As the food price crisis deepens, many commentators are pointing the finger of blame at overpopulation. Apparently, the real problem is the “human plague”: all those teeming, swarming billions of people in China, India and elsewhere, who are wolfing down so much meat and rice that food production methods have gone into meltdown. It’s time, we are told, to broach the last taboo: the fact that there are too many people.
Hold on a second… Discussing overpopulation is taboo? What are they talking about? Far from being an unsayable sentiment, the idea that the planet is being wrecked by too many humans — and in particular by too many black babies on that most fecund of continents, Africa — has become entirely mainstream. In recent years, the poisonous notion that the speedily breeding masses are pushing the planet to breaking point has become a casual dinner-party prejudice.
Not so long ago, people of a Malthusian bent tended to keep their views to themselves. They might have whispered them into a sympathetic friend’s ear over a glass of chardonnay, or talked about them at small “population control” conferences for like-minded souls. But, for fear of being denounced as a eugenicist (or worse), they rarely shouted from the rooftops about the need to reduce human numbers.
In his new book Fundamental Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population,/em>, Matthew Connelly explains how, following the Second World War, population-control activists suffered a severe crisis of identity. After the Nazi experience, explicit eugenics — especially in its racial form — stood exposed and discredited. So in the postwar years, population controllers embraced ‘reform eugenics’ instead and rebranded themselves as ‘family planners’.
The population-control lobby began carefully to present itself, as Frank Furedi points out, as a “benevolent and technocratic movement”, merely concerned with “improving Third World women’s reproductive choices” rather than “reducing human numbers”. Out went the old-fashioned, pre-war, Malthusian talk of plagues of unfit people swarming the world’s green and pleasant lands… in came arguments about empowering women in Africa and Asia to “choose” to have fewer children.
Until recently, population control remained a fairly minority pursuit and always dolled itself up in such “family planning” drag. Not anymore. Now, more and more world leaders, commentators and eco-activists accept the idea that the world is overpopulated (global population is currently 6.7 billion) and discuss the need to “control” or “reduce” the population in the most lurid, brazen, shameless language.
From the left to the right, Malthusianism is resurgent. Here in Britain, you can pick up a respectable liberal magazine and read that it is “sheer irresponsibility” to “reject population control [in Africa], a continent stalked by famine and stunted by malnutrition, where each year brings another 10 million mouths to feed.” Or on the other side of the political spectrum listen to the far-right British National Party scaremonger about how “population is expected to mushroom over the next 20 years”.
In mid-May, Prince Philip gave a typically royal and misanthropic pat explanation for the food price crisis: “Everyone thinks it’s to do with not enough food, but it’s really that demand is too great — too many people.” In the same week, an anti-royal, left-leaning newspaper columnist put forward a strikingly similar argument: “[A]lthough the swelling billions (that’s people in the Third World) are not now emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases, they will see that we are doing it and will (totally understandably) want to join in the carbon bonfire.”
British environmentalist James Lovelock says Earth is suffering from “a plague of people”. Former Thatcherite turned philosopher, John Gray, also labels humanity a “plague” and says world population should be reduced to 0.5 billion. Meanwhile, the novelist Lionel Shriver, beloved of the latte-drinking classes in London, says that even though the issue of overpopulation has become “racially, religiously and ethnically sticky”, we must recognise that “the threat of overpopulation is back and here to stay”.
From left to right, liberal to lunatic, it is now commonplace to hear people screeching about the horrors of overpopulation. They are as wrong, and as backward, as the original Malthusians were.
The central mistake made by population controllers is to treat population growth as the only variant and everything else as a fixed entity. Malthus, writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, predicted correctly that population would grow, but incorrectly that food production levels would stay the same. So he developed a nightmare vision of an Earth plagued by half-starved people looking for a scrap to eat. He didn’t reckon with the Industrial Revolution; his pessimistic mindset did not allow him to imagine that mankind might come up with better ways to produce and transport food.
