Dismantling the myth of controlling population growth
The misunderstanding of the UN approach to overpopulation has led to irresponsible population policies that underestimate the major problem of our time: the unsustainable consumption of resources. By Ana Escaso
When I started writing this article, mankind appeared the biggest threat to our planet, a plague that constantly reproduces itself, destroying all around it. And indeed, by the end of this piece, my opinion remains much the same. However, my concerns were initially about how rapidly the global population is increasing, and how many issues we will have to face in order to supply the current exponential growth of two people per second, which translates to 200 per day and 80 million per year.
According to the United Nations’ (UN) last report on population predictions 9,6 billion people will inhabit the planet by 2050. All alarms signalled the need to control population growth, especially in Africa, which will see its current population increase to four times its existing number during the next century. But when I realized that the unsustainable way of consuming resources will have the same effect as if the global population multiplies 70 times over, my initial approach took radically another direction.
The UN focus regarding the overpopulation problem has been misunderstood, when it should have been taken in a broader context combining this issue with other existing problems. These stunning, escalating statistics mentioned above are just numbers, that must be interpreted and contextualized correctly. Controlling human reproduction is not a solution when the currently unsustainable Western lifestyle is devouring everything within a world with limited resources. On the contrary, sometimes it leads to irresponsible reproductive policies that mean a threat to human rights and go against human nature. To see the bigger picture, one must backtrack to the beginning.
Misunderstanding facts
After World War II, the United Nations created the Population Division, which “has played an active role in the intergovernmental dialogue on population and development”, as it states on its website. A central part of this division is the Population Policy, which is responsible for advising governments on population issues, such as growth, fertility or family planning. One of its main goals today is to apply the Program of Action of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo. At this conference, important turning points were made: a link between population and development was established and population growth appeared as a factor that influences poverty, gender and social issues significantly. The unsustainable consumption of resources, however, was related to environmental issues exclusively.
Since then, overpopulation has been conceived worldwide as a threat that increases other existing problems. It was also an important factor taken into account when the Millenium Development Goals (MDG) were established in 2000. “The objective is to facilitate the demographic transition as soon as possible in countries where there is an imbalance between demographic rates and social, economic and environmental goals”, it says in chapter IV of the ICPD Program of Action and further “this process will contribute to the stabilization of the world population.” Thus, 179 nations that agreed with this international plan 20 years ago were recommended by the UN to ‘promote appropriate demographic policies’ in order to accelerate a ‘natural demographic transition’.
Nevertheless, it might be quite tough to apply population policies to control the growth in those nations where misery and injustice are rife in their societies or where corrupt authorities rule the social systems. But more importantly, is this going to eradicate poverty and social issues worldwide?
Mission accomplished?
My aim is not to demonize the UN, because nothing is in black or white. Improvements have been made regarding overpopulation and its consequences, and still decision makers from all over the world must remain concerned about it. Those improvements remain under the shadow of what the Swedish medical doctor Hans Rosling calls ‘wrong preconceived ideas.’ In one instance, Rosling explains for the BBC documentary Overpopulated how the average number of babies per woman has decreased from 5 in 1963 to 2,5 in 2014. According to his surveys made in the UK, the lack of awareness about these achievements among the public is virtually zero.
In this way, the most common contraceptive method used worldwide – as an UN report from 2013 reviews - is the pill, which has the widest geographic distribution. What is to be derived from this data is that female sterilization presents (alternate: “is common”?) high percentages in Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean and Northern America.
The UN has made big progress imparting the need to use contraception methods around the world, but also working hard at gathering and conveying data, predictions and research results so that we all make use of them. The actions proposed in terms of gender equality, empowerment of women, reproductive health, family planning and much more appear to have been successful. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports, such as the UN Millennium Development Goals account for a 45 percent decline of maternal deaths from 1990 to 2013 globally.
But unfortunately, there is a dark side to the story. The principles of the 1994 Conference take refuge in the right of sovereignty and respect of religious and cultural values to let governments act under their responsibility. However, not all population measures practiced are in conformity with universal human rights, as it was signed at that time in Cairo.
Playing God
The Chinese one-child policy approved in 1980 to reduce its rising population is well known. But less familiar is the fact that Amnesty International accused authorities in China’s Guangdong Province of forcing sterilization programs on its population. The goal was to meet the family planning targets stipulated in the law by the government in 2002.
Sadly, an even worse sterilization case made newspaper headlines in 2010: hundred of Uzbek women were surgically sterilized without consent, as part of a sterilization campaign that President Islam Karimov started in the late 1990s. Indeed, human rights organizations acknowledge that doctors were under pressure by authorities to perform involuntary sterilization practices on women. Furthermore, “rights groups say the government is dealing with poverty, unemployment and severe economic and environmental problems,” journalist Mansur Mirovalev reports for The Associated Press. This link between population growth and development problems may explain, but not justify the Uzbekistan government’s reasons to apply these kinds of authoritarian policies with the aim of controlling its population.
In the Annual Report of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in 2000, it is said that help was given to 10 countries in order to develop new programs on population control, where Uzbekistan was one of them. Surprisingly and contradictorily, in 2007 the UN Committee Against Torture condemned a “large number” of cases of forced sterilization and removal of reproductive organs in this country.
