NSW Premier Bob Carr addressed the sustainability session at the World Economic Forum in Melbourne on September 13, calling for sustainable economic development to save the environment.
Citing global warming as one of his fears, he also directed comments about population growth and environmental devastation to the thousands of protesters gathered outside the forum demonstrating against this big business, pro-corporate talkfest. "I want to see placards and protests outside the embassies of those countries that don't do something about unsustainable population growth", he said, adding that what was needed to deal with the problem was the empowerment of women, giving them rights and freedoms and the respect of the law.
Whether or not one adheres to the argument that it is rampant population growth that is the biggest enemy of the environment, or whether it is the irrational use of resources for profit, it is true that there is a link between the position of women in societies and the fertility rate. More specifically, it is the overall levels of poverty or wealth which have an impact on the number of children women bear; and the less likely it is for children to reach adulthood, the more likely it is that women will have more children as an attempt to escape crushing impoverishment.
Despite the cost of having many children, in most poverty-stricken nations they are essential to provide extra labour to supplement the family income, and to look after their parents in old age when there is no state support for the elderly. In many regions, the bearing of many children also confers status on women.
An increase in the overall economic level of a region, and particularly of the women, usually has an impact on the fertility rate, assessed by the United Nations Children's Fund in 1999 as 1.6 children per woman on average over her lifetime in industrialised countries, compared with five in the least developed countries. Comparing these two populations, literacy levels and contraceptive prevalence (among married women between 15 and 49 years old) in the industrialised countries are 97% and 72% respectively, contrasted to 24% and 22% in the least developed nations.
Not many would disagree that women living in poverty have less access to education, usually have far less political decision-making power within their communities and have more children over their lifetimes. But there is a reason for the huge imbalance in wealth distribution which results in this disparity in the economic and social conditions of women (and men and children) globally.
Bob Car would have us believe that it is the fault of the least developed nations that they are in such a dire situation, and that it is basically through governmental negligence that the women of these countries are giving birth to large numbers of babies, many of whom don't live to see their fifth birthday, the rest pretty much condemned to continue as another link in the chain of poverty.
While many of these governments are indeed corrupt, and often live in relative wealth at the expense of the vast majority under their rule, the poverty of the Third World did not originate with those now in power in these countries. Centuries of plunder by first colonial, now imperialist, powers created and perpetuate this gap between the most and least wealthy peoples.
Bob Carr may rail about more worthy targets, but the governments and the big business honchos of the countries of origin of most of the WEF participants are exactly the correct target for the anger of protesters who want an end to the misery facing such a large proportion of the 6 billion of our fellow humans.
From a premier of the wealthiest state in a very wealthy country, who can't even bring in policies which provide the necessary services and system of government to fully empower the women of NSW, and who in fact is actively undermining women's living conditions, this is as hypocritical as his alleged concern for the environment, while promoting privatisation and pro-big business policies.
BY MARGARET ALLUM