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 population. Show all posts
Showing posts with label population. 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.]
Friday, January 30, 2009
No Such Number
Out of the eight provinces in Kenya, the two most disadvantaged, using a range of about 50 indicators, are North Eastern and Coast. The two most advantaged are Central and Nairobi. When you compare HIV prevalence, the two provinces with the highest rates are Nyanza and Nairobi and the two with the lowest are North Eastern and Central.
A broad range of advantages does not necessarily mean low HIV prevalence and a broad range of disadvantages does not necessarily mean high HIV prevalence. This is why it is important to look at development as a whole, rather than obsessing about HIV; it's just one disease and for many people, it is not even the worst thing that can happen.
If you look more closely at some districts you get even clearer insights into serious instances of underdevelopment. If you compare urban populations, they appear to have a lot of advantages over rural populations. But if you look at slums, and there are many in Kenya, you get a completely different picture. An estimated 71% of urban dwellers in Kenya live in slums (probably around 2.8 million people in Nairobi alone).
Some of the social indicators (health, education, infrastructure, etc) for slum areas are even poorer than they are in rural areas. Slums are growing, especially now as many IDPs are moving to urban areas. Others are moving from rural areas to find work, so there is particular pressure on urban areas right now.
A report published last year on the burden of disease in two of Nairobi's slums, Korogocho and Viwandani, list many features of these areas that differ from Nairobi as a whole. Although the report does not have the scope to measure HIV prevalence, it suggests that it, too, is higher there than in other parts of the country. Prevalence fell slightly in Nairobi between 2003 and 2008 but this is unlikely to reflect the situation in slums.
The report measures mortality in years of life lost to premature mortality (YLL). It found that under fives had four times the mortality rate of the rest of the population (standing at 692 years per 1,000 person years). The chief causes of death are pneumonia (22.8%) and diarrhoeal diseases (19.5%). It is notable that these two causes can be addressed, in part, by introducing intermediate technologies such as solar cookers and other techniques for sterilising water.
Infant mortality was 96.0, 82.6 and 81.8 per 1,000 live births for the years 2003, 2004 and 2005 respectively (compared to 79 per 1,000 nationally in 2005 and 96 per 1,000 in 1970). Under five mortality is 139.1, 119.1 and 121.4 per 1,000 live births (compared to 120 per 1,000 nationally in 2005 and 156 per 1,000 in 1970). Malnutrition is known to be an underlying cause for more than half of childhood deaths but may be underestimated by this survey methodology. Malnutrition and anaemia account for 8.4% of YLL.
In Nairobi province 20.3% of children are stunted, 6.3% of under fives are underweight and 2.1% suffer from wasting. Poor health and nutrition in children can be related to low maternal education, poverty, lack of food security, etc. Only 69.2% of children have full childhood immunisation. This suggests weak and inaccessible health systems and poor attendance at ante-natal clinics.
It is clear that nearly forty years of development has had little impact on infant and child mortality in Kenya. In fact these figures have mainly been disimproving nationally since the 1970s in Kenya. The HIV epidemic may have had some part in this but the trend started before HIV would have had much impact.
Among those over five years of age, around 50% of mortality is caused by HIV/AIDS and TB. TB has been counted with HIV because deaths caused by either are difficult to distinguish. Mortality in the population as a whole is 205 YLL per 1,000 person years.
Other findings are equally appalling: population density in this area is estimated to be 60,000 per square kilometre. Homicide is the second most common contributor to mortality (12.1%) in those over 5 years old. Road traffic accidents are the third most common (5.8%). These figures are higher than for Sub Saharan Africa as a whole
The ratio of males to females in these areas is similar to much of Nairobi and a large part of the population consists of those from productive age groups. Between the ages of 20 and 35, males outnumber females considerably. Where there are a lot of men relative to women, this can result in high levels of commercial/transactional sex. Nairobi had a particularly high ratio of males to females in the 1980s, a time when HIV was known to have spread very rapidly.
Health systems, clearly, are poor in these slum areas. Most people die outside the formal health care system. Verbal autopsy was used for the report in question but this has its limitations. Official death certificates are not common. For Nairobi as a whole, life expectancy is 57; 54.1 for men and 59.8 for women. 40% of people are not expected to survive to over 40, the worst figure for this indicator in the country. 54% of people have poor access to a qualified doctor.
The Human Development Index, a composite index widely used and recognised by the development community, is currently the highest in the country for Nairobi province. But this hides many problems faced by a huge number of the city’s population. The fact that many of the richest people in the country have a residence in Nairobi must distort many of the figures.
