By Steve Painter
World population has more than doubled since 1950, and the 1990s will be humanity's most prolific decade ever as we race towards 10 or maybe 14 billion by the end of next century, depending on the success or failure of population control programs. The figures are certainly alarming, and it's clear population growth must be curbed.
Though famine somewhere on the globe has become a commonplace of human existence in the late 20th century, the world is not in immediate danger of running out of food or other resources. The present problems are entirely due to political and economic inequality.
We are capable of producing enough to feed 10 billion, though at what cost to the environment is another question. But unlike in the times of Thomas Malthus two centuries ago, the end is in sight: population growth at its present rate is not sustainable.
How can population growth be slowed and even reversed? Strategies that leave existing political and economic structures untouched tend to focus on birth control, particularly in the Third World. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) estimates in a just-released report that spending on family planning programs must double in the next nine years.
Some US$9 billion is needed for Third World contraception programs just to reduce the average number of children per woman from 3.8 to 3.3 by 2000. Unless this happens, world population could reach 14.5 billion rather than the commonly accepted 10 billion by 2100, the report says.
While the spread of contraception has been spectacular in recent decades (from 10% of couples in the 1960s to 51% today), and the rate of population growth has slowed as a result, staking everything on contraception programs is a hopeless strategy for a number of reasons. One of these is the anti-abortion lobby. At the moment, the United States doesn't fund the UNFPA and related agencies because they support "abortion-related" activities, and US pharmaceutical companies are getting out of research into contraception because of the threat of litigation and the power of the anti-abortion lobby.
More importantly, contraception programs based on aid from the rich countries don't even go near meeting the demand. The UNFPA estimates that some 300 million couples worldwide don't want more children but have no access to family planning. The UN fund estimates that contraception programs must reach another 8% of the population by 2000 just to restrain growth to around 8.5 billion by 2025.
Launching the report, UNFPA director Nafis Sadik linked the population problem with the status of women: "Contraception is part of an environment in which all people, women and men, have opportunities and free choice. Women and girls must have equal value; higher status will bring increased ability to choose."
This gets closer to the fundamental problems of the population crisis. Rich societies such as those of North America and Western which birth rates are lowest and women have achieved most freedom. But how can desperately poor societies even think about reaching those levels?
A step in the right direction would be the cancellation of the Third World debt to international banks, followed by a political and economic program to end the drain of wealth from the poor countries to the rich. Aid, contraception and other programs might alleviate the situation, but they won't solve what is essentially a political problem. n