Comment by Jenny Goldie
[This article was written as a reply to an article by Reihana Mohideen, "Immigration and the Environment: Is Australia Overpopulated?", which appeared in our September 23 issue. Jenny Goldie is president of Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population].
The author is quite right that inequitable social structures need to be addressed. However, changing social structures must go hand in hand with lower birth rates. Women burdened with 10 children do not have the energy to fight for social change. Literacy rates for women around the world are inversely proportional to birth rates. Literacy is an important precursor for social change, as Paulo Friere found in the 1960s. Anyone genuinely interested in empowering the mass of the dispossessed must support universal availability of birth control.
The desirability of being self-sufficient in food should determine the upper limit of any nation's population. Given the alarming annual increase in world population, it is not too hard to envisage a time when there is no surplus food left to export or import.
Our Common Future might have said in 1986 that the growth of cereal crops has outstripped population growth, but the United Nations FAO now says that 2 billion people are malnourished. The increase in calories has been at the expense of variety and nutrition.
Better distribution of food and an end to war would do much to relieve this, but let us heed the warning from experts at an international Food and Agriculture Conference in the US this April who said the world was running out of food. It is naive and dangerous to assume that the only solution lies in distribution.
Most arable land in the world is already being utilised, so further gains in food production will involve either further clearing of natural habitats or an increase in fertiliser use on existing land. For instance, news reports say that tigers, elephants and other forms of wildlife are becoming increasingly rare in Vietnam as their forest habitat is eaten away by logging and the demand for farmland by its ever growing population. With respect to the latter, increased use of fertiliser is not an option for economic reasons for many Third World farmers and, of course, may lead to excessive nutrients in streams and rivers.
The author maintains, quite rightly, that ignoring the social roots of hunger while trying to reduce birth rates
almost inevitably leads to a more coercive birth control program. Social change and the provision of family planning services must certainly go together. No-one who is serious about achieving a reduction in birth rates advocates coercive measures.
But there are already 300 million women in the world who have said they would use contraception if it was available to them, and countless others who say they do not want more children. The United Nations decreed in 1968 that family planning was a right, yet hundreds of millions of couples are denied that right, either through ignorance or through their country's inability to establish health clinics with family planning facilities accessible to all people.
The author asserts that the idea that there are too many people in the world is to devalue human life. I say it devalues human life when a Somali woman who has given birth to 12 children has to watch most of them die through starvation, or when a South American woman gives birth to 10 children who she can barely feed and certainly not educate. Far better to produce two children who will survive, grow up nourished and educated, to be productive adults in their own culture.
The author does herself a disservice when she claims that green opponents of high immigration give legitimacy to the racist anti-immigration viewpoint. My organisation advocates low immigration but says selection of migrants must not be based on race. Indeed, if immigration was cut back to its humanitarian component, as we believe it should be, the intake would be largely Asian.
The author does not seem to be aware that in the past three years the immigration debate has moved from composition to numbers. True, the debate has largely focused on economics rather than environment, but even the chairman of the Ethnics Affairs Commission of NSW, Stepan Kerkyasharian, said recently that immigrants share and bear the same economic circumstances as the rest of the community, and that it is not the case that migrants automatically want high immigration. He scoffed at suggestions that it is wrong to debate the issue at all.
The immigration debate must be contained within a broader debate on population, and how many people this continent can support at a certain level of resource use. The author's preoccupation with people per hectare is almost totally irrelevant, since it is the population/resources balance which is critical.
Australia is not well-endowed: its arable land is limited, its soils are thin, its water supply is erratic and poorly distributed. Dr Tim Flannery from the Australian Museum argues that, because of the erratic climate, Australian Aborigines as hunter-gatherers used to keep their
populations within 20-30% of maximum carrying capacity and recommends that we, now with an agricultural economy, should too. This means a maximum of about 12 million people and implies, of course, a severe curtailment of immigration and further reduction in birth rates.
We do produce food in excess of what the domestic population needs, but the surplus we export is critical for our balance of payments and for paying for fertiliser which is needed to maintain that level of food production. Were we to increase the population in line with what the country can feed, there would need to be a reduction in standard of living. That may not be a bad thing in greenhouse terms, but may lead to increased poverty and social disruption.
In terms of the correlation between population and environmental degradation in Australia, there are very clear indicators in our major cities.
In Sydney, further growth in the north-west corridor is putting the Nepean-Hawkesbury at risk, because even with tertiary treatment of effluent, nutrients still reach the river, giving rise to blue-green algae growth, as we saw last summer. In the western suburbs, air pollution is so bad that asthmatics are warned to stay indoors on the worst days, and the mayor of Liverpool has warned that congestion and air pollution are so bad that growth must stop. Without water restrictions or a stop to population growth, Sydney will need a new dam on the Shoalhaven River near Braidwood, taking out a huge area of prime agricultural land.
In Melbourne, urban sprawl continues to encroach on agricultural land and ever increasing demand for water means more and more valleys and native habitats are flooded.
Adelaide and Perth are reaching their limits to growth because of water.
In rural areas, where initial land degradation occurred through bad management rather than overpopulation, unsustainable practices continue in order to sustain our growing population and its standard of living. If we are to achieve agricultural sustainability, we may have to pull back: not overgraze, leave the land fallow in more years, restore acidified or salinised land to its natural state. But this will involve at least a short-term drop in productivity.
Those who advocate an end to population growth are not opposed to a move to renewable forms of energy such as solar power. Indeed, if we are to save this land and the planet, the two must go together. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change advocates a reduction of over 60% in greenhouse gas emissions for developed countries, and for Australia, over 90%. We can achieve this only if we
adopt existing technologies and pour money into development of further technologies, but for every increase in population there has to be a further drop in per capita emissions.
To advocate low immigration and zero population growth is not to cut ourselves from the global environmental crisis. On the contrary, it is to recognise our contribution to the problem and to try to move our society to ecological sustainability, develop appropriate technologies and give them to developing countries, countries too poor to develop them themselves. We cannot achieve ecological sustainability, however, if our population continues to grow by 1.5% annually.
The author believes that people have a right to live anywhere they choose. Perhaps she could convince the United Nations of that but I doubt she will. National boundaries cause an awful lot of problems to be sure, but they do have advantages. A nation has control (multinationals notwithstanding) over its affairs and it can and should determine what size population it can support.
It is not just a matter of environment, it is the provision of jobs. The recent demonstrations in Germany were an outcome of the local inhabitants being pushed out of jobs by immigrants. 400 million new jobs are going to have to be provided in the world before the end of the century. We cannot provide them here — we cannot provide enough for our own people.
All nations have to be responsible for the welfare of their own people. No country can absorb another nation's excess any more. All nations have to realise there are limits to growth, limits to their own resources and limits to global resources. Most nations are reaching or have passed those limits, including Australia. We must set limits to population growth, reduce our resource consumption, share better what resources we have, move to renewable energy and be a model for the rest of the world.