Likewise, the neo-Malthusians, many of them environmentalists, see population as a wild variant, and everything else — food production methods, human ingenuity, technological progress — as rigid things that will never provide us with a leap forward. They, too, are driven by a deeply pessimistic view of humanity, and a belief that everything from energy to resources to land-space is severely limited. They see newborns as little more than “mouths to feed”, when in fact they are also potential brains that can be put to work and hands that can help build a more productive world.
Commentators who claim that discussing overpopulation is taboo are flattering themselves. They want us to believe they are making daring and dangerous arguments, when in fact fretting about human numbers is now as mainstream as it gets. The real taboo today is to argue that human life is always valuable, and that we need more people to make a success of life on Earth, not fewer.
Brendon O’Neil
Are you from a Catholic family? Isn’t the author Matthew Connelly also Catholic?
If so – how many children are you going to have? And will your wife take the pill (for medical reasons of course!)?
Japie
We are already at 6 billion, and where there is no population control the population figures double every generation( 25 years )
Me
Africans are happy to look after the environment for “the white middle class” if they bring in foreign exchange as tourists. Believe me they would much rather work in hotels, on game farms, in National Parks, than do subsistence farming.
Nick
Nature is “taking a pot shot” – HIV/ AIDS
Alex
If every adult was only allowed to parent one child ( i.e 2 per couple ) the problem would be solved – and there would be much less child abuse as well!
Mink
Negative growth is Swaziland is the result of both AIDS and emigration.
Richard
I don’t believe ANY government statistics. Did they count the immigrants ? Or the emigrants ? When these government spokespeople come on the radio and get asked questions – it is appalling what they don’t know and can’t answer.
Dylan
Why should the women be steralised – why not the men? My doctor refused to let me go back on the pill or have the op, so my husband got sterilised. It took 20 minutes!
Despite what we read all the time in the papers, most of the world’s poor are in Asia, and 2/3 of the Asian poor are in India. Are you sure they are managing to feed themselves ? Are they not importing food ?
Adam
“nutty religious right in the USA”
So right – both the 25% of the USA that is Catholic, AND the lunatic fringe of the Bible Belt.
I was told by a worker in a private AIDS clinic that the reason they get private funding (and NOT from the USA) is that America will only fund clinics or hospitals which agree to ban abortions!
Cool Down
That link is not working.
Elizabeth
Paul Ehrlich wrote “The Population Bomb” just before the birth control pill was developed. That could have saved us – if people had been allowed to use it. Blame the patriarchs (like Zuma) and the religious nuts who want women “barefoot and pregnant”.
Carlos
Japan started birth control even before China did. They however encouraged male sterilisation – with financial rewards.
Haiti and Rwands
Haiti is part of an island – no room to expand. Rwanda is a small inland country hemmed in by mountains – no room to expand. The genocide in Rwanda and the starvation in both was the result of overpopulation and no more land to expand into.
We only have one planet. God is not going to create another one.
Brendan,
You do a thorough job of setting forth the views of Malthusians but you end your article without actually defending your view that we ‘need’ more humans. What is the basis of your optimism about humanity–given your scathing comments about all ‘western’ societies? Do you see greater virtue in non-white societies? Or are you, like Mother Teresa, a firm believer that poverty and suffering are necessary to our ‘redemption’ and are therefore ‘God’s will’ and it is wrong of us to try to alleviate poverty? Do you believe that universal poverty would improve the human race?
P. S. Mother Teresa banked the millions of donations she had received from people all over the world and made her nuns continue to beg in the streets because it would keep them ‘humble’. Was this the thinking of a great human being or of an uneducated Albanian peasant?
Lyndall Beddy
Try http://www.un.org and see if you can find
the report on their website
Interesting, just got around to reading this. Curbing of population growth doesn’t have to be as draconian as China. Ask the Italians about it (a predominantly Catholic country as well…).
The reason that some Western countries are getting into a tizz about people not having enough children, as far as I can see, is purely to prevent implosion of the financial system.
Think of pension schemes as the pyramid schemes that they are (particularly government ones). Imagine all those old people (that’s us) demanding to be paid out that state pension when we get a bit along in years. Only problem is, all that money that we thought was being ‘put away and invested’ in fact was often being used as a current payment scheme for yesterday’s old folks…so unless we breed nicely and create a generation to follow us and pay their taxes and contributions like good people, we’re going to be left up the creek and all that.
