This text the first of 12 reproduced below from the debate on population that arose following the publication of Too Many People? by Ian Angus and Simon Butler, which was itself a response to Laurie Mazur’s book A Pivotal Moment – Population Justice, and the Environmental Challenge published the previous year. The debate at that stage ended in a semi-public seminar on December 15th 2013 which was poorly attended and therefore indecisive. My review of Too many People can be found here and the reply to it by Angus and Simon can be found here.
Discussion paper on the rising population of the planet
Alan Thornett, August 2012.
At the SR Amsterdam a seminar in June 2010 a question was raised as to whether SR has a position on the rising population of the planet. There was a brief exchange during which I explained that SR has never adopted a position on it. When Sheila Malone and I proposed an addendum on it (very late unfortunately) at an SR conference a few years ago it turned out to be more controversial than we had anticipated, and since there was no time for a full discussion, it was not taken.
Since then the issue has not been discussed within SR as such, although the SR website carried critical review, by myself, of Ian Angus and Simon Butler’s book on population entitled Too Many People? This led to a vigorous on-line debate, between and Ian and Simon and Sheila (who is unfortunately no longer a member of SR) and myself, in which a few SR comrades got involved and others followed the discussion – which can be found at: http://socialistresistance.org/3013/too-many-people-a-review and at http://socialistresistance.org/3053/a-reply-to-alan-thornetts-review-of-too-many-people.
Too Many People? was clearly written as a response to Laurie Mazur’s book A Pivotal Moment – Population Justice, and the Environmental Challenge which was published the previous year and with which Sheila and I broadly agreed. Although I have tried to limited references to these two books in this text it would make no sense to leave them out because the most recent debates on population amongst the ecosocialist left has centered around them.
Ian Angus, of course, has a long association with SR, has spoken at our events, and has made an important contribution to the concept of ecosocialism. Although I have strongly disagreed with him on this issue I have great respect for his wider contribution on Marxism and ecology.
I would strongly urge comrades to read both of these books, if possible, as a part of this discussion in order to make their own assessment of them.
1) The problems of discussing rising population
As indicated above SR, as such, has never had a discussion on the rising population of the planet. This is surprising when you consider the scale of the subject and its impact on politics at multiple levels, and not least on ecology. SR, however, is certainly not alone in this. All of the radical left, as well as the Green Party, and the Green Left, appear to have had little discussion on it.
This is due, partly at least, in my view, to the way discussions on population tend to be dominated (or derailed) by the divisive debates and conflicts of the past 200 years. Allegations of Malthusianism, or even eugenics, are readily thrown around making such debates emotive and fractious. The19th century economist Thomas Malthus, of course, famously advocated closing down the workhouses because they were, in his view, generating welfare dependency and thereby encouraging larger families and rising population which would outstrip food supply.
Those raising the issue of rising population today often face the backwash from these old debates and this has resulted in the issue of population remaining something of a taboo subject on the left.
There is also a right-wing and pro-life dimension around this as well, with Tory websites ranting on about mass murder by the back door and evil environmentalists who want to get rid of billions of people by stopping them existing in the first place. As a result of this those raising the issue of rising population (including socialists) are often caricatured as in some way anti-people – something they find deeply offensive.
All this has resulted in the issue of rising population being a seriously underdeveloped subject from a radical left\eco-socialist perspective.
It is true that there are still Malthusians and eugenicists around with some very unpleasant views and propositions to put forward. There are also those who see rising population as the source of all the problems of the planet and are ready to blame it for virtually anything – from wars to immigration to riots and road rage.
It is a mistake, however, to allow such views to skew or restrict our own debate and discussions. We have to get beyond the 19th and early 20th century debates and name calling to a new dialogue which is taking place today. We have to insist that population is an entirely legitimate and important subject to discuss, and we have to get the discussion underway.
2) The scale of the issue
The importance (and sheer the scale) of this subject is clear enough. The rise in the population of the planet has been dramatic over the last 60 years – particularly in the impoverished Global South. The global population has almost tripled in the last 60 years – from 2.5bn in 1950 to over 7bn today! This is a rise of around 80bn every year, which is the equivalent to adding the population of the USA to the planet every four years. This has occurred despite a drop in the rate of increase which has taken place since the immediate post-war period.
According to UN figures the population will reach somewhere between 8 and 11 billion by the mid-century. After that it could begin to stabilize – possibly doing so by the end of the century. The difference between 8bn and 11bn, however, is huge in terms of the impact on the planet. And ‘possibly’ is a very big word. It means that such stabilisation is far from certain. Long-term population predictions are notoriously inaccurate as demography shifts along with the economic and political configuration of the planet. There is, therefore, with such uncertain figures, a very strong precautionary principle to be taken into account.
Meanwhile, nearly half the current world population is under 25 – which is a huge base for further growth. How such a situation can be seen as other than an important factor in the ecological crisis and how we approach it is hard to understand.
It seems unlikely that a planet with finite resources, which are already stretched to breaking point, will be able to absorb such population increases without serious damage, even if the figures do stabilise by the end of the century. There is, therefore, an urgent need to stabilise the population, or at least reduces the rate of increase. (This text does not argue for a reduction in current population levels only its stabilisation.) Rising population is therefore something socialists (eco-socialists in particular) should integrate both into their analysis of the ecological crisis and in their responses to it.
A reduction in the rate of growth of the population, however, or even its stabilisation, of course, would not resolve the ecological crisis or guarantee sustainability – far from it. Nor would it eradicate poverty or prevent hunger. Continued reliance on fossil fuels could easily overwhelm any carbon emission reductions from slower population growth. A wide range of other ecological, economic and social measures, on a much shorter time scale, would need in order to do these things. But chances of success would clearly be better. It would be easier to provide food, freshwater, energy, and waste disposal and protect the bio-diversity of the planet at less environmental cost, to a population of 8bn, rather than 11bn or more.
3) Recent debates
For me discussing this issue became unavoidable last year with the publication of Too Many People? by Ian Angus and Simon Butler, with what I regarded as a fundamentally wrong line. It argues – with the support of a significant number of people from a green left environmental perspective it has to be said – that the size of the human population of the planet is not in itself a threat to its ecology. Even discussing it (particularly if you hold a contrary view to Too Many People?) is seen as a dangerous, or even reactionary, diversion, which puts you on a slippery slope towards Malthusianism.
The book scrapes together every argument it can find from the past which smacks of population control and make it the starting point of the debate today. The specter is raised not only of Malthus but of writers such as Paul Ehrlich and his 1964 book the Population Bomb, which presented rising population as the principal cause of all the problems of the planet.
Those who insist that there is a population problem to discuss are presented as a part of this genesis. They are presented as ‘populationist’. By this it meant that they are a part of a new generation who advocate population control and who focus solely on the ‘supposed evils of over population’. As I say in my review, rather than opening up a discussion on the left on population (which it claims to do) the book has more the hectoring tone of seeking to close it down.
This approach is not only methodologically wrong it is ultimately dangerous. If the left have nothing to say about the rising population of the planet – other than it is more or less irrelevant – the field is left open to the real populationists, and they will be very pleased to fill it.
What Too Many People? fails to do is to present the historical examples on which it places so much score in their historical context. Malthus, for example, was not only a bourgeois economist and a vicar he was also a product of the early 19th century – it is not so surprising he held the view he did. Even progressive people can get caught up in reactionary ideas. Marie Stopes who pioneered birth control in the first half of the 20th century (because she saw repeated unplanned pregnancies as wrecking the lives of poor women and exacerbating the poverty in which they lived) not only opposed abortion, but along with many others who saw themselves as progressive (HG Wells and John Maynard Keynes for example), supported eugenics. Margaret Sanger, who pioneered birth control in the USA, also embraced eugenics – though she quickly dropped it when Nazism took it up.
This does not negate the huge contribution these women made on contraception – since poor women flocked to their clinics in large numbers. It means that they were a product of the period in which they lived and were susceptible to some of the reactionary ideas of the day.
Too Many People? is right to say that capitalism is the root cause of the environmental crisis, and not rising population. It is right to say that stabilising the population would not in itself resolve the crisis. It is right to say that we have to have an alternative economic and social model to capitalisms unlimited growth. All of this is clear. What it is wrong to say, however, that rising population levels are more or less irrelevant. The current rate of increase is unsustainable were it to continue – and whether it will continue, or for how long, no one actually knows.
4) ‘Control’ or empowerment?
Laurie Mazur in her book A Pivotal Moment – Population Justice, and the Environmental Challenge presents a very different view to that of Too Many People? She argues that rising population is indeed a serious problem to be addressed and moreover (given that women are the producers of the worlds rising population) it is first and foremost a feminist issue. The key to stabilising the population, therefore, she argues, is the empowerment of women. This proposition is far from new, but it is both very powerful and highly contentious.
Not everything Laurie Mazur’ writes is supportable. But on the central issue of the empowerment of women she is right. Most women who have large families would not have them if they if they had the genuine right to choose to have smaller ones.
By empowerment she means giving women the means to control their own fertility by making contraception and abortion services available to them. She means giving them access to education, and lifting them out of poverty. Empowerment also means challenging the powerful influence of religion and other conservative influences such as patriarchal or communal pressure, which denies them the right to choose.
These are important objectives in and of themselves, whether or not they exert a downward pressure on the birthrate. One is not dependent on the other. Rising population levels simply gives them an add urgency. They are matters of human rights and social justice. As Mazur puts it: ‘it is a win-win situation’. It is an approach is good for women and it is good for the planet.
