Nicholas Kristof really knows how to pack the largest amount of conservatism into the one article. The presumptuousness of the title continues throughout the article, as well: 'The Birth Control Solution'. Kristof holds the rather naive view that underdevelopment exists because some people in some countries have too many children. The 'solution' to climate change, poverty and civil wars, and to underdevelopment in general, is birth control to limit population growth.
One result of overpopulation, according to Kristof, "is that youth bulges in rapidly growing countries like Afghanistan and Yemen makes them more prone to conflict and terrorism". All those who have spent long hours wondering why terrorism erupts in some countries should look at rapidly growing countries, with a high proportion of young people. These areas are 'prone' to conflict and terrorism, apparently.
Such populations also contribute to global poverty, we are told, and make it impossible to protect virgin forests or fend off climate change. Well that's quite a revelation to me. I always thought the biggest pressures on climate change come from rich countries. What does Kristof think virgin forests are being cut down for? To build mud huts? I am happy to let him know that the bulk of carbon emissions don't come from mud huts or from people wearing out the soles of their sandals in developing countries. There is no global shortage of food either, just a lot of people who can't afford prices that have been inflated by Western economic measures.
Kristof cites evidence that family planning works, but that is not in doubt. What's in doubt is that if you get family planning right, everything else will follow. His evidence is from India and Mexico in the 1950s and 60s. So now all Indians are rich and Mexico is peaceful? Family planning, birth control, even sexual and reproductive health, are just part of the health of a population. They need to be put into perspective.
Surprisingly, Kristof notices that the 'unmet need' for contraception is only one of many unmet needs, but he seems to think others are limited to those relating to family planning. Does he not know that there is an unmet need for access to healthcare, clean water and sanitation, education, social services and adequate infrastructure? There's nothing wrong with contraception, nor with providing more contraception, but it is just not at the top of everyone's list. It is buried inside some of those far more pressing needs.
The first thought of people planning a family (or just having a family, without any particular plans) is to have children. Then there needs to be some consideration of how to raise them. Some may wish to limit the number of children they have, but that might not come till later. What seems unlikely is that people will use contraception in order to reduce the possibility of their having an abortion. Aside from the fact that people don't think that way, abortion is illegal in many developing countries. It is just not an option. Reducing abortions is a secondary outcome of increased use of family planning methods, it is not a 'selling point'.
And those who worry about the world running out of resources tend to be those who are able to use far more of them than they need, not those who barely have access to them in the first place. Kristof seems to be thinking of his skin, and the skins of other rich Westerners. There is widespread poverty because most of the world's wealth and resources are in the hands of a few, civil wars are often fuelled by external influences (as any American journalist should know) and climate change is a result of the overconsumption of the minority world, not the sheer size of the majority world.
Showing posts with label overpopulation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label overpopulation. Show all posts
Monday, November 7, 2011
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Rich Academics Talk Bollex About Climate Change
Academics and wannabe academics have been beating on for decades about population growth being a threat to humanity. The main paradigm for development was, for many years, population control. Extremely well funded organisations from rich countries went around developing countries trying to persuade people to adopt various birth control techniques and technologies, whether they wanted to or not.
Most of these organisation in most of the countries where they worked were not very successful. In Kenya, when the British finally left, health, education, water and sanitation, infrastructure and other social services started to improve from the 1960s to the end of the 1970s. At around the same time, fertility also started to drop.
However, development came to mean economic development as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) began to, effectively, run most developing countries. All the things that had started to improve went into decline and are still declining today, nearly three decades later.
Also in the late 1970s and early 1980s, HIV started to spread rapidly. Once it was identified as a sexually transmitted virus, the same organisations that had been toting condoms and contraception as a panacea for development changed their tack and tried to promote the use of condoms to protect against HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. These efforts have been even less successful than their earlier efforts.
Now, the 'Optimum Population Trust', run by a collection of academics and wannabe academics, is advocating the use of condoms to curb population growth as a means of reducing climate change due to over consumption. They are suggesting that this is the most economic method of influencing climate change, too, cleverly combining those two earlier development paradigms into one.
Ironically, when people have smaller families, they often become bigger consumers. In fact, many people say they want to have smaller families so they can afford things like cars, consumer durables and various other goods. So, the result of reducing family size is often an increase in consumption. In fact, there is little connection between high fertility and high consumption. On the contrary, populations with high fertility rates usually have low rates of consumption. The biggest consumers have low fertility rates.
In Kenya, much of their carbon emissions result from the production of goods destined for rich, high consumption countries. Kenya produces all sorts of goods in Export Processing Zones (a posh name for sweat shops), fruit and vegetables are force grown under electric lights and transported by air and biofuel crops that are responsible for the destruction of much of the country's remaining land resources. The rich have managed to export a lot of their carbon emissions to developing countries.