Cost of healthcare similar…those European countries will be all over euthanasia in about 25 years, trust me. Not enough tax money and way too many elders.
There endeth the conspiracy theory for the day.
(And a postscript: Agree with Lyndall totally about the inherent sexism in that ‘women getting sterilised’ thing that people are always rabbiting on about on both sides of this debate. If more men got the snip it might just fix the problems much more efficiently than the more invasive female body-snatchers visiting. Let’s face it, blokes don’t have to carry the kids so their (they think) rights to rule often mean that women end up with more children, more quickly than they want anyway. If women were really in control of their own bodies, I can’t imagine many who would voluntarily have 10 children in 11 years. Send your vas deferens off to the vet, do your bit for the world.)
As we speak, there is more food stored in the silos of America, Canada Europe.
Population is growing in the west. They are getting old. they need people to work. They are getting them form Africa, India and China. Africa populaion is dropping, ask us we live there. In south Africa it may be rising due to foreigner
Cool Down
Thanks
Klipspaaider
The first world does consume more resources, but it also preserves much more – national parks, subsidised farmers etc
Elizabeth
Only The Pope can stop Catholics breeding themselves into poverty and hunger.
Much of the “taboo” comes from people who secretly (or not) desire genocide. Anyone who advocates genocide for solving overpopulation should set the example by starting with themselves. What is more of a taboo is pointing out to us “first worlders” that we should no longer assume the right to have children. While we live in an age of scarcity, even doing the most innocent of things means depriving someone else. By having children and raising them to consume at the rate we do, compounds the problem. At the very least, in civilised countries it should be illegal to have children while there are orphans, anywhere. That way we can use the brains we already have.
blackvine
Why did you not choose Singapore instead of Japan?
Singapore’s population density is 17.9 times higher than Japan.
Using your logic, the world could carry 895 billion people. Divide by two, for a bit of safety factor, and we get a whopping 447 billion people.
(do you work for Eskom?)
Dylan
>Indians were largely capable of finding ways to feed themselves.
I have not checked the Unicef report myself, but I have no reason to doubt the following from an Indian website:
According to Unicef’s latest State of the World’s Children’s report, India has the worst indicators of child malnutrition in South Asia.
It claims that 48 percent of under fives in India are stunted, compared to 43 percent in Bangladesh and 37 percent in Pakistan.
The report further goes on to say that 30 percent of babies in India are born underweight, compared to 22 percent in Bangladesh and 19 percent in Pakistan.
Unicef calculates that 40 percent of all underweight babies in the world are Indian.
Lyndall and Cool Down
Try this link to the UN report World Population Policies 2007 http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wpp2007/Publication_introduction.pdf
Here’s a quote:
“Many developing countries have realized the importance of reducing high rates of population growth in order to ease mounting pressure on renewable and non-renewable resources, combat climate change, prevent food insufficiency and provide decent employment and basic social services to all their people.”
So shouldn’t the developed world be doing more to help these governments with family planning assistance?
You might also be interested to check out this article in Time – What Condoms Have to do with Climate Change: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1739253,00.html
Here’s a couple of quotes:
“The key to limiting population growth…is to give control over procreation to women. In society after society, even in countries where large families have always been the norm, when women take control over family size, birth rates shrink. “They don’t have to be coerced,” says Engleman. “This will happen as long as women are in charge.”
And of course women also need access to education and social and economic autonomy. Rather a long way to go on that one in some cultures…
(And men should also be encouraged to control their own fertility, it’s not fair that women alone bear the burden of responsibility. Another difficult task to accomplish in the more macho cultures).
It now seems to new be considered a truism that the way to eradicate poverty is to emancipate women. They tend to be more responsible with aid etc, and understand the burden of children much better.
The Grameen bank of Bangladesh gives about 80% of it’s small loans to women.