Too Many People? rejects this approach. In fact that is what the book is mainly about. It argues that such empowerment, which is laudable enough in itself, is actually (once the issue of population is introduced) a cynical means of introducing population control by the back door. The right to choose, it says, would, in reality, be a sham. What would actually exist would be population control. It conflates the concepts of control and empowerment throughout insisting that in the end empowerment equals control – that empowerment is only being raised in order to eventually exert control.
But if empowerment equaled population control it would not be the empowerment of women but the abuse of women. It would be a contradiction in terms. What this text advocates (and what Laurie Mazur is clearly advocating) is not population control but the right of women to control their own bodies on a totally voluntary basis. It means giving women the ability to determine the size of the families they have (large or small) through access to abortion and family planning facilities. That is the only rational meaning of empowerment.
Population control is a very different matter. Control means the regulation of a woman’s fertility by coercive means – whether such coercion is legal, economic, psychological, or by deception. It means the requirement of women to limit their fertility in line with government policies which violate civil liberties and human rights – such as in China with its one child policy or in India and Peru with their forced sterilisation programmes. It means the use of coercive measures (openly or by deception) which impose birth control against the wishes of the women involved. All such measures are abhorrent and should be opposed.
Not that women are passive observers in all this. The right to control their own fertility is something women have historically demanded and fought for, and continue to do so today – including in those parts of the world with the highest birthrates. They are the active agency of change in this field and this struggle has always included the fight against reactionary measures of enforced control. Reproductive rights were the lynchpin of the feminist movement of the 1970s and 80s. We should also remember how in struggling for their own specific interests, women often also become the agents of wider change.
5) The 1994 UN Cairo conference
Some important progress towards the empowerment of women approach to population was made at the UN Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo in 1994, which was backed by the US Clinton administration. The conference recognized for the first time both that current population growth was unsustainable and that the key to stabilising it was the empowerment of women.
Previous such international conferences, in Mexico in 1975 and Nairobi in 1985, for example, had been embroiled in battles with both the pro-life and population control lobbies and had produced very little. This time the feminists (or more precisely those feminists advocating the empowerment of women) won the day despite fierce opposition from the Pope and the Catholic Church and the pro-life lobby. It was an important breakthrough.
The result was the adoption of a Programme of Action based entirely on the empowerment of women free from any connotations of population control. It included not just reproductive rights but lifting women out of poverty and giving them access to education. This was not contextualised into a socialist or an anti-capitalist framework in the way we would present it, of course, because it was the UN. But it was important none-the-less. The Programme of Action can be found at: http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/populatin/icpd.htm
After the conference, however, the Programme of Action faced an increasing backlash from pro-life forces. Many of those governments which had initially supported it backed down and the decisions of Cairo were eventually largely sidelined. The arrival of George W Bush in the White House 2001 ensured that it stayed that way.
The conference did, however, give the empowerment of women approach to population an important mainstream dimension, and some countries did do something. The Bangladesh government, for example, adopted a new reproductive health policy based on the Programme of Action which helped reduce maternal mortality by 20% by 2000 which saved thousands of lives a year.
Population Matters, for example, (Previously the Optimum Population Trust) which is headed up by naturalists David Attenborough and Chris Patton appear to focus entirely on empowerment – which was not the case in the past.
6) The Global South
The fact that by far the highest birth rates and lowest carbon footprints are in the impoverished countries of the Global South with the lowest population increases, including some stable or even declining populations in the comparatively affluent West, has led to the charge that the empowerment approach is in some way to target the women of the South, and to blame them for climate change. (There are exceptions to these birthrate patterns, however, with high birthrate in some wealthy countries (Saudi Arabia for example) and the continued above the 2.1 replacement level in the USA, but as a broad pattern the highest birth rates are in the Global South.)
The charge that advocating the empowerment of women means targeting of the South, however, makes no sense. Why is fighting for the rights of impoverished women caricatured as targeting them? The same was said of Stopes and others when they (as middle class women) fought for contraception facilities for the impoverished women of East London in the inter-war years.
What the empowerment actually targets is the appalling conditions under which women of the Global South are forced to live and the denial human rights to which they are subjected. There are huge disparities in reproductive health. In Sub-Saharan Africa women have a I in 6 chance of dying in child birth, in North America and Europe it is I in 8,700. What empowerment means is releasing women of the South from the poverty and high fertility trap to which they have been subjected with endless domestic labour and child baring. It demands that they have the same opportunities as the women of the Global North and supports them in their struggle for such rights.
In the South children are often seen as potential wage earners and as the providers of a ready-made social support network. This exacerbates existing problems, as rapidly growing families are forced to degrade their own environments to get food, water and fuel just to survive. In the slums of today’s megacities entire families, including young children, are often employed in various types of cottage industry (for example scavenging waste tips) in order to make a living.
Today over 220m women in the Global South are denied family planning services – which can be (and often is) the difference between life and death. There are 80m unintended pregnancies a year – of which 46m end in abortions. 74,000 women die every year as a result of failed back-street abortions – a disproportionate number of these in the Global South. Every year, around 288,000 women die from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth – and 99% of them occur in developing countries. Many of these are as a result of multiple pregnancies close together with inadequate or non-existent medical facilities. Millions of children die in their first year of life.
Preventing unintended pregnancies could reduce maternal deaths by 25 percent, saving the lives of 150,000 women and girls each year. Moreover, when girls go to school, get educated, and marry later they have fewer and healthier children. It leads to higher potential income, better crop yields, lower HIV infection rates, and reduced infant mortality. Refusing early marriage or avoiding exclusion from school because of accidental pregnancy can challenge oppressive norms of state religion and clan.
The proposition that most women in the Global South, given genuine choice, would choose to have the large families many of them have today is unconvincing. Some would but most would not. And when women are denied their legal an social rights along with education, employment, property ownership, and access to credit, they are forced to rely on child baring for survival and status and security.
As already mentioned women not only want the ability to control their own fertility but they have historically demanded and fought for it, both North and South, and continue to do so today. We should remember how this approach empowered women in the North as well as supporting the struggles of the women of the South. In fact the pioneers of birth control in the North faced many of the same reactionary forces, and some of the same unfounded allegations, which are leveled today at those arguing for empowerment today in the South.
7) The carbon footprint in the Global South
It is argued that since the populations of the Global South have a carbon footprint which is a fraction of those of the North, the task is not to reduce their footprint but the footprint of the Northern populations. This implies that it is of little consequence whether the population of the planet reaches 8bn or 11bn by 2050, or whether it continues to grow until the end of the century.
Of course the highly polluting populations of the North are the main priority in this regard, but we have to do both. In any case concentrating solely on the North only works if the countries of the South remain poor- something neither they themselves nor we would want.
Populations which today have a low carbon impact because they are forced to live in poverty and deprivation rightly aspire to change their situation and will hopefully do so. In fact some of the countries which have the lowest carbon footprint today have the highest economic growth rates.
It is also argued that rising living standards will resolve the problem of population growth. That as women are lifted out of poverty they will have less children, that development is the best contraceptive. And there is truth in this of course. Poverty is one of the drivers of high fertility rates, and its elimination would bring it down. It is, however, far from the only driver of the fertility rate. Women across the world are under pressure from other factors such as religion, patriarchy, and cultural pressure not to use contraception even after the issue of poverty is resolved.
In any case it is clear that development along the same lines as the North is leading to social and ecological crises in countries like China and India. China is now the highest carbon emitter globally, with an average footprint approaching that of France. We urgently need an alternative, non-capitalist development model in both North and South. Within this, however, and until we get there, the number of footprints matter – as well as their size.
8) Food and natural recourses
It is argued in Too Many People? and elsewhere that if food production and distribution was rationally organised more than enough food could be produced to feed the rising population – that even a population of 9 or 10 billion can be fed in this way. It is true that if food was produced and distributed rationally things would dramatically improve. At the moment there are staggering inequalities. A billion people go short of food everyday and 200m children go to bed hungry every night. There is corruption and speculation on a grand scale and huge quantities of food wasted because it becomes unprofitable.
Does this, however, mean that a global population of 9 or 10 billion people could be fed without unacceptable damage to the planet? It is predicted that with rapidly changing diets as people are lifted out of poverty in the emerging economies (resulting in far more meat and vegetable oil consumption for example) alongside rising population food production could be required to double by mid-century, and water use by a similar amount.
It is true that there have been many predictions in the past that food production was about to be outstripped by rising population. Malthus was wrong about this in the 19th century and so was Ehricht in 1964. This does not mean, however, that food can be produced for a population of 9 or 10 billion, particularly if it is to be produced without destroying the plant in the process. Feeding such a population on the basis of the ever increasing industrialisation and monopolisation of agriculture and the application of destructive or unacceptable technologies is one thing, doing it in a sustainable way is a different matter.
Then we have the growing impact of climate change on food production. This is causing floods and fires and droughts and extreme weather events on a much more frequent basis. It is depleting water supplies, expanding the desserts and disrupting agriculture. Two years ago Russian harvests failed and there were food riots around the world and it was a factor in triggering the Arab Spring. This year an even greater harvest failure is taking place in both Russia and the USA due to drought and abnormally high temperatures. In Britain the harvest looks like being 40% down due to abnormal rain.
Agriculture is extremely vulnerable to changing weather patterns and extreme events. Whether under such conditions enough food can be produced for an additional 2 to 5 billion people by mid-century seems optimistic in the extreme.
