FACTS againest MYTHS V0L-VII-8-2001
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VIKAS ADHYAYAN KENDRA_____________ Vol VII #8/2001_________ INFORMATION BULLETIN_________
Over-population as Underdevelopment:
The Myths behind “Population Control” — II
COMMENT
he 2001 State of the World’s Population report, published by the UNFPA
states that the world population will grow by 50%, from 5.1 b. in mid-2001 to
9.3 by 2050, with all the projected growth taking place in the South.
Undoubtedly, population growth is a serious concern but a bugbear especially
among population “experts” in the North. The seemingly intractable
problems of poverty and under-development of the region invariably ends
up in the conclusion that
virtually all of its problems are
rooted in “population explosion”,
“over-population”, etc. The
underlying themes of these
problems are that the poor are
poor because they have too many
children. To illustrate: India is
backward “because it has too
many people” and similarly other
countries of the South are what
and where they are because they
“are not doing enough to control
their exploding populations” and
having failed “in meeting (
population targets”. To that
extent the only “solution”,
therefore, is family planning.
C FACTS against MYTHS
This victim-blaming syndrome has been
increasingly evident not only at the
national level but also in the global
discourse on the future of the planet. The
South, with their large populations, are
blamed for all manner of social and
environmental ills giving rise to a number
of assumptions on controlling population
growth in the region. The three main ones
being
Rapid population growth is the
primary cause of the problems of
underdevelopment and threatens
the entire natural world;
£ The poor of the South must be
persuaded to have fewer children
whether or not their conditions of
poverty change;
Like other western development
schemes, birth control technology
can be delivered to women in the
South in a top-down, technocratic
manner with the right combination
of media advocacy. The goal is not
to improve health care services but
to prevent pregnancy (viewing
women as objects of reproduction
rather than as subjects of their own
decision-making goals and in
defining their own fife);
This philosophy has since shaped the
activities of most population “experts” and
organisations and international aid
agencies in the South as well as among
ethnic minorities and poor communities in
many parts of the North itself. In 1958
Sweden became the first government to
provide international aid for population
control, first to Sri Lanka and then to
Pakistan. In 1966 the UN General
Assembly reached a consensus about
“population assistance” a label that
eschewed control and limitation. The label
has since become a euphemism for all global
funding of condoms, IUDs, the pill and
Karman tubes, as well as US university
demography department, international
bureaucracies and local workshops. These
FACTS against MYTHS
“experts” have also appropriated the
language that appears reasonable,
progressive and even sensitive — some of it
is even co-opted from the women’s
movement. To illustrate: a 1989 de
classified US National Security Study3
states that the US support derives from a
concern and spacing of children. Thus, it
smuggles and fits into its population
control policy the language of‘choice’ that
global financial institutions including
institutions like the Vatican also find it
convenient to introduce in their rhetoric.
Further, the obsession with the thesis of
“over-population” (the Demographic Trap)
is one of the biggest global red herrings in
the development discourse. Sustainable
energy and relative scarce resources,
practised in the South, but used within a
framework confuses cause and effect. While
this confusion is basically ideological, it
reveals how ideologies mask reality and
determine perspectives. Moreover, it soon
becomes clear that the obsession with
population is a substitute for a proper
concern with social justice: this must be
avoided at all costs, for it also calls into
question the dominant ideology in the
world and mimicked by the ruling bloc in
the country. Is it any wonder, then,
population growth in India continues to be
a seemingly intractable problem with
crores having already been invested on its
“control”. Taking a closer look at the I
rhetoric of population planning therefore
becomes an essential prerequisite in
dismantling some long-standing myths
that has accompanied it.
MYTH: The major causes of hunger
and poverty in the world today are
uncontrolled population growth and
density.
FACT: Not so!
Western Europe has an average
population density of about 98 people per
square kilometre (with Holland having
over 1,000 per sq.km.); Africa as a whole
has an average of only 18 people per sq.km.
Yet, the Europeans are among the best-fed
people in the world and Africa suffers the
highest levels of malnutrition. So, there is
little relationship between hunger and
land-availability. The South undoubtedly
great shortages of food, but it is not due to
a lack of land. Less than one-third of its
potential arable land is being cultivated.
The fact is that the rich North has enough
money to support its population unlike
countries of the South.