O’Neill you have all the training and knowledge of the subject of the average Bafana Bafana coach… has at teaching ballet and ancient Greek. You didn’t bother to do any elementary research (suggest you go to New Scientist for entry level liberal orientated background next time) – you just ranted your prejudices. We do not ‘need’ more humans – for what, pray? Other than the far left – Maoists – no one has suggested population ‘control’ – only the far left ever actually joined the Nazis (two of a kind) And yawn, no, it’s not closet racism (the handy excuse of the ‘left’ for everything). What scientists have been saying for a long time now is that raising the standard of living (which inevitably means female emancipation and an increase in education) are the most effective ways of reducing population increase — which, duh, usually means an improvement in the quality of life for the children. This seems an eminently honourable ambition, something to be desired by all liberal thinkers — and it is. It’s good for the humans concerned, good for the ecology, medium term. The only opponents who defend to the death the right of despots to oppress and impoverish (and thereby send populations spiralling upwards) are the theocratic fanatics, and their best friends the dogmatic narrow-minded ‘left’(who are anything but ‘liberal’). Yep, those two groups want more human cannon fodder.
The term ‘overpopulation’ is a somewhat irrelevant misnomer.
‘Over’ populated according to whom, and more pertinently, by what criteria?
The human population has always expanded into, and therefore been constrained by its resource base.
Since the ‘dawn of man,’ in the context of organized societies some 160,000years ago up until very recently, the human population was relatively stable, hovering around half a billion, and marked by a number of near extinction events.
Growth was slow and could only be sustained by turning more land over to serve human needs, basically accessing the solar energy which fell on such land. Yield per ‘acre’ or whatever other measure could not be significantly increased, as no additional (fossil) energy inputs were then available.
Incidentally, this formed the essential motivation for the much hated ‘colonisation, subjugation and conquest’ for which redress is now so avidly sought. There was simply no other means to sustain a growing population.
If population growth and better standards are all natural and ‘good’, how can the only (then) possible way to achieve it be ‘bad’?
Suddenly, with the advent of access to ‘limitless’ (fossil) energy in the 19th century, population exploded exponentially. Agricultural yield per unit area jumped five fold, as did population, in just one century.
We are now on an energy plateau, whilst the population continues to rise. We are in ‘overshoot’ in terms of the global resource base, not ‘overpopulated’. The UN projections of a peak around 10 billion seem reasonable. What is perhaps not emphasised is that almost all the increase will be form the developing world, will be young (demographically), and will be living below the bread line.
Unless there is a global conspiracy to hide massive undisclosed energy resources away, the plateau will be of brief duration, maybe as little as a decade, before going into an inexorable decline, pulling the global population along with it.
It is neither ethical nor necessary to contemplate ‘control’ measures.
Kit
The “elderly” are more productive than they have ever been. They retire at 65 on a pension – and then start a new business as a consultant. Often more successful than their previous job. I have a cousin that retired after 30 years at Nature Conservation – and now makes 3 times what he used to make as a consultant ( and gets his pension!). My husband has a cousin who also took early retirement from the Navy and then went on to a very successful second career. Denny’s Mushrooms was started by a man of 95 years old – in his 3rd career!
To Anton K:
I understand your pessimism, but do you live as though “mankind is not worth the effort”?
Or, do you hope against the evidence and desire something better? Do you act as though life is an accident (and hence meaningless), or do you live with purpose and intent?
There is this theory going round that man has purpose and “nobility”, that he is not a cosmic accident, but that he is flawed, as a result of wilful rebellion.
If true, it would explain our desire for truth and meaning (and our sense of moral outrage), but also explain the depressing things that you mention.
We need to put over-population and the food crisis into perspective. With regards to over-population, one needs to understand why people in developing countries have so many children. Firstly, more children means more potential hands to feed the family. Secondly, these families hold on to the hope that maybe, just maybe one of their children will hit the big time. We have seen and heard all the rag to riches stories so who is to stop these people from dreaming of a better life sometime in the future.
With reference to the food crisis, those who eat too much (those overweight and obese sobbs) should think out that poor family in Sudan, Somalia, Niger etc who dont have a crumb of bread to eat. Those of us fortunate enough to have an abundant supply of food should consume less so that the resources of this planet can be shared more equally.