But even if enough food could be produced, and without vast agribusiness and environmental impact, food is far from the only resource which is involved. There is the overall carbon impact of such a population: the demands on natural resources, housing, transport, health care, education – even if this is done alongside a drive for renewable energy and energy conservation.
There would also be a hugely increased demand for water not only for drinking but for food production (which accounts for 60% of water use) and for industrial use – and this is heavily complicated by climate change which is reducing fresh water availability. The increased demands for energy will be on a similar scale. Yet 1 in 6 people on the planet get their drinking water from glaciers and snowpack, on the worlds mountain ranges, which are receding. When they are gone so will be the water.
The impact of the human population on bio-diversity is itself at a crisis point. In the last fifty years human being have modified the earth’s ecosystems more extensively than in nay period in human history. Due to human activity – habitat loss and degradation, climate change, excessive nutrient load and other forms of pollution, and the over-exploitation and unsustainable use of the resources of the planet – we are now losing species at a rate that is a thousand times higher than the average rate during the preceding 65 million years. Because the rate of change in our biosphere is increasing, and because every species’ extinction potentially leads to the extinction of others the number of extinctions are likely to snowball in the coming decades as ecosystems unravel with a domino effect.
Urbanisation is another huge issue in this. It is estimated that there will be more than 3bn more urban area inhabitants by mid-century with accompanying problems of overcrowding, sanitation, and waste disposal. There are already 450 cities around the world with more than a million inhabitants. There are also 20 mega-cities with populations of over 10 million, and 8 of them have populations of over 20 million.
9) Will it all be OK come the revolution?
Another argument advanced for regarding higher population levels as containable is that the abolition of capitalism, and the establishment of a socialist society, will eventually solve the problem. That capitalism is so wasteful that to eliminate it would free-up enough resources to allow the planet to cope with whatever level of population might arise.
This is wrong on all counts. In fact the same thing used to be said about women’s liberation. Like women’s liberation, however, the ecological struggle has to be carried through as an integral part of the struggle to overthrown and replace capitalism, not as a separate and later stage to it. Otherwise by the time capitalism is overthrown the environment will be so damaged that it will be a matter of picking up the pieces.
Also, unless you think that capitalism can be overthrown and replaced by socialism throughout the world in the next few decades (which might be a tad optimistic given the current relationship of forces) the time scale is some way out. Such an approach underestimates not only the impact of rising population but the severity of the ecological crisis itself and the amount of time available before it spins out of control.
In any case the idea that resolving the ecological crisis (or establishing an ecosocialist system of society) will be plain sailing once capitalism is removed from the scene is also optimistic – even though capitalism is the main cause of the problem. The fact is that the vast majority of the socialist/radical left have yet to be convinced that the environmental crisis exists let alone on the necessity to replace capitalism with an ecosocialist society.
The idea that overthrowing capitalism will automatically abolish the baggage which capitalism generates such as racism, women’s oppression or environmental destruction, just because it established the objective conditions to do so, is extremely optimistic. Such things will only be abolished by a political struggle which has to begin in the struggle against capitalism itself. That’s what ecosocialism is all about!
Ecosocialism and Population: A Reply to Alan Thornett by Phil Ward, Jane Kelly and Susan Pashkoff – September 2012
The purpose of this document is to illustrate our main arguments against Alan’s view that population is an important issue for socialists. This has the potential to be a fraught discussion in SR, but instead we hope it can be used to enrich our knowledge and arguments for ecosocialism and women’s liberation. We are presenting our document in that spirit, avoiding name-calling and caricaturing the other sides’ positions. Nevertheless, there are occasions where we have to “read between the lines” or draw out the practical implications of the positions outlined by Alan and others who have expressed views similar to him. If some of these interpretations are incorrect, we hope our attention will be drawn to that and the positions clarified.
This document will discuss several of the issues Alan raises in turn, often using the headings provided in his own document. Firstly, however, we need to find the core of his position.
Unfortunately, nowhere in his several contributions on the subject of population (which, in addition to his document, are usefully collected here), does Alan actually state exactly what his approach or policy is: he mostly says population is important and argues at length in support of this contention. Unusually, in a document that aims to establish a programmatic position for SR and its tradition, there is no summary that proposes a set of aims and demands (an action programme) that can serve as a guide to the activity and propaganda of the organization.
So, at the risk of having misunderstood his views, we are forced to explicitly state the core policies that encapsulate his argument:
- A stabilization of the world’s population as one means of mitigating the ecological crisis (climate change in particular), or, as Alan put it: “This text does not argue for a reduction in current population levels, only its stabilisation.”
- The empowerment of women, so that they can control their own fertility (in part, as a means of reducing the population growth rate)
These two “demands” will be at the centre of our discussion of Alan’s positions.
Incidentally, Alan does not specify a “target” stable population level, but since much of his argumentation is based on Laurie Mazur’s book and he repeatedly contrasts the “environmental costs” of a population of 8bn vs. one of 11bn – the UN’s low and high projections for 2050 – we will assume he means the former (as Mazur does), which is expected to be reached by about 2030.
We note that Alan does not advocate “population reduction” and nor does he support coercive means to induce women to adopt birth control.
The problems of discussing rising population
As Alan says, SR “as such” doesn’t have a position on population. However, there was a discussion of the section on population control, in the climate change document at the ISG pre-World Congress conference in 2009, shortly before the launch of SR, so it is an issue that has been aired recently amongst many of our members. The conference voted against an amendment put by Sheila and Alan on this issue.
We also do not think it is right to say that the left avoids the issue. The resolution makes the following point (amongst others) on population, which broadly encapsulates the “traditional” position of the Marxist left, that Alan is trying to change:
“The population level is obviously one parameter of the evolution of the climate, but we have to categorically combat the false idea that population growth is a cause of climate change. The demographic transition is largely underway in the developing countries, and is progressing more quickly than had been envisaged. It is desirable that it continues, but that will be a result of social progress, the development of social security systems, the information that women dispose of and their right to control their own fertility (including the right to abortion in correct conditions). This is obviously a long-term policy. Short of resorting to barbaric methods, no policy of population control makes it possible to respond to climatic urgency.”
Alan attributes the absence of discussion of population in SR and other sections of the left, to the spectre of Malthus: that we don’t want to be associated with his anti-working class diatribes etc.
Another possibility is that we thought the argument had been largely settled, from the point of view of the Marxist and socialist left. Numerous socialists have discussed it, especially in response to the wave of population control advocates in the 1960’s and ‘70’s. (Examples listed at the end of the document). Those people, along with many others on the left and large sections of the women’s movement, managed to beat back the population controllers from that period, so that many at least now make some gestures towards equality and women’s rights in their pronouncements.
What is the case is that very few socialists have advocated the view that Alan is putting forward. Hopefully, this document will help to explain why that is so.
The scale of the issue
Alan starts this section with a rehearsal of a series of figures given by Laurie Mazur in her book A Pivotal Moment, indicating the near-trebling of world population in the last 60 years. What is left out is the cause of this increase: this is entirely due to the 70% decline infant mortality rate and the 43% increase in life expectancy and not due to “women having too many children”. This is how the population can rise, while the average number of children a woman has (fertility rate) has nearly halved.
Here are the figures:
| 1950 | 2010 | |
| Population | 2.5bn | 6.9bn |
| Fertility Rate (children / woman) | 4.95 | 2.52 |
| Infant Mortality (under 1 year, per 1,000 live births) | 152 | 45 |
| Life Expectancy (years) | 47 | 67.2 |
| Population Growth Rate (%/year) | 2.2 (max, 1963) | 1.1 |
For Alan, the headline figure is the 80 million current annual increase in population, which he likens to “one USA” every four years – a metaphor also used by Laurie Mazur. Alan points out that “long-term predictions [of population] are notoriously inaccurate”, but he doesn’t say that they have always overestimated the numbers and fertility rates and despite underestimating rises in life expectancy.
For what it’s worth, the UN’s best estimate for 2050 is 9.1bn and 8.1bn for 2030.
The key issue though, is not the numbers, but the political conclusions to be drawn from the undeniable fact that the world’s population will continue to rise for the next 20 years, at least.
For Alan, the conclusion is this, “It seems unlikely that a planet with finite resources, which are already stretched to breaking point, will be able to absorb such population increases without serious damage, even if the figures do stabilise by the end of the century”.
The first thing to point out is that catastrophic damage has already been caused, not by population, but by the capitalist economy, based at it is on fossil fuels. The capitalist system cannot sustain current population levels and nor can it do so for 8 or 11bn people. On that, we totally agree with Alan. But we are not in the game of seeking a solution within the capitalist system, or ameliorative measures that point in the opposite direction to socialist revolution, which is what a policy of population stabilisation is.
The increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is the most obvious form of capitalist damage: we have not yet seen the warming effects of current CO2 levels, let alone those due to increases in emissions projected for the future. This is because the oceans take a very long time to come to equilibrium temperature with the atmosphere (indeed, they can’t, if CO2 levels continue to rise). So, current extreme weather patterns, already attributable to climate change, are only a taste of what we have yet to experience, especially as now the rapid loss of arctic ice is acting as a feedback mechanism for yet more warming.
The second form of damage the capitalist, fossil fuel economy wreaks on the environment is its mode of agriculture. It is well-known that the excessively mechanised and fertiliser/herbicide/pesticide-based system, which provides at least 40% of the world’s food, causes immense damage to biodiversity, soils and water systems, including the sea. For those people in the west, who don’t eat organic food, 70% of the nitrogen atoms in their body protein have been through the Haber process in a factory that makes fertiliser from natural gas. Of course, climate change will make sustaining this agricultural system even more difficult.