Slums are sometimes politely referred to as informal urban settlements or by some similar construction. They are barely alluded to by politicians and few official statistics exist to allow proper evaluation. But they are a reality for an increasing number of Kenyans, a reality that needs to be addressed now.
A broad range of advantages does not necessarily mean low HIV prevalence and a broad range of disadvantages does not necessarily mean high HIV prevalence. This is why it is important to look at development as a whole, rather than obsessing about HIV; it's just one disease and for many people, it is not even the worst thing that can happen.
If you look more closely at some districts you get even clearer insights into serious instances of underdevelopment. If you compare urban populations, they appear to have a lot of advantages over rural populations. But if you look at slums, and there are many in Kenya, you get a completely different picture. An estimated 71% of urban dwellers in Kenya live in slums (probably around 2.8 million people in Nairobi alone).
Some of the social indicators (health, education, infrastructure, etc) for slum areas are even poorer than they are in rural areas. Slums are growing, especially now as many IDPs are moving to urban areas. Others are moving from rural areas to find work, so there is particular pressure on urban areas right now.
A report published last year on the burden of disease in two of Nairobi's slums, Korogocho and Viwandani, list many features of these areas that differ from Nairobi as a whole. Although the report does not have the scope to measure HIV prevalence, it suggests that it, too, is higher there than in other parts of the country. Prevalence fell slightly in Nairobi between 2003 and 2008 but this is unlikely to reflect the situation in slums.
The report measures mortality in years of life lost to premature mortality (YLL). It found that under fives had four times the mortality rate of the rest of the population (standing at 692 years per 1,000 person years). The chief causes of death are pneumonia (22.8%) and diarrhoeal diseases (19.5%). It is notable that these two causes can be addressed, in part, by introducing intermediate technologies such as solar cookers and other techniques for sterilising water.
Infant mortality was 96.0, 82.6 and 81.8 per 1,000 live births for the years 2003, 2004 and 2005 respectively (compared to 79 per 1,000 nationally in 2005 and 96 per 1,000 in 1970). Under five mortality is 139.1, 119.1 and 121.4 per 1,000 live births (compared to 120 per 1,000 nationally in 2005 and 156 per 1,000 in 1970). Malnutrition is known to be an underlying cause for more than half of childhood deaths but may be underestimated by this survey methodology. Malnutrition and anaemia account for 8.4% of YLL.
In Nairobi province 20.3% of children are stunted, 6.3% of under fives are underweight and 2.1% suffer from wasting. Poor health and nutrition in children can be related to low maternal education, poverty, lack of food security, etc. Only 69.2% of children have full childhood immunisation. This suggests weak and inaccessible health systems and poor attendance at ante-natal clinics.
It is clear that nearly forty years of development has had little impact on infant and child mortality in Kenya. In fact these figures have mainly been disimproving nationally since the 1970s in Kenya. The HIV epidemic may have had some part in this but the trend started before HIV would have had much impact.
Among those over five years of age, around 50% of mortality is caused by HIV/AIDS and TB. TB has been counted with HIV because deaths caused by either are difficult to distinguish. Mortality in the population as a whole is 205 YLL per 1,000 person years.
Other findings are equally appalling: population density in this area is estimated to be 60,000 per square kilometre. Homicide is the second most common contributor to mortality (12.1%) in those over 5 years old. Road traffic accidents are the third most common (5.8%). These figures are higher than for Sub Saharan Africa as a whole
The ratio of males to females in these areas is similar to much of Nairobi and a large part of the population consists of those from productive age groups. Between the ages of 20 and 35, males outnumber females considerably. Where there are a lot of men relative to women, this can result in high levels of commercial/transactional sex. Nairobi had a particularly high ratio of males to females in the 1980s, a time when HIV was known to have spread very rapidly.
Health systems, clearly, are poor in these slum areas. Most people die outside the formal health care system. Verbal autopsy was used for the report in question but this has its limitations. Official death certificates are not common. For Nairobi as a whole, life expectancy is 57; 54.1 for men and 59.8 for women. 40% of people are not expected to survive to over 40, the worst figure for this indicator in the country. 54% of people have poor access to a qualified doctor.
The Human Development Index, a composite index widely used and recognised by the development community, is currently the highest in the country for Nairobi province. But this hides many problems faced by a huge number of the city’s population. The fact that many of the richest people in the country have a residence in Nairobi must distort many of the figures.
Slums are sometimes politely referred to as informal urban settlements or by some similar construction. They are barely alluded to by politicians and few official statistics exist to allow proper evaluation. But they are a reality for an increasing number of Kenyans, a reality that needs to be addressed now.
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