Thus, the current food crisis has nothing to do with over population but more with the rich folk thinking that they consume the planets resources without limits whilst the rest of the world should suffer
Is it not strange that we are living on a
continent far richer in resources than any other
and should be able to comfortable feed its
population have to debate over population?
For info, here are a few quotes from the UN report World Population Policies 2007 http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wpp2007/Publication_introduction.pdf
- Many developing countries have realized the importance of reducing high rates of population growth in order to ease mounting pressure on renewable and non-renewable resources, combat climate change, prevent food insufficiency and provide decent employment and basic social services to all their people. (p.7)
- In 2007, fertility was viewed as too high in over half of developing countries, including most parts of Africa, Southcentral Asia and South-eastern Asia. (p.12)
- Fifty-four per cent of developing countries considered their fertility to be too high in 2007. Ninety per cent of the least developed countries held that view. (p.13)
- Developing countries with high fertility are grappling with the challenge of providing decent work for their growing labour forces. In 2006 there were nearly 200 million unemployed persons, an increase of 18 per cent since 1995 (ILO, 2007). The highest rates of unemployment and underemployment are found in the poorest countries. There is a general recognition that employment generation in developing countries requires employment-intensive economic growth combined with a coherent set of employment and human development policies. (p.11)
- During the last three decades, most developing countries have strengthened their support for increasing access to contraceptive methods. Even previously pronatalist Governments, which in the past had wanted to maintain or even increase population growth, have gradually modified their stance and accepted family planning and contraception as integral components of maternal and child health programmes. (p.15)
- Despite widespread government support for increasing access to contraceptives, demand is believed to outstrip supply. It is estimated that more than 100 million women lack ready access to safe and effective means of contraception. (p.14)
Developing countries obviously recognise they have a population problem. We should be doing more to help them address it with more family planning assistance.
Ooh lots of hardcore realists out there. Like the stone age realists that worried about the exhaustion of stones as a resource! They were so right of course, the world had limited stones. So Paddy II if we wanted 9th graders opinion on how to construct an argument or a 10th graders view of ‘ scarcity ‘ then we could consult some high school kids of course…
Will give you a clue also, there’s not actually more ‘ breeders’ out there, one of the greatest myths ever! More people are living longer while less people are dying off like flies.
I do admit though, death can’t come soon enough for some wannabe non-existers.
@ Perry Curling-Hope “It is neither ethical nor necessary to contemplate ‘control’ measures.”
That it is not ethical to contemplate ‘control’ measures is valid from a philanthropic point of view. At present we are dominant species on earth and have the capability and potential to outstrip the capacity of the planet to support us by insensitive breeding. More importantly and frightening though, is that by being “intelligent” the decision will be entirely our own. So, if we do have to make this choice, we must choose wisely.
Thanks for the comment, Bobster
“At present we are dominant species on earth and have the capability and potential to outstrip the capacity of the planet to support us[..]”
That potential has long been breached.
It was breached the day human numbers exceeded a food supply which could no longer be sustained on sunlight alone.
This is not to mention that many humans want more of a life than the mere basics, which digs deeply into the ‘energy’ till.
The average American consumes some 23 times the energy as the average human, all in order to support the trappings of an affluent suburban lifestyle.
It is true that there are many transient factors, such as undue interventions by governments, mismanagement and misappropriation of resources, degradation and waste, but they are just that…transient.
From a distance, our 10 billion population and the fossil energy which made it all possible will be just a ‘blip’ on the radar of history.
Is it intelligent?
Should we have done it?
Should we rather have left the stuff in the ground, and all lived the idyllic rustic life of ‘The Waltons’ for all eternity?
Mind you, that portrayed the 1930’s and John Walton Sr. had a Model T Ford, I think, so we need to go a lot futher back and more ‘agrarian’ to be fully sustainable.
If so, there would have been no computers, no moon landing, no jet liners, no internet, no global village and the explosive growth in our knowledge, the understanding of our universe and expression of human ingenuity and creativity.
