'
File photograph of Sanjay and Indira Gandhi in 1980
Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay (above) presided over a mass sterilisation
campaign. From the mid-1970s, Indian officials were set sterilisation quotas,
and sought to ingratiate themselves with superiors by exceeding them. Stories
abounded of men being accosted in the street and taken away for the operation.
The head of the World Bank, Robert McNamara, congratulated the Indian
government on "moving effectively" to deal with high birth rates. Funding was
increased, and the sterilising went on.
In Delhi, some 700,000 slum dwellers were forcibly evicted, and given
replacement housing plots far from the city centre, frequently on condition
that they were either sterilised or produced someone else for the operation. In
poorer agricultural areas, whole villages were rounded up for sterilisation.
When residents of one village protested, an official is said to have threatened
air strikes in retaliation.
"There was a certain madness," recalls Nina Puri of the Family Planning
Association of India. "All rationality was lost."
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.
"They spoke of a war on population growth, fought with contraceptive weapons,"
he says. "The war would entail sacrifices, and collateral damage."
Such language betrayed a lack of empathy with their subjects, says Ms Germain:
"People didn't talk about people. They talked of acceptors and users of family
planning."
Emergency measures
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".
But just a year later, Mr Singh's government presided over one of the most
notorious episodes in the history of population control.
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.
Yet, for all the official programmes and coercion, many poor women kept on
having babies.
The BBC's Fergus Walsh finds out whether the numbers will rise or fall in the
future
And where they did not, it arguably had less to do with coercive population
control than with development, just as Karan Singh had argued in 1974, says
historian Matt Connelly.
For example, in India, a disparity in birth rates could already be observed
between the impoverished northern states and more developed southern regions
like Kerala, where women were more likely to be literate and educated, and
their offspring more likely to be healthy.
Women there realised that they could have fewer births and still expect to see
their children survive into adulthood.
Total control
By now, this phenomenon could be observed in another country too - one that
would nevertheless go on to impose the most draconian population control of
all.
China: 'We will not allow your baby to live'
Steven Mosher was a Stanford University anthropologist working in rural China
who witnessed some of the early, disturbing moments of Beijing's One Child
Policy.
"I remember very well the evening of 8 March, 1980. The local Communist Party
official in charge of my village came over waving a government document. He
said: 'The Party has decided to impose a cap of 1% on population growth this
year.' He said: 'We're going to decide who's going to be allowed to continue
their pregnancy and who's going to be forced to terminate their pregnancy.' And
that's exactly what they did."
"These were women in the late second and third trimester of pregnancy. There
were several women just days away from giving birth. And in my hearing, a party
official said: 'Do not think that you can simply wait until you go into labour
and give birth, because we will not allow your baby to live. You will go home
alone'."
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.
Assessed by numbers alone, it is said to be by far the most successful
population control initiative. Yet it remains deeply controversial, not only
because of the human suffering it has caused.
A few years after its inception, the policy was relaxed slightly to allow rural
couples two children if their first was not a boy. Boy children are prized,
especially in the countryside where they provide labour and care for parents in
old age.
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.
Moreover, since Chinese fertility was already in decline at the time the policy
was implemented, some argue that it bears less responsibility for China's
falling birth rate than its supporters claim.
"I don't think they needed to bring it down further," says Indian demographer
AR Nanda. "It would have happened at its own slow pace in another 10 years."
Backlash
In the early 1980s, objections to the population control movement began to
grow, especially in the United States.
In Washington, the new Reagan administration removed financial support for any
programmes that involved abortion or sterilisation.
Start Quote
if you give women the tools they need - education, employment, contraception,
safe abortion - then they will make the choices that benefit society
Adrienne Germain
The broad alliance to stem birth rates was beginning to dissolve and the debate
become more polarised along political lines.
While some on the political right had moral objections to population control,
some on the left saw it as neo-colonialism.
Faith groups condemned it as a Western attack on religious values, but women's
groups feared changes would mean poor women would be even less well-served.
By the time of a major UN conference on population and development in Cairo in
1994, women's groups were ready to strike a blow for women's rights, and they
won.
The conference adopted a 20-year plan of action, known as the Cairo consensus,
which called on countries to recognise that ordinary women's needs - rather
than demographers' plans - should be at the heart of population strategies.
After Cairo
Today's record-breaking global population hides a marked long-term trend
towards lower birth rates, as urbanisation, better health care, education and
access to family planning all affect women's choices.
With the exception of sub-Saharan Africa and some of the poorest parts of
India, we are now having fewer children than we once did - in some cases,
failing even to replace ourselves in the next generation. And although total
numbers are set to rise still further, the peak is now in sight.
Chinese poster from the 1960s of mother and baby, captioned: Practicing birth
control is beneficial for the protection of the health of mother and child
China promoted birth control before implementing its one-child policy
Assuming that this trend continues, total numbers will one day level off, and
even fall. As a result, some believe the sense of urgency that once surrounded
population control has subsided.
The term population control itself has fallen out of fashion, as it was deemed
to have authoritarian connotations. Post-Cairo, the talk is of women's rights
and reproductive rights, meaning the right to a free choice over whether or not
to have children.
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.
"If you don't, then you'll just be in an endless cycle of trying to exert
control over fertility - to bring it up, to bring it down, to keep it stable.
And it never comes out well. Never."
Nevertheless, there remain to this day schemes to sterilise the less well-off,
often in return for financial incentives. In effect, say critics, this amounts
to coercion, since the very poor find it hard to reject cash.
"The people proposing this argue 'Don't worry, everything' s fine now we have
voluntary programmes on the Cairo model'," says Betsy Hartmann.
"But what they don't understand is the profound difference in power between
rich and poor. The people who provide many services in poor areas are already
prejudiced against the people they serve."
Work in progress
For Mohan Rao, it is an example of how even the Cairo consensus fails to take
account of the developing world.
"Cairo had some good things," he says. "However Cairo was driven largely by
First World feminist agendas. Reproductive rights are all very well, but [there
needs to be] a whole lot of other kinds of enabling rights before women can
access reproductive rights. You need rights to food, employment, water, justice
and fair wages. Without all these you cannot have reproductive rights."
Perhaps, then, the humanitarian ideals of Cairo are still a work in progress.
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."