World hunger does not keep the population
down; it actually keeps it up. Africa, again,
has also one of the fastest population
growth rates; yet, this itself is an indication
of prevailing poverty. Individual families
will remain large as long as they lack the
economic security that the North takes for
granted. In rural areas of the South,
children are needed as workers to assure
the survival of their families and to support
parents in their old age. And, since nearly
one in five such children dies before the age
of 5, fertility rates remain high as a
safeguard.
MYTH: Unchecked population
growth, after all, adversely impacts
the carrying capacity of the earth
making the planet unable to provide
food for all.
FACT: There is no physical shortage of
food today, least of all in India! For the
C FACTS against MYTHS
large masses of people who have no food,
the surpluses exist right in front of them!
India has massive reserve stock of over 20
m. tons of food grains but not distributed
to the needy with much of it rotting in
godowns.
At any rate this claim is a non-issue today.
The problem is not food scarcity but mainly
over consumption by the rich in the North
as well as by a tiny section of the rich in
the South including their capricious waste
and affluent life-style.
MYTH: Population Growth is also
responsible for global environmental
degradation.
FACT: This spurious claim along with the
others is linked in the chain of causes to
become the first and final cause of
environmental degradation.
Undoutedly, pressure of people does
damage the environment. Women who
trudge miles and miles each day to collect
firewood to cook the family meal, the
depletion of groundwater by tube wells, the
sheer weight of humanity on the limited
landmass are indeed formidable factors in
environmental degradation. But this is
nothing in comparison to the massive
extractive project of the global economy;
millions of people displaced since
Independence
by
the
so-called
development projects; the status of forests
3
Two Ways to Plan a Population Programme
1st Method
i® In Theory. Start With the Population - “Progress should be measured in the
only terms which ultimately matter — births averted” — Dr. Ravenholt, ex-head
of Population, USAID
In Practice’. 6 Steps to Coercion!
#1. Set Up a Target
& Setting definite population targets often means that more wide-ranging efforts
to improve health and wellbeing are neglected. Majority of women know about
Family planning but a negligible few have heard of immunisation or oral
rehydradion, both vital aids to preventing child deaths
#2. Choose your weapon
Target-oriented programmes tend to focus on a small number of permanent or
semi-permanent methods (sterilisation or IUD) to minimise dropout rates.
Some IUDs cannot be removed by the woman. It has to be extracted by a trained
person with a metal hook.
#3. Cut Down Costs
Providing proper counselling and screening costs money. When reduction of
birth rates is the main aim, these luxuries’ are often dispensed with.
‘Family planning programmes are less costly than conventional development
projects. Successful projects of this kind will yield veryjhigh economic returns’
- R. McNamara, ex-President of the World Bank
#4. Educate! Motivate!
Informing people of the availability of services is essential.But trying to
persuade (educate’, ‘motivate’) them to use family planning demonstrates an
unwillingness to understand why people have children in the first place. This
means that those underlying factors are unlikely ever to be tackled and people
will come to distrust a government that disregards their needs.
#5. Downplay difficulties
g- Possible complications and side-effects are ignored or minimised in a targetoriented programme as it is more important to add to the numbers of acceptors
than to help women make an informed choice about contraception. Often people
are not informed that sterilisation is permanent. Studies have warned that it
should never be used on women who intend to have children because of the
danger of permanent sterility.
#6. Force as a last resort
When all else fails and people are still not coming forward in sufficient numbers
to meet the targets, then persuasion escalates into coercion. This generates
further distrust and resistance which is, in turn, met with further coercion,
culminating in gross abuses such as those during the 1975-77 State of
Emergency. An estimated 6.5 million men were given vasectomies, mostly
against their will, and a total of 1,774 died as a result of the operations.
f FACTS against MYTHS
In Theory: Begin with the People
“A woman who wants family planning can have it.
But we don’t think it is a ‘Top Priority’.
We don’t think poverty will end by ending the poor”.
In Practice: 5 billion population plans
Every person is different and each has her or his optimal strategy for survival.
For some the best strategy is 9 children; for others it may be one or two. The
only humane population programme is one that expands people’s opportunities
so that large families are no longer necessary for survival. And that means
understanding and respecting the reasons why people have children.
