Curbing the Myth of Overpopulation to Fight Poverty
By Nicholas Eberstadt
February 9, 2009
President Obama has ended the ban on federal funds imposed by the Bush Administration on groups that promote or perform abortions abroad and on the United Nations Population Fund. He must take this opportunity to put pressure on the UNFPA to concentrate on the health of women and babies–and to stop wasting money assaulting the poor with wrongheaded population-control schemes.
“Continued rapid population growth poses a bigger threat to poverty reduction in most countries than HIV/AIDS,” the UNFPA said in an hysterical statement on World Population Day, last July. This is plain wrong: it is not human numbers that cause poverty, but bad economic policies, laws and institutions.
The densely-populated Netherlands and Japan are prosperous but poor in resources, while much of impoverished Africa is thinly populated but rich in resources. The United States rose to affluence with one of the world’s highest long-term population growth rates, while now-prosperous Ireland had negative long-term rates. Clearly, neither human numbers nor natural resources are keys to the modern story of global wealth and poverty.
The UNFPA talks of “women’s empowerment and gender equality” and “universal access to reproductive health” but, despite this politically-correct discourse, it remains committed to its original purpose of reducing population growth: reproductive healthcare is “the most practicable option for slowing population growth,” it says, equating this with poverty, food insecurity and environmental degradation.
These fallacies hark back to the 18th century economist Thomas Robert Malthus. Like many other pressure groups and NGOS, the UNFPA continues to commit elementary analytical errors: ignoring evidence staring us in the face.
The 20th century saw human numbers quadruple to more than six billion but food production widely outstripped population growth, average life expectancy doubled to well over 60 years, while global GDP per capita more than quintupled.
In the 1960s, alarmists such as Paul Ehrlich predicted imminent mass famine around the world. Indeed, in the last couple of years global food prices briefly shot up–maize, wheat and rice all doubled or tripled in a short time–but fell back again. In fact, the long-term trend in real grain prices over the past century has been heading steadily downward, at an average of seven to 10 percent per decade (depending on the product).To be sure, a horrifying number of people today still live in squalor, scourged by disease and hunger–but the correct name for this is poverty, not “overpopulation.” In countries where people cannot securely own property, cannot sell their produce freely and get scant protection in law, government is poverty’s handmaiden.
Population alarmists and their allies in the U.N. are deluding themselves when they claim government intervention can reduce fertility rates and “stabilize” population. Their mantra is that education, high literacy and cheap birth control lead to lower birth rates.
Health, literacy and voluntary contraception are meritorious objectives in their own right, irrespective of any influence on population growth. But it is misleading to claim they predictably reduce birth rates.
Take literacy. The adult literacy rate in 2006 was about a third higher in Malawi than Morocco (54 percent vs. 40 percent), yet fertility levels in Malawi were double. Family planning campaigns are similarly unpredictable: in 1974 Mexico started a vigorous campaign to cut population growth and got fertility levels down by 56 percent but Brazil’s fertility level fell by 54 percent with no campaign at all, in the same quarter century. These are not cherry-picked examples: there is simply no way of knowing in advance the impact of family-planning programs on birth rates.
It turns out that the single best international predictor of fertility levels is the number of children that women say they would like. The only proven way of curbing population growth is coercion, as in India briefly in the 1970s and in UNFPA-client China today. There is no other assured way of accomplishing immediate and dramatic birth reductions through population policy–period.
Many organizations, including the World Health Organization and UNICEF, already work to promote the health of women and children internationally. Plainly, many global health threats, from maternal and neonatal deaths to diarrhea, malaria and other infectious diseases, are creations of poverty. Only economic growth and freedom, not deceitful population programs from the UNFPA, can empower women and spare them poverty and premature death.
Nicholas Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at AEI.
