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CONSUMPTION VS. POPULATION No matter how big the population of the developing world, it will be a long time before they overtake the resource-use of the rich countries, says the writer. According to him, 'the population problem obscures the consumption problem, and serves to wipe from the agenda a more just distribution, which alone will provide the security people need to lower their fertility rates.' By Jeremy Seabrook
October 1999 In front of the All-India Medical Sciences building in New Delhi, a giant electronic screen records each new addition to the population of India. Within a few months this will register one billion; at almost the same time the world total will exceed six billion. The increasing burden of humanity on the planet provokes what is, perhaps, a more irrational response than almost any other issue; and with good reason. Not only does it raise Malthusian prophecies that there is no place for the poor at Nature's banquet (actually it isn't nature's banquet now, it is an almost wholly human-made feast); but the very terms in which the debate is cast suggest the revival of an ancient enmity between rich and poor, a dispute which is supposed to have been laid to rest by the ideology of Globalisation, and the conventional belief that increasing wealth will benefit all. The poor countries create a surplus 'population', while the 'people' of the rich ones do not. The poor breed; the rich have children. It is still possible to talk of the masses of India or China; on the other hand, the masses which once besieged the shores of America have long been transformed into individuals. Renewed concern about the poor is also a reflection of the ageing populations in the advanced economies: while the people of Japan, Germany and Italy fail to replenish themselves - whether because of the hedonism of an existing generation, loss of faith in the future and a consequent elective childlessness scarcely matters - the cities of the South teem with energetic and hopeful youngsters. Elizabeth Liagin, director of the Information Project for Africa, points out that if current fertility rates are maintained, the average woman in Yemen can expect to have seven children; over the following three generations, she will have 49 grandchildren, 343 great-grandchildren, and 2,500 great-great grandchildren. The people of Europe might expect only two or three great-great grandchildren. Of course, projections of population growth are notoriously unreliable. Who now remembers the scare of the 1930s that the population of Britain was due to fall precipitously, leaving a country of empty cities and abandoned villages? It is true that pressure of people damages the environment. The woman who walks 12 kilometres a day in Madhya Pradesh, India to collect the firewood that will cook the rice and pulses for the family meal, the depletion of groundwater by tubewells, the sheer weight of humanity on the limited landmass of Bangladesh which has left 60% of families with little or no land - all these are formidable factors in environmental degradation. But they are nothing compared with the vast extractive project of the global economy: the 25 million people displaced in India since Independence by developmental purposes, the fate of forests transformed into ranches or monocultures for export, the declining yield of the miracle seeds of the green revolution, the end of self-reliance among subsistence farmers all over the world, as they forsake their home-place for the carceral cities of the Third World. Even so, if a child born in the United States consumes 25 times more than a child born in India, India could support a population of four billion before it overtook the resource-use of the richest country on earth. The population problem obscures the consumption problem, and serves to wipe from the agenda a more just distribution, which alone will provide the security people need to lower their fertility rates. Forty years ago, the richest 20% of the world's people commanded 30 times more wealth than the poorest 20%. That differential has now doubled. 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 earth. No wonder there is such agitation in the presence of population growth, for it is both destiny and duty - if current orthodoxies are 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. We know, from our own experience, that people have fewer children when they acquire a measure of social security. Indeed, the increased life expectancy, the ability to cure formerly fatal diseases, have had a clear effect upon the birth-rate of poor countries. What they now need is enhanced security, not yet more lessons in 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 sickness 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 occurred in Europe. But this brings us back 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 a by-product of wealth-creation, involves such a prodigious abuse of the resource-base of the earth that the very basis of global industrial society is now in question. Ideology is in conflict with survival; livelihood is turned against life; population is at war with humanity. The end of history looms: but not quite the sunny version apprehended by Mr Fukuyama. 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 clearly. The depressing thing is the almost total absence of an even half-adequate response. - Third World Network Features -ends- About the writer: Jeremy Seabrook is an author and freelance journalist based in London.
1965/99
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