Why People Have Children
&
Low status of women: Where husband and in-laws want many children,
a wife may not dare to object;
Need of Today: Children help with work and provide status and
affection for their parents;
Fear of Tomorrow: Children are many parents’ only source of security
in old age;
Lack of contraception: The family planning clinic may be too far away,
the service too costly or scarce, or even prohibited;
4s
Fear of infertility: Where children are needed fear of infertility can
lead to early, frequent childbearing;
Fear of children dying: In some very poor countries a woman must
have 10 children to be certain of a surviving adult son;
Contraceptive side effects: Unless these are clearly explained women
may avoid contraception unless they are very desperate.
Tell-tale Signs: Not all family programmes, however, end in sterilisation. But
if the focus is on population first and people second, people will always tend to
be sacrificed to the programme. Periodically abuses appear and the system is
tinkered with. But the approach itself is never questioned, so the abuses merely
re-surface later in its new ‘avatar’. For instance, the scandals of the infamous
Emergency; later reports of widespread sterilisation abuse in Gujarat (using
famine relief as an ‘incentive’) and Rajasthan (using promises of employment
as an ‘incentive’ for Adivasi women)
Source: The New Internationalist, London, October 1987.
( FACTS against MYTHS
5^)
transformed into ranches or monocultures
for export, the declining yield of the socalled miracle seeds of the ‘Green
Revolution’, the end of self-reliance among
subsistence farmers globally. Even so, if a
child born in the US consumes 25 times
more than a child born in India, India
could support a population of 4 b. before it
overtook the resource-use of the richest
country on earth. The population debate
obscures the consumption problem, and
serves to wipe from the agenda of a more
just distribution, which alone will provide
the security people need to lower their
fertility rates.
Over forty years ago, the richest 20% of the
world’s population commanded 30 times
more wealth than the poorest 20%. That
differential has now doubted. Not only is
there little sign that the rich will moderate
their use of resources but this same model
is now being promoted globally as the only
way forward for every country on the
planet. No wonder there is such agitation
in the presence of population growth, first
is both destiny and duty - if current
orthodoxy is not radically modified - of all
these people to aim at the levels of
consumption attained by the West. Indeed,
such is the goal and objective of the global
economy.9
The above will make it clear that people in
the South have fewer children when they
acquire a measure of social security.
Indeed, the rise in life expectancy, the
ability to cure formerly fatal diseases, has
had a clear impact on the birth rate. Their
need today is enhance security, not yet
more lessons on birth control; that security
and economic growth are not necessarily
synonymous has been the object of almost
conspiratorial evasion. At present the only
safety nets for the poor are those of flesh
and blood, which support people in illness
and old age. When they lose the terror of
dereliction in old age, of abandonment in
ill health, they will reduce the size of their
families just as it occurred in Europe. But
FACTS against MYTHS
this inevitably leads to the taboo question
of redistribution, of a fairer allocation of
resources.
This model of development, in which the
relief of poverty is more or less by-product
of wealth—creation, involves such massive
abuse of the resource-base of the earth that
the very basis of global industrial society
is now being challenged.
Population as resource not as a threat, a
re-dedication to social justice, a retrieval
of human well being from economic
indicators,
a
reclamation
of
internationalism from globalisation - the
millennial imperative defines itself
clearly9.
MYTH: Controllingpopulation growth
will lead to alleviating hunger and
poverty in the south including
environmental degradation.
FACT: not so!
Consider India or Thailand or any other
country in the South that have succeeded
in reducing birth rates without
significantly redistributing access to
survival resources - land, jobs and health
care.
India’s fertility rates - which are still
comparatively high - have declined
significantly since Independence. Yet are
the citizens of the country any better fed?
Despite the dramatic industrial
development, military and nuclear power,
space technology, the vast majority of the
population has not benefited economically.
Over half the population lacks the income
necessary to buy a nutritious diet and
starvation deaths continue to abound day
after day among the fanning community.
And despite food exports and bulging stocks
of foodgrains in godowns mass hunger
persists.
The related claim that without reduction
in population growth even more people
would go hungry and die has deeper
implications — that all that can be done is
6
to reduce the rate of population growth
today so that the situation will not be worse
for even more people tomorrow — leads to
an untenable moral stance.
This raises the question of whether an
ethical claim to success can be made if it is
held that the number of hungry people in
the world to be over 800 m.? Clearly not.