Tags: UNFPA
PERFECTIBILISTS: The 18th Century Bavarian Order of the Illuminati
The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship
Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism
Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith
America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones
February 11th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Excellent article. More people should be aware also that Maurice Strong, a Marxist and staunch advocate of very limited world population, was advisor to Kofi Annan, when he was the head of the United Nations. It seems that the poor and helpless are always targeted for extinction by the rich and powerful. It stunned me to learn that 44 million American babies have been aborted since Roe v. Wade. While we are all apalled by death of 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, everyone vowed never again. But what is this?? Again the helpless put to death by those who think that their lives are more important. This new administration seems bent on mass murder when pushing for abortion, late-term abortions, and stem cell research. The new stimulus package now will have the Federal government making our health choices. Tom Daschle’s memo when he thought he was going to be the new health czar, stated that “old folks ought to consider forgoing new procedures in favor of the young!!!” He ought to re-think that inasmuch he “ain’t no spring chicken” himself. It seems to me that human life ought to be more sacred than it is to politicians.
February 11th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
If you haven’t already seen it, you may be interested in this:
Collection of News Group postings on Maurice Strong
It’s from the ’90s back in the Usenet days. It’s quite thorough.
February 24th, 2009 at 11:40 pm
Outstanding article,,, my environment professor is going to enjoy my abstract on this article
March 6th, 2009 at 4:39 am
For Africa to crawl out of poverty, good governance must first all be realized. Otherwise all the efforts being done by different organisations will not achieve anything in the presence of dictators and corrupt leaders. On a positive note, it is important to point out that some countries (Botswana, Mozambique) are doing well in the area of good governance.
September 21st, 2009 at 11:35 am
Why are people like Nicholas Eberstadt so against improving global human population density? If it’s just for religious reasons? If so, he is spreading a very cruel ideology that is hurting a lot of people and destroying our planet.
Mr Eberstadt is wrong to site Japan and Holland as being, “prosperous but poor in resources”. Both these examples have very fertile soil which enabled these nations to prosper. The firtility of the soil and the abundance of fresh water is no comparision to Africa. Today the wealth of wealthy nations like Japan and Holland enables them to purchase resources from all over the world. Worth noting that this also gives them a false sense of security in the face of global environmental collapse. For example, fish stocks around the world are being wiped out regularly but wealthy nations like Japan and Holland are able to worry little about these collapses and simply purchase other fish from other stocks that are not yet decimated.
There have never been more humans living on the African continent, and on this planet, than there are at this minute. Since western intervention began in Africa the human population there has exploded and continues to expand at an unprecedented rate. Western governments and NGOs have helped Africa overcome many causes of death, which is wonderful, but ideological intervention has meant we did nothing to help them with the explosion in their population numbers that resulted from our intervention. We fail to realise that if you’re going to interfere with one end of the scale (death rates) then you’re going to have to intervene at the other end (birth rates) to avoid disaster.
The land could barely support them before but today many African nations contain so many people there is absolutely no possibility they will ever achieve self-sufficiency. The food and medical assistance that the west has been providing, while denying family planning assistance, has now created a situation where hundreds of millions of people have absolutely no chance of surving without outside assistance. These people are now totally dependent on foreign aid and everyday their populations grow larger still putting prosperity further and further out of reach.
If we want to help these people – genuinely help these people – the very first step that must be taken is to help them stabilise their population growth. Any other assistance carried out in the absence of this, is an absolute compete waste of time, effort, money and resources because next year there will be millions more that need help with less and less chance of ever reaching self-sufficiency.
This is a very serious matter. People like Mr. Eberstadt need to try hard and look beyond their cloud of ideology and superstition and get a handle on what’s really going on before it’s too late.
July 6th, 2010 at 6:26 am
I find in reading those sites that say that population problems are a myth that their evidence is very sparse and inconclusive. Recently I read Book 1 of the free e-book series “In Search of Utopia” (http://andgulliverreturns.info), it blasts their lack of evidence relative to their calling overpopulation a myth. The book, actually the last half of the book, takes on the skeptics in global warming, overpopulation, lack of fresh water, lack of food, and other areas where people deny the evidence. I strongly suggest that anyone wanting to see the whole picture read the book, at least the last half.
July 19th, 2010 at 10:33 am
How many children a woman wants to have should be her informed choice, exercised without coercion or manipulation of any kind.