To some, these things are not important. They will have their way in the next century.
This article comes like a breath of fresh air! As an economist I am extremely frustrated by the incredible amounts of rubbish that people come up with on the topic sometimes. Unfortunatly on these issues everybody has an opinion, unlike say Quantum Physics! Economics is perhaps not in the same league as Quantum Physics but it *is* a science. As an economist I reject with contempt the notion that overpopulation is a problem, and certainly is not responsible for the high food prices. Everybody is entitled to their opinion, but that doesn’t mean every opinion has merit. It’s time we call these assumptions by their name- ignorant and racist!
In Zimbabwe before independence the black women asked the white doctors for the pill – they did not want 10 children in 11 years. The black men objected and said it was racist. After independence the black male politicians banned birth control – and the women marched on parliament in protest threatening to burn them!
This is a ridiculous article! There are almost no arguments put forward (save a false dilemma: either you believe in population control, in which case you think humans don’t have the ingenuity of increasing food production, or you think the earth needs more people. As humans do have ingenuity, the former position is false… Incidentally, I consider the invention of birth-control as a good example of aforementioned human ingenuity!) The rest is just a rant, (or rather an ad hominem attack: showing what bad folk are associated with these beliefs, rather than attacking the countless arguments for the planet being overpopulated.)
As an illustration, many developing nations have birthrates of around 4-7 children per woman (eg. Mali 7.3, Rwanda 6,). Take Rwanda, with perhaps the highest population density in Africa, 80% of the population is involved in subsistance agriculture. Almost every piece of the land in the country (save some national parks) is used for agriculture. Land is passed down from father to sons. When there are more than 1 sons, then the land is often subdivided. The massive population growth in the last 100 years has led to steadily declining sizes of plots of land. If every person born survived to reproduce, the population would triple every 25-30 years! The population doesn’t do this. Why? Because when humans do not control their population, then nature does it for them. And nature is a far crueler ‘population controller’ than the mentioned liberals, feminists, etc. Nature controls with disease, malnutrition, resource wars etc. Rwanda cannot possibly sustain many more people. So those 4 out of the 6 kids born to a mother will die. Nature will ensure it.
Incidentally, an increasing population has had a negative impact on Rwanda’s agri productivity, as food shortages forced farmers to intensify their crop cycles, leading land-exhaustion. (see for instance http://www.library.utoronto.ca/pcs/eps/rwanda/rwanda1.htm) This is in opposition to Brendans claim that more people = more productivity.
I cannot stand ignorant fools living in comfort in the West, who savagely assualt those who identify meaningful causes and hence solutions to the drastic problems faced by the poor, due completely to their unshakable ideological convictions.
AND that massive overpopulation and land starvation was the main reason for the Rwanda massacre. NOT what the politicians tell you! Read “Collapse” by Jarred Diamond.
It’s simple. If you believe there are too many people on this planet… be the solution to the problem and leave! you first buddy!
As my wise mother once said, “If the men in the family had to birth every other child, there would only be two children per family.” Jests aside, maybe there really is a higher intelligence that created this galaxy just to see how and if we could solve this problem. Maybe this higher intelligence is waiting to see just how long it takes for us to ask for help with this extremely complex math problem. We can behave like wanna-be child geniuses with inflated egos and keep saying, “No, I can figure this out myself!” Or we could err on the side of radical humility and start asking for help. Prayer, meditation, abstinence, tolerance, all potent means of creating much needed hope. Whether you believe in God or not, hatred and fear-mongering and trying to prove you have the biggest vocabulary is not a sign of intelligence. Could the key to survival as a species be to embrace true compassion, which is the highest form of intelligence. This might not appear on its face to be a scientific comment, and it’s true that many people would want to debate the endless possible meanings of the word “compassion” and the endless possible policies that could be justified by that value. But just what if this human experience is all about learning compassion? What if . . .
Let’s try another perspective.
Let’s ask the wolves, the whales, the bees, the cougars, the bears, the frogs, the birds, the butterflies, the sharks, the dolphins and the monkeys how they feel about human presence on the earth.
I bet they’d say that we are a plage.