By Claudette Begin
A woman's right to choose when, if and how to have children is at the core of the women's movement. And yet increasingly, as concern grows about the scarcity of resources and the poverty here in the US and in Third World countries, population control as an argument is winning ground within the feminist movement.
Population control is advanced as a solution to both environmental disaster and the poverty and famine of the poor. Increasingly the problem of feeding the starving masses of Bangladesh or Somalia seems beyond the resources of even rich countries. Poor people in the Third World, and welfare recipients and immigrants within the US, are seen as somehow stupid since they keep having so many babies whom they cannot feed.
In developed countries, decline in the population growth rate followed an increase in the standard of living of most of the population. Population control advocates, however, promote programs in the Third World that only teach or force population control, without addressing the economic factor. This has not worked effectively.
In fact, reduction of population growth has been most remarkable in countries where not only the standard of living for all but especially the status of women have first been substantially improved. Walden Bello of Food First cites the example of Kerala in Population and the Environment:
"The Indian state of Kerala ... reduced its fertility rate by 40 per cent between 1960 and 1985 ... 'Fair price' shops have kept the cost of rice and other essentials like kerosene within the reach of the poor ... Expenditures on public health are high and health facilities ... serve both the rural and urban populations ... At the same time, greater education for women has apparently led to greater control over reproduction. The literacy rate for females in Kerala is two-and-a-half times the all-India average."
Women in poorer countries have more children because that's their job. The family must provide all the social services for its members up through old age. To break that cycle, women must be freed from these social burdens.
The typical picture painted by advocates of population control is of an environment literally eaten up and chopped down by the masses of people in the Third World. But is this picture based on reality? As Bello also points out, "Thailand provides a good illustration of how, in many Third World countries, it is not population growth but the impact of Northern overconsumption that is the principal engine of ecological degradation".
Despite its fertility rates being reduced by half since the 1960s, "irreversible erosion is setting in in the country's rural Northeast, where close to half of the region's 53 million acres are severely eroded, partly because of the effects of unrestrained deforestation provoked by Japanese demand".
Is it their supposedly out-of-control populations that keep the underdeveloped countries from improving their standard of living? Consider some very relevant and startling facts:
- 80% of the current consumption of the Earth's resources is accounted for by the 20% of the world's population that resides in the north! Hence the sense of plenty in the north and scarcity in the south.
- The average Swiss pours 2000 times more toxic waste into the environment than the average Sahelian farmer.
- If levels of consumption and waste do not change, the 57 million Northerners who will be born in the 1990s will pollute the Earth more than the extra 911 million Southerners. The slower population growth in the northern countries is more than outweighed by their overconsumption of resources.
- Africa is far less populated than Europe. Countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands are among the most populated per square mile.
Once we have become aware of this basic information and it really sinks in, limiting the population growth in poor countries loses its lustre as a solution. Whether population control advocates like it or not, balancing the North's use of resources becomes the essential factor, for both population and the environment.
How can we accomplish this? Will depending on the new world order do it? Hardly. We can expect more of the same spoiling of the world's environment, extraction of resources and exporting our wastes, actually inflicting poverty and exporting ecological horrors to other countries.
The World Bank and the IMF set out an agenda for Third World countries. That agenda includes development of resources for those outside their borders, payment of exorbitant interest on loans to already rich Northern banks, austerity programs for the population and an end to self-sufficient and sustainable systems of production, since these don't bring in enough cash — a totally anti-environmental and anti-people agenda. Countries are forced into selling their resources cheaply while their people's standard of living plummets and starvation results.
As feminists with an environmental consciousness, we clearly must reject the simplistic solution of population control. Our job is to put the spotlight on the corporations that are raping the environment and impoverishing most of the world. We should join forces with the progressive part of the environmental movement and fight for the people of the world to control and share the resources equably, managing our ecosystem in an environmentally safe way.
We should support struggles for self-determination, people fighting to take control of their own lives and countries. These struggles and their victories enhance the lives of our sisters and provide them the basis for empowerment. They will be free to make choices beneficial to the entire human race and the environment.
Population control is not the answer. Empowering women is a better solution.
[From the US magazine Independent Politics.]