The moral imperative is clear. The
undemocratic power structures that lie at
the root to the problems of poverty and
underdevelopment, and population growth
by “solution” which at best can only limit
the numbers hurt. To illustrate:
Someone is afflicted with a disease, which
is slowly getting worse. A doctor is
approached for help. On examining the
'''/person, she/e offers some not-veryconforting news. “I can offer a treatment
that will stop the spread of disease, but I
cannot prescribe the cure” Sh/e openly
admits that the cure is well know, but
unfortunately it is only approved for use
in certain countries and India is not among
them. Besides, sh/e is not licensed to give
it to you anyway—it is not his or her
speciality.
Given the seriousness of the issue,
dispensing a less effective medicine in the
presence of a known cure can in no way be
rationalised. Yet, such a course is in effect
what is promoted by those who peddle
spurious claims e.g. that in certain
countries there is no hope for social and
economic transformation.
MYTH: Family planning is thus the
only hope in controlling population
growth.
FACT: Having many children is part of a
survival strategy of the poor in the
South.(Cf.Box pg.5)
Most population “experts”, however, are
unwilling to address the roots of these
problems that lie largely in the socio
economic order. Thus, when it comes to
action towards a solution, they focus willynilly narrows down to “family planning” so
FACTS against MYTHS
as to “...establish a balance between
number of people and available
resources...”
Defending family planning as virtually the
only feasible line of attack on high birth
rates also imply directly or by their silence
that global forces in a fast-growing country
cannot address the deeper, social roots of
its population problem. They cannot reform
the socio-economic structures of other
societies, it is assumed. The position
ignores the many channels - diplomatic,
military, commercial, and financial —
through which global forces already
greatly influence the structures of
decision-making power, affecting fertility
within many countries of the South.
This narrow approach is ethically
questionable and self-defeating. Once the
social roots of high fertility are deemed
impossible to address and fewer birth
becomes the goal, noble ends get sacrificed
to dubious means. Many women are
injured in the process, and ultimately the
very end itself — stemming population
growth - is unattainable.
References:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Population Policy and Women’s Health, All
India Democratic Women’s Association, New
Delhi, 1999.
Bramhe.Dr.S. Who’s Afraid of “Population
Growth?” Shankar Bramhe Samaj Vigyan
Granthalaya, Pune, 2001 (Marathi).
Shiva, V. Population Control: A Denied of
Individual Rights, TWN Features, #177,
Mapusa, Goa
Bergstrom, S. Myths and Realities in
“Population Assistance” and Maternal
Health Care, Oslo (undated document).
The Population Debate, The Earthscan
Publications, Institute of Food and
Development Policy.
Azizah Y. al-Habra, Family Planning and
Islamic Jurisprudence,"Panel on Religious
and Ethical Perspectives on Population
Issues”, The Religious Consultation on
Population, Reproductive Health & Ethics”,
Washington, DC,1993.
Maguire, D.C. "Poverty, Population,and the
Catholic Tradition, The Religious
7
Consultation on Population, Reproductive
Health and Ethics, Washington,D.C.,1993.
8. The "See Change Campaign": Facts &
Myths, Catholics for Free Choice,
Washington DC, 1999.
9. Seabrook, J. Consumption vs. Population,
TWN Features, Mapusa, Goa
10.. Population is A Very Political Issue,
TWN Features, Mapusa, Goa
11. Sikand.Y., Katju, M. Of Hindutva & Family
Planning, Frontier, #45,Calcutta, 1993.
12. The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and
Population in Capitalist Development, The
Corner House, Dorset, 2000.
Rogers, A. (ed), Population and
Consumption,
Taking
Action:An
Environmental Guide, UNEP,
Kenya,
1995.
14. Population Planning, Seminar, #410, New
Delhi, 1993.
15. Gowariker, V. (Ed.) The Inevitable Billion
Plus, National Book Trust, India, New Delhi,
1993.
16. Excessive Force: Power, Politics &
Population Control, Information Projectfor
Africa, Inc., Washington DC, 1995.
13.
Note: This is an updated version of the previous issue (No. 4/1993) of this publication
Please feel free to reproduce material from this publication but with due credit.
Facts Against Myths is a monthly bulletin offactual
information on a number ofdevelopment myths and
fallacies, etc, including information against alien
development models, paradigms and false concepts
on caste, creed and gender.
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