These observations may be thought to support Alan’s remark about pressure on “finite resources”, but the observation about agriculture illustrates the problem with this approach. Currently, if you damage the soil enough, you render land useless and need to move on. Eventually, all agricultural land will be used up. But this is a reflection of capitalist relations of production: the exhausted land is only so because the market cannot support the costs of remediation. There are things that can be done to recover damaged land. The same approach applies to other resources: water can be used more efficiently (see the link above) if enough money/labour is thrown at the problem, production and recycling can be made more efficient and so on.
This makes it not very meaningful to talk in terms of “finite resources” in these cases.
The same is not true of fossil energy resources. When used, these resources are degraded into heat (ultimately), which cannot be recovered and re-used. Fossil fuels are finite (in the medium-to-long term), but we know what the consequences of using them all up will be.
Overcoming the climate crisis thus requires land reform and a restructuring of agriculture and a complete replacement of fossil fuels as an energy source.
Alan does acknowledge capitalism’s role in environmental degradation, when he says that, as well as stabilising population, “a wide range of other ecological, economic and social measures, on a much shorter timescale” would be needed to resolve the ecological crisis eradicate poverty and prevent hunger. Or later: “capitalism is the root cause of the environmental crisis, and not rising population. It is right to say that stabilising the population would not in itself resolve the crisis. It is right to say that we have to have an alternative economic and social model to capitalism’s unlimited growth.” And in his review of Too Many People he says: “population is not the root cause of the environmental problems of the planet. It is capitalism.”
The problem is that, in the last few months, in particular, he has produced a set of writings on the ecological crisis that do not address these issues (except to state that they exist). Indeed, his articles appear to ignore the carefully built-up arguments of the FI and SR and it predecessors from the last 20 years. These addressed the ways in which the system is responsible for the crisis and proposed measures that could ameliorate the problem, as well as ones incompatible with capitalism. These views informed our practice (such as we were able to carry out) in climate change campaigns. We urge comrades to read this documentation, as it stands the test of time pretty well.
Recent debates
As Alan notes, the publication of Ian Angus’ and Simon Butler’s book Too Many People? spurred him into his quest for us to take population seriously. Several people have noted in commenting on his review, that the account of the book he gives is not really recognisable in the book itself. Alan claims that the authors fail to distinguish between (neo)-Malthusians and advocates of population stabilisation through empowerment of women, but the book is very clear on this issue, as the authors show in their reply.
In his document Alan makes the same arguments again, as if there had been no response from Ian Angus and Simon Butler to his criticisms.
What Too Many People? does show is that making concessions on the population issue opens the door to a more reactionary programme. Even the most empowering programme of family planning for women, if it is motivated by population issues (and possibly, even if it isn’t – see next section), will experience pressures to “perform” to various “targets” set by their funding bodies, inevitably introducing an element of coercion. This phenomenon has been well-documented by Bonnie Mass, Mahmood Mamdani, Betsy Hartmann and Matthew Connelly, amongst others. That is one of the links with the past Angus and Butler are trying to make.
Just as an illustration, amongst all the right-on stuff about empowerment, the new international family planning programme launched by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation says:
“By 2050, the global population is expected to grow to over 9 billion people, an increase of more than 50 percent over 2005 levels. This growth will only exacerbate the current health inequities for women and children, put pressure on social services and resources, and contribute significantly to the global burden of disease, environmental degradation, poverty, and conflict. Family planning is one of the best investments a country can make in its future.”
To us, this approach, as well as giving the wrong message about the responsibility for all the ills that it enumerates, opens the door to “targets” and “pressure”.
We take the following message from Too Many People? That we hope comrades will keep in mind as they read the rest of our document.
- “Unmet need” [family planning] programs won’t produce the promised reductions in population [or even stabilise it].
- The population reductions they do achieve won’t have an equivalent impact on greenhouse gas emissions.
- Any impact on greenhouse gas emissions will be too little and too late to slow global warming.
‘Control’, empowerment or self-organisation?
There is a central methodological problem in this section because Alan counterposes population control, which he rightly opposes as ‘coercive’ and abusive to women, to empowerment, described by Alan, referring to Laurie Manzur, as ‘giving women the means to control their own fertility by making contraception and abortion services available to them’, and ‘giving them access to education, and lifting them out of poverty.’ Note the words in italics! The notion of one person (or group or government) empowering women contradicts the central tenet of Marxism as well as of socialist feminism that self-organization is the key to fundamental change. As revolutionary socialists we do not try and ‘empower’ the working class. On the contrary the working class is in the end quite capable of empowering itself! We try and link up with campaigns and movements which seek to change the world, but it is not up to us to decide how or when such movements are built. Nor, just because women bear children, should we see population as ‘a feminist issue’. Rather we should remember the guiding principles of socialist feminism of the right of women to organize autonomously to determine when, how and what to campaign around. Women themselves, wherever they live, know why they have children and have always fought, more or less successfully to make decisions for themselves.
Alan himself recognizes this fact when he says in the last paragraph of this section:
‘Not that women are passive observers in all this. The right to control their own fertility is something women have historically demanded and fought for, and continue to do so today – including in those parts of the world with the highest birthrates. They are the active agency of change in this field and this struggle has always included the fight against reactionary measures of enforced control. Reproductive rights were the lynchpin of the feminist movement of the 1970s and 80s. We should also remember how in struggling for their own specific interests, women often also become the agents of wider change.’
This contradicts his framework, because at one and the same time he wants to ‘give’ women access to contraception, as well as recognizing that ‘women often become the agents of social change’.
To concentrate on women’s reproduction or ‘empowerment’ in the developing world without referring to the developed world, especially given the much greater carbon footprint of people in the latter, ignores the reasons people have children. As Vandana Shiva the Indian feminist and environmentalist argues:
‘The first thing is: population grows or decreases according to how the society is structured. In Italy even though you are in Rome, a Catholic country, your population is decreasing, not because of the Pope, but just for the cost of reproduction. Having children……is too costly. On the contrary children are all that a poor family has in the Third World. So when everything is taken away from you and they are thrown to the streets, your land is grabbed away from you, your economic skills are taken away from you, population growth should not be viewed as a women’s individual issue. It should be viewed in a social context and conformation. In India there is a State which has a negative population growth, that is the State of Kerala, where people recognized that the fundamental needs must be guaranteed, that is people must have land, education and health, including women. As the result of it the population decreases because of this security. Population growth is a symptom of economic insecurity, so unless you address it as an economic issue of justice, if you keep treating pregnancy as a disease needing a technological intervention, contraceptive pills, you never get a right because you will have to violate women reproductive rights.’
Nowhere in his document does Alan actually discuss the programmes on offer to women of the developing world. Instead he repeats the term ‘empowerment’ as though this will happen without someone or some body being in charge of it. Nor does he look at the types of contraception being proposed.
The foundation now most closely associated with promoting family planning and contraception in the developing world is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with a $4billion programme. In their Strategy Overview they link the need for contraception with the growth of population, revealing their real motivation to reduce the population in the developing world. As Betsy Hartmann argues:
“The Gates Foundation’s family planning strategy blames population growth for exacerbating all matter of social ills, from stressing government budgets to contributing significantly to ‘the global burden of disease, environmental degradation, poverty and conflict.’ It as if the fertility of poor women causes these problems, and not the exploitative policies and practices of the rich and powerful.”
Worse still are the methods being promoted by The Gates’ Foundation, especially the use of long-acting injectables and implants such as Depo-Provera. Even the maker (Pfizer) warns that, ‘You should use Depo-Provera long-term (for example, more than 2 years) only if other methods of birth control are not right for you.’ (My italics) Among other problems, it causes loss of calcium in bones and the longer it is used, the more calcium is lost. This loss ‘may not return completely once you stop using Depo-Provera’. But safer and more appropriate methods are not on the agenda.
Another warning from Pfizer concerns HIV and AIDS: ‘Depo-Provera does not protect you from HIV (AIDS) and other diseases spread through sex (STDs)’. But the truth is much more alarming. According to Hartmann, in the same article:
“For over a decade now, studies have pointed to a possible link between Depo-Provera use and increased risk of acquiring HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS. In October 2011 the British medical journal, The Lancet, published the results of a study which found that Depo may double the risk of women and their male partners acquiring HIV. The study sent shock waves through the international population community, since Depo-Provera is their method of choice for Africa.
“Precaution would dictate that Depo be phased out in populations at high risk of AIDS, but instead the World Health Organization has thrown caution to the wind. At a meeting in February the WHO decided to continue its “no restrictions” policy on the use of hormonal contraception, only adding the stipulation that women on injectables like Depo also use condoms to prevent HIV infection. Present at the meeting was only one HIV-positive woman from Africa.”
We think that for both Laurie Mazur and Alan, in different ways, a slippage into a perspective where women of the global south are “given” rights to control their family size, is a reflection of the current global balance of forces. For Mazur, it is very clear, that fighting for women’s reproductive rights implies linking up with population control advocates, in order to get access to the money and the mobilizing power of populationists:
[Talking about the 1994 Cairo conference] “feminists and populationists joined forces because their interests were aligned. If the best way to slow population growth is by ensuring reproductive rights and empowering women, then this is a win-win for both groups. Populationists didn’t just learn “to hide their views behind feminist vocabulary,” as you [Ian Angus] assert, many (though admittedly not all) truly came to realize that the feminists’ goals were central to their own.” (her emphasis)
And she then goes on to say that the feminist influence on family planning programmes meant there were no more “targets”, or rewards for recruiting people into these programmes and confronts the question directly:
“Can family planning programs adhere to Cairo principles if their funding comes from donors who are concerned about population growth?…..Yes……[working] to increase the resources available for reproductive health …. sometimes means forming alliances with people who are concerned about population growth, national security, the environment and other issues.”