Contraception is a vital technology in reducing the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. It also reduces unintended pregnancies. And many of the children who are born to HIV positive women are, in fact, unintended. There is a huge unmet need for contraception that the birth control evangelists seem to have done little to alleviate over the course of the last half century.
But it is not poor people in developing countries who contribute the most to global warming and environmental destruction, it is rich people in rich countries. Fertility may be low in rich countries, thankfully. But that doesn't reduce consumption, rather, it seems to be behind much of the continued increase in consumption.
Apparently this Trust is very excited by a study based on the principle that "fewer people will emit fewer tonnes of carbon dioxide". But this principle is flawed. Lower consumption (or fewer high consumers) will result in fewer tonnes of carbon dioxide. Most people in the world are low consumers. Here in Nakuru, some of the poorest are probably even negative consumers. The municipal dump is full of homeless people who derive their meager income by collecting and selling rubbish for recycling. Some even live in the dump in hovels made from waste.
I'm not suggesting that it is a good thing that people live like that because it isn't. What is disgusting is the idea that very rich, well educated, well fed people are pointing the finger at the very poorest of people and saying that they are the problem when it comes to climate change and environmental degradation.
So Porritt, Attenborough, Lovelock and other pompous tossers, leave your comfortable homes and offices, visit a few poor countries, or even poor people in your own countries, shut your big gobs, open your eyes and then rethink the consequences of the cooperation of a mere handful of the world's biggest consumers for the whole of humanity. Those who are condemned to a life of poverty will reduce the size of their families when they can see that it will be of direct benefit to them and people like them, but certainly not to people like you.
[See George Monbiot's 'The Population Myth' for an elaboration of the above argument.]
Most of these organisation in most of the countries where they worked were not very successful. In Kenya, when the British finally left, health, education, water and sanitation, infrastructure and other social services started to improve from the 1960s to the end of the 1970s. At around the same time, fertility also started to drop.
However, development came to mean economic development as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) began to, effectively, run most developing countries. All the things that had started to improve went into decline and are still declining today, nearly three decades later.
Also in the late 1970s and early 1980s, HIV started to spread rapidly. Once it was identified as a sexually transmitted virus, the same organisations that had been toting condoms and contraception as a panacea for development changed their tack and tried to promote the use of condoms to protect against HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. These efforts have been even less successful than their earlier efforts.
Now, the 'Optimum Population Trust', run by a collection of academics and wannabe academics, is advocating the use of condoms to curb population growth as a means of reducing climate change due to over consumption. They are suggesting that this is the most economic method of influencing climate change, too, cleverly combining those two earlier development paradigms into one.
Ironically, when people have smaller families, they often become bigger consumers. In fact, many people say they want to have smaller families so they can afford things like cars, consumer durables and various other goods. So, the result of reducing family size is often an increase in consumption. In fact, there is little connection between high fertility and high consumption. On the contrary, populations with high fertility rates usually have low rates of consumption. The biggest consumers have low fertility rates.
In Kenya, much of their carbon emissions result from the production of goods destined for rich, high consumption countries. Kenya produces all sorts of goods in Export Processing Zones (a posh name for sweat shops), fruit and vegetables are force grown under electric lights and transported by air and biofuel crops that are responsible for the destruction of much of the country's remaining land resources. The rich have managed to export a lot of their carbon emissions to developing countries.
Contraception is a vital technology in reducing the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. It also reduces unintended pregnancies. And many of the children who are born to HIV positive women are, in fact, unintended. There is a huge unmet need for contraception that the birth control evangelists seem to have done little to alleviate over the course of the last half century.
But it is not poor people in developing countries who contribute the most to global warming and environmental destruction, it is rich people in rich countries. Fertility may be low in rich countries, thankfully. But that doesn't reduce consumption, rather, it seems to be behind much of the continued increase in consumption.
Apparently this Trust is very excited by a study based on the principle that "fewer people will emit fewer tonnes of carbon dioxide". But this principle is flawed. Lower consumption (or fewer high consumers) will result in fewer tonnes of carbon dioxide. Most people in the world are low consumers. Here in Nakuru, some of the poorest are probably even negative consumers. The municipal dump is full of homeless people who derive their meager income by collecting and selling rubbish for recycling. Some even live in the dump in hovels made from waste.
I'm not suggesting that it is a good thing that people live like that because it isn't. What is disgusting is the idea that very rich, well educated, well fed people are pointing the finger at the very poorest of people and saying that they are the problem when it comes to climate change and environmental degradation.
So Porritt, Attenborough, Lovelock and other pompous tossers, leave your comfortable homes and offices, visit a few poor countries, or even poor people in your own countries, shut your big gobs, open your eyes and then rethink the consequences of the cooperation of a mere handful of the world's biggest consumers for the whole of humanity. Those who are condemned to a life of poverty will reduce the size of their families when they can see that it will be of direct benefit to them and people like them, but certainly not to people like you.
[See George Monbiot's 'The Population Myth' for an elaboration of the above argument.]
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