Another example of implementing drastic actions is India: the nation that will surpass China and become the most populated country in the world according to the UN’s predictions, has done unlawful and immoral castration practices during the 1970s. Still in 2012, similar human rights atrocities have been repeated, with the aim of reaching the state’s annual targets for birth rate. Particularly, forced sterilization practices were carried out against citizens in the province of Madhya Pradesh.
From the opposition party to Indian NGOs and health workers, critics against these practices claim that there is no way that the government can justify the use of force to enforce this concern, the magazine India Today informs.
Moreover, as happens in many other developing countries, such as China, the male gender is more desired than their female counterparts within ‘designer families.’ When tests to identify the sex of the baby became affordable in India, the selection of the gender became plausible. Hence, between 2006 and 2009, eight million girls have been missed or eliminated by abortion, according to Indian social activist Sabu George’s declaration for Live Mint.
Methods to control population growth are designed to improve those aspects in societies that are linked somehow to overpopulation. However, this can sometimes lead to the opposite effect – as occurred in the case described above – where encouraging gender discrimination happens as a result of irresponsible policies.
Overall, these political actions cannot be acceptable internationally. The UN should raise its voice against them and not take part in these types of programs that, occasionally, carry out terrible consequences.
Running on common sense
Unfortunately, there are other threats that walk aside overpopulation. After researching this topic, it makes absolutely sense that other alarming circumstances might come to the fore: the unsustainable way of consuming resources.
Jared Diamond, professor of Geography at UCLA, made explanatory points in an Op-Ed for The New York Times, confirming that if the world population was to adopt the high-consumption lifestyle of developed countries, it would be as if the population growth rose from 7 to 72. The US consumes resources at a rate 320 times more than Kenya and those nations getting closer to Western standards of life, such as China, expect to consume as much as developed countries do. Diamond questions reflexively who are (Americans) to tell them what to do? We cannot provide resources for those levels of consumption, so “does this mean we’re headed for disaster?” Diamond suggests that “we already know how to encourage the trends; the main thing lacking has been political will.”
Is reducing population growth going to force those industrialized societies to equalize the distribution of wealth, to consume responsibly or to produce less CO2? The coherent answer is no. Laurence C. Smith, a colleague of Diamond’s from UCLA, in an article for Edge.org explains that instead of being worried about rapid population growth, “the smarter focus is on the real challenge —reconciling our contradictory desires to bring modernity and prosperity to all, while stabilizing the innumerable natural resource demands that they foreshadow for our planet.”
Besides, this senseless way of consuming affects those developing countries that will simultaneously struggle with high levels of increasing population growth. Some industrialized countries have already started buying farmlands – mostly in Africa – due to the rise in food prices within the 2007-08 crisis, that pushed them to face their ‘troubles’ in order to feed their own people.
Oxfam International’s most recent report on grabbed land denounces that in South Sudan “between 2007 and 2010, foreign companies, governments and individuals sought or acquired at least 2.64 million hectares for agriculture, biofuel and forestry projects.” Meanwhile, population growth is seen as the main cause of the decline in resources on our planet, as this statement from a news article in Der Spiegel articulates: “Foreign investors are buying or leasing vast amounts of farmland in Third World countries to profit from surging demand for food crops as a result of rapid population growth.”
Hence, when I asked Smith about what the right focus should be in resolving the global population challenge, his answer was enlightening: “My response would be to shift the focus from ‘population growth’ – which is not, in and of itself, the biggest problem, but consumption growth”.
This has something to do with the food, water and energy supply problem. Human wellbeing and ecosystems are linked “in terms of security, basic material for a good life, health and good social relations,” as the International Union for Conservation of Nature states.
On one hand, the current agribusiness - where multinational companies control farms – has been interrupted by the fast food revolution. Massive amounts of unhealthy food, not needed, are produced in a way that is environmentally harmful and abusive to both animals and employees, as the American director Robert Kenner illustrates in the documentary
On the other hand, the shortage of drinking available water is affecting a considerable percentage of the world’s population. In Mexico D.F., 10 million people don’t have access to drinking water and once again, the media blames it on overpopulation, as headlined on the Mexican online paper Cronica.com: “One of the main reasons of a shortage of water in Mexico is due to population growth rise of 83 million people.” Enrique Vazquez, a water truck driver interviewed for the documentary How many people can live on planet Earth, talks wisely how “people don’t seem to understand. Instead of being concerned, we are just wasting it.” Here is the crux of the problem: a global lack of concern about how we waste our limited resources.
This article doesn’t have the answers for today’s global challenges, and it doesn’t pretend to solve them, but addressing the possible paths to a solution is the first step to finding one. Unfortunately, thus far, the UN has promoted an educational campaign on population growth that has been, for the most part, misunderstood or misinterpreted worldwide. Governments, on the other hand, underestimate what our main global concern should be: the rise in consumption.
Overpopulation is not the main problem; addressing its origins are certainly the key to making this world a better place and the current rate of consuming resources needs to be changed. But, for the meanwhile, individuals – you and me – attribute all blame for the state of the planet to the phenomenon of overpopulation, without reflection or impetus as to what might be done as an individual to course correct.