Even more explicitly, in a comment below her contribution, on the same web page, Mazur says:
“I am acutely aware of the perils of fundraising among foundations and governments for whom women’s rights and health may not be the foremost priority. But I continue to press for more funding—and work to steer those funds in the right direction—for the same reason John Dillinger robbed banks: because that’s where the money is…..The International Family Planning Coalition, which works to increase US funding for family planning and reproductive health worldwide, embraces a very diverse array of organizations: religious groups; organizations concerned with reproductive health, women’s rights, environmental protection; human rights; and yes, even population growth.”
The rationale for this approach is that population control programmes have now changed (as a result of the Cairo UN conference on population and development in 1994): they advocate empowerment of women, not coercion, but as we have seen, it is not so clear that this distinction can be made when such programmes are implemented on the ground.
Laurie Mazur says there is a demand to reduce fertility in the global south, but in the US, where it is already at 1.9 (it was 2.1 when she was writing – last year) it is not the low-hanging fruit. Whether this is rational from the point of view of climate change, which is the issue under dispute here, will be considered in the next two sections.
The Global South
In this section of his document, Alan attempts to rebut the charge that there is a contradiction between connecting population and climate change, and focusing on the reproductive health needs of the women of the Global South. Alan uses this argument:
“The charge that advocating the empowerment of women means targeting of the South, however, makes no sense. Why is fighting for the rights of impoverished women caricatured as targeting them? The same was said of Stopes and others when they (as middle class women) fought for contraception facilities for the impoverished women of East London in the inter-war years.”
This looks like an attempt to suggest that those who do not make a connection (much less see a causal relation) between population and climate change are against, “fighting for the rights of impoverished women”. Clearly, this is not the issue. What we do not support is using the climate change-population argument as a reason for advocating reproductive health that should be (and is) fought for on its own merits.
As a brief aside on Marie Stopes: it wasn’t simply the case that she concentrated her efforts on working class women due to recognition of their greater need. Alan points out earlier in his document that she was a eugenicist, but seems not to have taken on board what this means. Perhaps Marie Stopes herself can explain:
“Young married men of the professional classes are today often forced by conditions to remain sterile, though they passionately desire the healthy children they could have if they did not have hordes of defectives to support in one way or the other.”
Zoe Williams, from whose Guardian article this quote is taken, describes Stopes’ contributions to her publication, Birth Control News, as “fulminating rightwingness, peppered with self-publicising, a proto-Melanie Phillips with an extra PhD”.
It’s pretty clear that propagating such views would have hindered the campaign for birth control amongst working class men and women, despite the fact that, as Williams points out, there was high demand for her Stopes’ services: (“The women she provided with contraception didn’t care whether she thought they were scum who should leave the breeding to the master race.”) A quick trawl of the web shows how much ammunition Stopes’ eugenicist views have given to right-wing and Catholic pro-lifers and how Marie Stopes International is still having to dissociate itself from her views.
In the same way, linking population, greenhouse gas emissions and family planning damages both the campaign against climate change and the one for women’s reproductive health.
The second theme of this section of Alan’s document is a run-down of what we all agree is the terrible state of reproductive health of women in the Global South. Alan points to the 288,000 annual childbirth-related deaths of women. Of these, 74,000 are the results of the 46 million annual legal and illegal abortions, so 214,000 must be due to the 35 million unintended and 100 million intended births, with the former probably causing a slightly larger proportion of the deaths. This points to the need not only to save lives by preventing the 80 million unwanted pregnancies a year, but also by providing proper services for the 100 million women who have wanted children, as well as for the children.
The carbon footprint in the Global South
In this section, we will confront directly the issue of how much carbon dioxide emissions could be reduced if a family planning programme managed to cut unintended pregnancies to zero. This addresses the second point made by Angus and Butler: that promised GHG emissions cuts due to population reductions are insignificant.
The “headline figure” (to put it crudely) is that 35 million fewer babies would be born each year. We want to only consider the situation up to 2030, as predictions of population, energy use, GHG emissions and so on are less certain after this point. This is the IPCC’s medium-term climate mitigation date. Even in this 19-year period, given the extent of the climate and financial crisis, there are likely to be social and other changes which will put any predictions off, let alone looking to 2050.
However, assuming such changes do not occur, in 19 years (including 2012), a family-planning programme that prevented unwanted pregnancies (aside from all the benefits to the women and children concerned), would mean the world’s population in 2030 would be 665 million smaller (7.4bn, instead of 8.1bn).
What is the “saving” in carbon emissions? It’s agreed that these people are likely to be amongst the poorest on the planet. What is more, most will be children for most of that period, and are not likely to be using disposable nappies (220kg CO2 per year). The poorest third of the world’s population (2.7 billion people) averages about 0.5 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year, so to allocate 1 tonne per year to these 35 million people allows for some (carbon intensive) development that could take place.
So, if we add up 35MT in 2012, 70MT in 2013, 105MT in 2014 etc., we get a total saving in emissions of 6.6bn tonnes! This looks huge, except that the Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects that total CO2 emissions over those 19 years will be 685bn tonnes. (This estimate is based on current policies, but not including the so-called “commitments” arising out of Copenhagen in 2009).
It does not seem serious to argue that population growth is a significant contributor to climate change, when the contribution of those births that might be prevented if women had ready access to contraception over the next 19 years is ….. 1%. Even the “contribution” of those “extra” 665 million people in 2030, 8% of the population by then, would be only 1.6% in that year (100 x 665million, divided by 40.6 billion tonnes of CO2).
Of course, this is a crude estimate. The figure could be half that, or even twice this value, but it is still small beer compared to GHG emissions from more wealthy groups and individuals. And it is necessary to reiterate that making this point is not an argument against women all over the world having full rights and access to contraception, abortion and reproductive (and other) health services.
Having illustrated this point, however, we need to be wary of attributing emissions that way in any case. One of the most powerful arguments that Ian Angus and Simon Butler make in their book is that even people who consume at the most basic level do not choose how the commodities they use are produced (their carbon footprint, amongst other things) – the capitalist system does.
A family planning programme that is in part based on population issues has to end up “blaming” individuals (women, in particular) for their “contribution” to environmental degradation through reproduction. The problem is exacerbated if it is a programme funded in the West, aimed at very oppressed and exploited women from the Global South.
Finally, let’s consider the effect on population growth (the first of Angus and Butler’s points) if women were to get contraception and abortion services that meant that there were no longer any more unwanted pregnancies and births. Unless some other change takes place, then presumably this will reduce population growth numbers in 2030 by 35 million, the figure used above. The UN projects that the population growth rate in 2030 will be 0.75%, or 60 million people per year. We assume the UN don’t anticipate that women will have achieved universal contraception and abortion services (the situation would be “worse” if they do make this assumption). This means that there would still be 25 million “excess” births per year in 2030.
Laurie Mazur’s (and Alan’s?) aim of population stabilisation by 2030 therefore could not be achieved by a voluntary family planning programme. Coercion, using deception or economic “incentives” would be required, which is one reason why we argue that the aim of population stabilisation runs counter to the aim of overthrowing capitalism.
Food and natural resources
In this section, Alan takes issue with the point made in Too many People? that if food was produced and distributed rationally, then 9 or 10 billion people could be fed with relative ease. Alan initially concedes that rational organisation, ending of waste, corruption, speculation and staggering inequalities, would cause things to dramatically improve, but contests the figure given by Angus and Butler.
He argues that increasingly meat-and-oil based diets and ever-increasing industrialisation and monopolisation of agriculture will make it impossible to feed that many people. He adds that climate change – and the associated extreme weather events – also mitigate against feeding 9-10 billion people, citing the current drought in the USA and floods in UK.
We have already agreed in the second section of this document that the capitalist system is unable to feed the current population of 7 billion, so it is clear that any population increases under the current system are likely to increase hunger for working class and unemployed people in all countries. But that is not the point: the question is whether this is the result of some fundamental lack of resources adequately to feed a population of 10 billion.
Several of the arguments on this issue have already been addressed in an article in Socialist Outlook 14 (Spring 2008), which is also on this web site. What this article basically says is that, as with all other commodities, food is subject to the vagaries of the capitalist market. Large quantities of grain, that are currently devoted to biofuels and to feeding animals for meat, need to be diverted into feeding people. Measures need to be introduced that reduce waste, especially in the Global North and loss to pests in the Global South. Agricultural practices that reduce demand for new land need to be implemented.
One of the major factors preventing further food production in the Global South is the diversion of land to cultivation for export to the west, often of luxury goods. Diminished local food production is then further undermined by dumping of subsidised food from the west on the local market. Changes in the world market then determine who in these countries will eat and who will not. An urgent land reform programme is thus a necessity.
Alan presumably does not consider it to be realistic to make demands for such changes. He seems to accept current trends as established facts. In fact, such policies are the only possible ones that could eliminate hunger and provide for higher populations. Some, such as use of more grain for human consumption, could have a very rapid impact, both on hunger and GHG emissions: much more so than a family planning programme. Many of these measures are also likely to make agriculture more resilient to climate change.
The same arguments can be made for water supplies. These are used in an incredibly wasteful way by capitalism, again because the way the resource is used is determined by its price, rather than its use value. Thus, in the USA, irrigation water is massively subsidised (the cost can be as low as 1 cent per 1000 litres, up to 80 times less than that charged to domestic consumers), meaning that waste is not discouraged. This is not an argument for increasing the price of water to farmers: instead it is one about planning and workers and community control of production.
In his section on resources, Alan also addresses biodiversity loss and urbanisation. He attributes biodiversity loss to “human activity”. We presume this is a slip on his part, as the causes he enumerates (land degradation, nutrient run-off, pollution, excessive resource use) are very much down to the way production is organised, not human activity as such. The same arguments apply to his comments on urbanisation, where he decries the overcrowding, lack of sanitation, etc.
How would we implement a position that highlights population as an issue?
We remarked earlier that Alan does not really state how the line that he is advocating would be implemented. We think he ought to do this, for two reasons. Firstly, it will make it easier for comrades to understand what he is really getting at with this new position. Secondly, he needs to draw conclusions for the practise of SR (and the FI?) – even if it is only what we should say in our propaganda – for this discussion to be of any consequence.
Perhaps we can here look at the political implications of trying to carry out Alan’s line in practice:
Since it centres on the issue of empowerment of women, could SR argue that the current threats to abortion time limits, coming from various Tory MPs, should be fought, not only because they threaten A Woman’s Right to Choose, but also because there would be a resulting increase in population and carbon dioxide emissions?
No, as this would be a diversion from the right of women to decide.
Could we raise the position in the Campaign Against Climate Change?
No, as this too would divert from government policy on fuels, transport, housing etc. into one about individuals’ reproductive choices (or worse, their responsibility for degrading ecosystems).
Could SR declare public support for existing empowerment/population programmes, such as that being initiated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation?
No, because there is an implication in their position that population control is necessary. Nor we should take Laurie Mazur’s position of an alliance – on the grounds that they have the finances to support women’s empowerment – with open population control advocates,.
Nor, we hope, would we want to do any joint activity with Population Matters (previously the Optimum Population Trust, OPT), despite Alan’s contention that it now appears to “totally focus on empowerment”. A trawl through its web site quickly indicates that Alan is mistaken in his view of PM.
First, there’s the home page, which retains the OPT’s simplistic gimmick of the population counter (3 people per second, for those who need to know). But it is also possible to find documents, from leading position holders in PM that “population should be allowed to stabilise and decrease gradually to an environmentally sustainable level, by bringing immigration into numerical balance with emigration, by making greater efforts to reduce teenage pregnancies, and by encouraging couples voluntarily to ‘Stop at Two’ children”.
This means “zero net migration”: any asylum seekers “accommodated” must be balanced by immigration cuts elsewhere. The arguments used in the OPT paper (but on the PM web site) are similar to those used by the Climate Change/Immigration Control organisations in the USA (migration into a high “per capita” emitting country increases the threat of climate change). They add, for good measure, the observation that migration (of foreigners) into London is “likely to cause further pressures”, displacing some of London’s population into the surrounding urban and rural areas. (The same document states that the world’s “optimum population” is “not much higher that two billion”).
Of course, we understand that Alan does not support these views, and would not work with people who express them. His comments about Population Matters result from an over-hasty look at their made-over web site. But even the fact that their real positions are hard to find and that they felt the need to coat their views with a veneer of liberalism, should act as a warning to us. Such deviousness is basically an admission by them that “population matters” is not a position that that the left finds palatable, as it contradicts the view that “capitalism matters”.
Will it all be OK come the revolution?
It is in the final section of his document that Alan indicates why he has adopted his arguments linking population and ecology: it is a policy to ameliorate the climate crisis, while the balance of class forces is so unfavourable. This, it seems to us, is the only way to interpret the following statement:
“Like women’s liberation, however, the ecological struggle has to be carried through as an integral part of the struggle to overthrow and replace capitalism, not as a separate and later stage to it. Otherwise, by the time capitalism is overthrown the environment will be so damaged that it will be a matter of picking up the pieces.”
Of course, the first sentence is perfectly correct, but the second carries with it the assumption that the capitalist system can be forced to make major changes in direction, in order to protect ecosystems. Alan has argued in the past that a mass movement could force the system to make such changes, but in our opinion, the evidence for this contention is lacking, especially in relation to climate change. The system is too locked into dependence on fossil fuels and its current mode of agricultural production, to do any more than tinker at the edges with a few energy conservation measures, renewable energy projects or agricultural experiments.
We should add that there are situations where the system is unable to respond to the demands of a mass movement: otherwise there could not have been any socialist revolutions.
The capitalist system is hell-bent on a course of action that will ultimately ensure its own destruction through ecocide, if it is allowed to get away with it. Governments have shown, with their failure to negotiate or implement any meaningful climate treaty, that they are unable to divert from this trajectory, because they are competing with one another for market share and they host major corporations for whom the drive for profit overrides all other concerns. How else are we to interpret the relish with which oil, gas, mining, shipping and even cruise companies have greeted the opening up of the Arctic seas as the ice recedes?
In any case, as we have shown, Alan is proposing measures, which – if implemented under women’s control and without population as a rationale – would be a major step forward for women, but would have a small effect in terms of ameliorating climate change.
Of course, none of these arguments mean that we should not fight for immediate and transitional demands to combat climate change. We need to build and/or be part of a movement, which also needs to achieve what victories it can in the struggle against ecological destruction, but which will come to understand, in the course of that struggle, that the system is incapable of curing the problem and needs to be got rid of.
This is not that dissimilar to how we have historically approached women’s liberation, because we do argue that this is also contingent on overthrowing capitalism (“no revolution without Women’s Liberation: no Women’s Liberation without revolution”). This is due to another dependence the system has – on the bourgeois nuclear family.
Finally, let us end on a note of complete agreement: socialist revolution will not automatically save ecosystems either. A conscious struggle is necessary and all the measures needed have never adequately been enumerated by anybody, Marxist or not. That, perhaps, should be the subject of another discussion, but for now, we urge Alan to reconsider a position that does not sit easily with his strong commitment to the working-class struggle and to the ecosocialist revolution.
Bonnie Mass (“Population Target”, 1976), Mahmood Mamdani (“The Myth of Population Control”, 1972), Barry Commoner (“[Paul Ehrlich’s] solution is equivalent to attempting to save a leaking ship by lightening the load and forcing the passengers overboard”), Murray Bookchin (e.g. “Defending the Earth”, 1991), Betsy Hartmann (“Reproductive Rights and Wrongs”, 1995), Tom Athanasiou (“Slow Reckoning”, 1996), Mathew Connelly (“Fatal Misconception”, 2008) and FI members Joseph Hansen (“Too many babies?” 1960) and Alan Roberts (“The self-managed society”, 1979).
Sheila Malone’s Reply to Ian Angus January 13 2012
In my first article on population (SR 57), I tried to take a different approach from the old polemics around Malthusianism and population controls by calling it ‘Population growth is a feminist issue’. I still think the key to the issue is women’s empowerment. However ‘Too Many People?’ seems much more in the old mould.
I agree with the authors that the main cause of social and ecological un-sustainability and inequality is capitalism (although not discounting pre-capitalist systems too). But I also see rapid population growth as a factor exacerbating already existing problems.
Historically promoted and encouraged by capitalism and its ideologues (because it means more producers, consumers, warriors, believers), high birth rates have nevertheless brought high costs socially and ecologically and have been especially damaging for women – who have mostly struggled against them to control and limit their fertility.
Maybe some overkill in the Marx/Malthus debates has deterred future Marxists from paying much attention to population. However, when they have taken it up, it has often been one-sidedly, not fully recognising the impact of population policies socially and ecologically [Brenner] In addition they often want to keep women’s rights separate from both demographic and development issues.
This seems to be TMP’s approach. This means that when they explain the ‘demographic transition’ it is presented as happening more or less automatically. For instance, poverty reduction is seen as necessarily and always resulting in lower fertility rates. Hence ‘development is the best contraceptive’.
This ignores high birth rates in some wealthy countries (Saudi Arabia), or the continued above replacement level in the USA. Secondly, and pertinently, their one-sidedness leaves out the important role of women’s own struggles in gaining the reproductive rights and resources which have ensured the big drop in fertility levels in the North. Nor do we hear much of women’s movements around these issues in the global South.
In many countries in the South agriculture and industry has been geared to export and to benefit only local elites. This has created huge social and ecological problems. Nevertheless, women often remain under great pressure from state, religion, culture and clan to have more and more children. This exacerbates existing problems, as rapidly growing families are forced to degrade their own environments to get food, water and fuel just to survive.
A better understanding of this situation might have led Ian and Simon to a more sympathetic view of the 1994 UN Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, and the Action Plan resulting from it. This was not a top-down programme, imposed from outside and harking back to coercive population controls, as they imply. On the contrary, Cairo was a response to what women themselves were asking for. As I discuss in my review of Laurie Mazur’s ‘A pivotal Moment’ its approach enabled women to set up centres where they could meet together, discuss and decide on their own needs and aspirations and those of their communities (and out of earshot of sometimes hostile partners)
Here constant childbearing and rearing was seen by most women as exhausting and as restricting their and their children’s educational and job prospects. So they wanted the rights and means to control their own fertility. In addition gaining skills and a different future through something like small-scale organic farming and trading was seen as a way out from a poverty and high fertility trap, as well as beneficial to the wider community [and the planet!].
In other words, women themselves linked the issues of population and development.
I don’t disagree with Ian and Simon’s and their co-thinkers advocacy of ‘a woman’s right to choose’, nor with the sentiments behind the current ‘ecological justice is the best contraceptive’ [Vandana Shiva]. But in some ways bolder but equally pertinent were the old National Abortion Campaign in Britain’s ‘Every child a wanted child’ and ‘Not the church, not the state, women must decide their fate’.
This approach linked women’s individual needs and rights to the wider social issues. But, whichever approach you support, people usually need resources, skills and information to realize their wants and aspirations. These the Cairo programs provided. They are what I would call population policies which empower women. If either international bodies or national governments promote them, then I support this – as have women in countries as varied as Bangladesh and Philipines. Here many women’s wellbeing, status and prospects have greatly improved, as well the birth rate decreasing.
So, I agree with TMP on the need for an alternative development model to capitalism, one that is socially and ecologically sustainable and just. But this must also address and integrate women’s specific needs, interests and wishes. We can then work out something which is good for women, good for our communities, our societies and good for our planet!
Phil ward’s reply to Sheila – Jan 15 2012.
Sheila seems to think that those who argue that population reduction is not part of the fight against climate change need education about the struggle for women’s rights (in the LDCs especially). I think that if she reads carefully the article immediately above her comment, then her point has already been answered. The authors also reiterate that it is dealt with in their book.
Sheila’s comment does not provide arguments for her professed belief that population is a crucial issue in the ecological struggle. She discusses the importance of women being able to control their own fertility in the LDCs and comments that women themselves linked issues of population and development. But from the way in which she reports it, it sounds more like an understanding that for them as individuals or a community, breaking from the cycle of child rearing had an impact on their economic circumstances. It is a big jump from that to saying that population control is part of the solution to the ecological crisis.
In any case, why all the emphasis on the third world women’s rights and fertility in Sheila’s comment? Surely the “fertility of first world women” (plus those in the UAE) is much more of a “problem”, as “their carbon emissions” are much higher?
Finally, if you make argument for women’s right to control their fertility as part of the “need” to control population growth, what happens to traditional socialist demands that could actually encourage women to have more children, such free as 24-hour childcare, work-sharing with no loss of pay and extended rights for maternity leave?
Population: comments on Phil, Jane and Susan’s reply to Alan
Dave Bangs November 4th 2012
Very useful facts are contained in Phil, Jane and Sue’s (PJS from now on) response to Alan’s population piece. I have already gleefully incorporated some of them into my everyday political arguments…such as the stuff about the global population increase’s derivation mostly from the decline in the infant mortality rate and the increase in life expectancy, whilst the fertility rate has halved.
But those facts and similar stuff don’t remove my sense that PJS are arguing in a kind of bubble in their refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of the population issue for the future of humanity. Their response leaves me feeling that their attitude amounts to a kind of complacency, and will not do our ability to be heard amongst our potential allies any good at all.
This is because they only address some aspects of the crisis of nature and natural systems – chiefly, modern human created climate change – and don’t address the central core of the crisis, which is a global extinction event greater than any other since the Permian ‘great dying’ 251 million years ago.
In my reading of PJS’s reply I did what I often do when I read FI stuff with an environmental content…I counted the number of references to biodiversity and its analogous terms.
My count is three. The first is on page 3 as part of the list of forms of damage caused by capitalist agriculture. The second occurs in the response on page 10 to Alan’s attribution of biodiversity loss to “human activity.” The third is in their very last paragraph’s reference to ecosystems.
That isn’t much in a piece designed to address an issue with such a major environmental dimension.
To be sure, Alan’s piece only mentioned biodiversity twice, once on page 3 and once on page 9, but the latter is a rich mini-discussion of the extinction event we are going through, something which PJS’s paper does not address.
Indeed, PJS are concerned to deflect attention from, and to counter, Alan’s argument that the planet has ‘finite resources’. They assert that “there are things that can be done” to repair the damage from capitalist agriculture and make no comparable mention of the irreparability of lost species assemblages.
They narrow the problem down to the assertion “that catastrophic damage has already been caused not by population but by the capitalist economy, based on fossil fuels”.
This narrowness of approach is nonsense.
The origin of this cataclysmic extinction event lies in the competition between our species and others. Though this competition has been ratchetted up exponentially under capitalist supremacy, it vastly pre-dates the onset of capitalism, and, indeed, the onset of class society itself. Indeed, some of the early inter-species competition us Homo sapiens engaged in may have seen us rendering other Homo species or sub-species extinct (by exclusion, murder, and inter-breeding). We are now moving towards acceptance that our species was partly responsible for the extinction of much of the megafauna of late Ice Age North America (cave lions, ground sloths, mastodon et al) and no doubt elsewhere as well. The soil eroding activities of Neolithic (perhaps even Mesolithic) and bronze age people were on such a landscape modifying scale as to create our current sluggish English river systems by the dumping within them of vast quantities of alluvium. The (avian) megafauna of New Zealand and a big chunk of the megafauna of Australia were rendered extinct by the early predation of the Maori and aboriginal settlers. The fertile green lands of the near east were rendered barren and their peoples forced into migration by the irrigation technology of their early class societies, with its built-in obsolescence.
All these activities took place before capitalism appeared.
Though PJS end their piece by reminding us that “socialist revolution will not automatically save ecosystems” that tail-end reminder reads a bit the same way as the singing of the red flag at the end of Labour Party conferences…a token gesture of acknowledgement to a part of their constituency which they otherwise take little account of.
I am a bit chilled by their onslaught on those who assert that an optimum population for the globe should be ‘not much higher than two billion”. They “would not work with people who express” such views, they say… This onslaught is one-in-the-eye for folk like me who have found comfort and inspiration in Marge Piercy’s “Woman on the Edge of Time”, over perhaps thirty years. Bang goes my dreams of a socialist society based on small communities within a green rural matrix. Bang goes all the similar dreams of those who have loved William Morris’s stuff, too.
I have no brief for any particular figure, but would be very happy to see a shrinking of the world population….and I see no reason why we as socialists should not speculate about the future best course for our species in that way. Of course, as socialists we have a long tradition of being non-prescriptive about the future nature of socialist society…because we are bound to get it wrong…but we should welcome and encourage such speculations, not growl at them.
I am chilled, too, by the categorical nature of their dismissal of the negative consequences of migration (again in their reference to OPT).
The gigantic shifts of poor world populations to mega (slum) cities are hugely negative…The gigantic demographic shift of the Chinese population to the coast will have had catastrophic consequences for the ecosystems of their littoral, leave alone all the human consequences….The gigantic shift of European populations to the Spanish and other Meditteranean littorals in the past 60 years have been dreadfully destructive for ecosystems and landscapes.
As I have said several times before, too, the consequences of uneven and combined development, and its concomitant inward migrations, on the landscapes and ecosystems of the English south east (my region) look set to finally eliminate the distinctiveness of several natural areas (sort of bio regions) of great beauty, cultural and biological importance.
I am not going to stand by and ignore or minimise the negative consequences of these traumas…
The desperation of our plight in ecological terms – the dreadful withering of biological resources – should be a motor for our commitment to socialist policies and for the garnering of the allies we need for effective action. It has always been that for me…and indeed formed a good half of my motivation in embracing socialism.
The marginalisation of any notion that our species impact (of which the impact of capitalism is the current great expression) needs to be addressed can only weaken that commitment.
Sometimes I feel as though I have blood on my hands…In campaigning against nature and landscape-damaging proposals I have argued against new housing (both social and private), against allotment extensions (and am doing so in a current campaign), against a city farm, against a new primary school, against traveller encampments (though I was co-founder of Sussex Travellers Action Group), against the construction of a youth club, against the out of town construction of a ‘community’ football stadium…and on and on…All those being ‘goods’ that I believe in completely…
The choices that we have to make if we take the need to address this extinction process as an imperative are profound and painful and thoroughly disturbing.
We will have to budge up, or we will have to accept vastly reduced possibilities for self-actualisation in a drastically biologically simplified world…
Resources ARE finite…and our population size is a horribly worsening problem, whether it is solved in a generation or so or not…There’s every point in being honest about that…and our potential allies will not listen to us if they sense that we are less than honest about ALL aspects of the seriousness of our plight.
Dave Bangs
P.S. Sorry if you feel you’ve heard much of this before…
Population – Alan’s Latest Missive – Phil Ward
In his latest email, Alan distorts and misrepresents practically everything I say. The following points are my
final remarks in this debate. I won’t defend myself from Alan’s attacks in future.
On extension of life: Maybe there is a misunderstanding, but when Dave said he didn’t want to live too long, I assumed that this meant that people getting very old is a population issue. There is a world of difference between that and my comments in my last email, where I point out that increases in life expectancy are almost entirely due to more children surviving into adulthood. The increasing proportion of old people in many societies is an interesting one and I didn’t say don’t discuss it: I said it doesn’t help to link it with discussions of population growth. In fact, that was the first sentence of my last email. Why do I have to go on repeating the same things time and again?
The society where ageing is most marked (Japan) has a static population that will soon start declining fast (barring changes in immigration policy etc.).
Biodiversity: My last email I said that I thought Alan latched onto Dave’s raising of ‘who takes biodiversity most seriously’ (where he plumped for Alan) as a “debating ploy”. He also says that I imply that he has nothing to say on the issue, just because I say Dave approved of his views. I fail to understand the logic of that.
He then argues that he takes biodiversity much more seriously than us, by quoting a paragraph from his second document, written after (he latched on to) Dave Bangs’ contribution. This is exactly the passage where, on reading it, I thought “why on earth is Alan making such a big deal about this? We all agree that the ecological crisis is very much one of biodiversity.” And of course, I agree with all the points that he makes in the relevant paragraphs quoted in his most recent email. This is why I have made my complaints about “appropriation” of issues into the population debate. Alan’s approach seems to be to claim that not only does only he have the answer (which he would, understandably, say), but more damagingly, that his opponents don’t think biodiversity’s even important.
Here is an example of how that works. Alan says: “Phil has a blind spot about population and biodiversity when it comes to population increase”. He then says that I’ve hardly mentioned biodiversity in my articles on population and then, after several sentences pointing out my failings in comprehensively anlaysing issues of biodiversity loss: “If I have missed something Phil mentions on biodiversity, he should draw my attention to it”. Notice how the word “population” has now disappeared? I don’t want to go through all the stuff, published in SO or SR, not on population, but definitely on the environment, where I have taken up biodiversity issues, to prove that I do think it is a (very) serious matter. Alan should just agree that I think it is. What I don’t think is that a minor reduction in population growth rates is any kind of solution, or would have much of an impact at all (ecologically), so it is understandable that I wouldn’t go into it at length in a discussion of the population issue.
You can’t just counter that point by saying “Phil doesn’t take biodiversity seriously”. I don’t say (or even imply) Alan doesn’t take it seriously. Why can’t he just accept that we both do, as we do women’s reproductive rights (but see below on his attitude to my attitude to that)?
I also don’t know where Alan got the idea that I think he’s not qualified to write about “the subject” (quite
what subject, I’m not sure, but I presume it is biodiversity, as it follows his remarks on that). Alan clearly works very hard to inform himself about these matters, as I do (my articles on the SR web site usually require about 10 hours’ work). It is not a matter of qualifications at all and I acknowledge that Alan’s contribution to the FI’s positions on the environment have been crucial to our politics. Indeed, that is one reason why it is so disappointing that he should have adopted the position he has on population.
On population stabilisation – Alan accuses me of saying that I ignore his remarks that other measures are necessary to deal with the ecological crisis as well as this. There is some truth in this, which I will explain in another document at a later date. But first of all, it is unfortunately necessary to remind Alan of some of the points we tried to make in our first reply to him. There, we tried to show that, even assuming women’s reproductive needs were fully met (which, of course, would be an excellent thing), the impact on GHG emissions would be small and population would not be stabilised in any case.
Alan has responded to the first point in his IV article, arguing that because we say the emissions “attributable” to most of the people who would not be born as a result of such a victory are very low, we are somehow omitting the potential effects of capitalist growth (our argument was using on population projections up to 2030), pointing to how China’s emissions have grown in 20 years (approximately tripled, per head of population). In our argument, we allowed for a doubling of emissions per head in the period up to 2030, of the poor people who would not be born were there a comprehensive reproductive rights programme (about 650 million). In my opinion, it is not useful to base the argument on a country’s emissions, including all social classes, as Alan does, because those most likely now to be forced into having children are predominantly from those sectors of society where per capita emissions are very low. So, I think our argument is still valid.
Alan also responds by saying that there are other ecological effects of population growth too, claiming that the overall “ecological footprint” of impoverished people in the global south is significant. Perhaps China is also a good example here, because it’s absolutely clear that rampant capitalist development, partly to meet the consumption demands from the West, is overwhelmingly the driver of ecological destruction. Here’s another example: just last night, I read the article in this week’s Weekend Guardian about the destruction of the Masaai Mara game park. Some may attribute this to “population pressures”, as cattle grazing, for example, is one of the causes, but it’s clear that absolutely central to the decline is the capitalist drive for profit, big companies both in Kenya and the West, lubricated by extensive corruption.
The second point we made was that meeting women’s needs for reproductive rights would not cut the population growth rate enough to achieve population stabilisation. I am unsure whether Alan sees this population stabilisation as an aim of a reproductive rights campaign, but a response to our analysis on this would be helpful.
On the Cairo Conference, the UNFPA, Vandana Shiva China, Peru and Mathew Connelly: I tried to be very circumspect about all these issues, as can be seen from the way I dealt with them in my email. This is partly because there are contradictory accounts of the Cairo Conference and of the activities of the UNFPA since the conference. I was really saying that we (I) need to be more informed about these issues before making any definitive decisions about the UNFPA.
In response, I get things like:
- a) That I “oppose the implementation of the Programme of Action – in particular the call for the provision of reproductive services worldwide on the basis of free choice by 2015”. Where did I say that? If you had said that “Phil wants more information before he endorses the activities of the UNFPA”, then that would be accurate, but what you say I say sounds like I oppose women’s reproductive rights (I thought we had got beyond that kind of argumentation) – and of course, you DO say that:
- b) I “oppose the UN demand for worldwide provision of reproductive rights”. Huh?????????
- c) That I am “still trying to defend Vandana Shiva”. Oh yeah? Here’s what I said: “I think it is worth
trying to understand Vandana Shiva’s point of view”, with reference to experiences of population control programmes in India. I don’t agree with the views expressed in her document for Cairo and I have no idea if she still holds them (although it matters, due to her massive reputation in India: so do her apparently strange views on Science). I was trying to say that her views on contraception and abortion are partly formed by what happened in population control programmes in the past. It is not uncommon for left-wingers in the Global South to express such views: I first wrote about this issue in an IMG Africa Commission document in the late seventies, if you want to dig it out.
- d) Complete dismissal of my suggestion that we look into what the UNFPA did in Peru and China on the grounds that I don’t present any evidence. (We are talking about after the Cairo Conference: before it, the UNFPA supported the one-child programme in China, training 17,000 people to implement it, covering up the coercion and giving large quantities of money). All I was saying is that it needs looking into: see if there is any evidence. I don’t know enough about the FPA to endorse its current activities and I won’t until I know more. Furthermore, I’m concerned about its links with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and about its age of marriage campaign, which Alan doesn’t comment on. Alan calls what happened in Peru “alleged forced sterilisation”. I’m afraid it’s fact. I presume he read about it in Laurie Mazur’s book, that he normally quotes so favourably (p 292-299).
- e) An unnecessary attack on Matthew Connelly’s book for being “dreadful” and “internally contradictory”, whatever that means. Alan perhaps could expand on this, as his criticism is not very informative. The book is packed with facts and information about the international population control programmes of the 20thC, up to the Cairo Conference. I should add that I was mistaken about what Connelly says about Cairo: he is much more positive: “Population control as a global programme was no more. The Cairo program constituted and instrument of surrender.” I’m still undecided on this. I don’t quite know where I got the idea that Connelly viewed Cairo as a compromise. He gives detailed accounts of several conferences prior to Cairo (which he shows didn’t come out of the blue with its moving away from population control programmes) and it may have been in his summing up of one of those.
More distortions: There is another case in which Alan distorts someone’s statements to suit his own ends. That is in his IVP article, where he harnesses a 1983 article in New Left Review by the Canadian Marxist, Wally Seccombe, in support of his claim that the left ignores population issues. So, immediately after a paragraph suggesting that not “to regard rising population as a problem” is to give a reactionary, authoritarian agenda a free hand, Alan states that Seccombe
“argued that constant references to Malthus had ‘placed the debate on population beyond the pale of legitimate scrutiny and investigation’, and that in doing so Marxists abandoned the terrain to our enemies. He was absolutely right.” (Actually Seccombe uses the term ‘demographic realm itself’ here, not “population”: I don’t know why Alan felt the need to alter that).
You would think that Seccombe was discussing current (or, at least, 1980’s) debates about population control.
In fact, Seccombe’s comment about the apparent linking by leftists of demography and Malthus is nothing to do with that.
Seccombe’s article discusses “the transformation of fertility patterns in the families of the labouring classes which occurred” during the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western Europe: i.e. its subject matter is not relevant to what we are discussing here.
Seccombe’s methodological argument (which is relevant) is with those Marxists, who he claims do not integrate demographic factors into their class analysis: “there are compelling feminist reasons for paying close attention to the demographic regulators of women’s fertility and their change over time”, and that “there has been an unfortunate counterposition of the socio-economic to the demographic, as if these two dimensions of social relations were materially separable under capitalism or elsewhere, and as if the lines of causality ran, undialectically, only one way from the socio-economic and political to the demographic”.
I presume Alan didn’t read the whole Seccombe article (his quotes are form the first paragraph), or he thought no-one else would bother to do so.
More Distortions 2 (and the end, finally): In his very long first reply to our reply, “Population – A Rejoinder to JPS”, Alan attacks Betsy Hartmann a veteran feminist and anti-population-controller. We (JPS) had previously quoted two passages from her, one about the approach of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and another linking HIV and the use of Depo Provera, an injectable, long-acting contraceptive.
Alan attacks Hartmann on several fronts:
“She argues—in her book Reproductive Rights and Wrongs published in 1987—that the idea that rising population is any kind of problem is nonsense, that reproductive rights per se are a conspiracy to persuade women to have fewer children against their best interests and that most of the women involved do not want them. The provision of contraception, she argues, is a substitute for social change.
“She goes on to warn against the use of implants such as Depro Provera on the basis that they do not prevent HIV infection! She puts it this way: ‘For over a decade now, studies have pointed to a possible link between Depo-Provera use and increased risk of acquiring HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS.’
“This claim is irresponsible, in my view, since it could deter women from using the contraceptives they need. It is self-evident that implants will not prevent HIV infection, or STDs infection, any more than the pill will prevent them—unless used with a condom (which is the only method that will prevent such infections). In fact the manufacturer, Pfizer, specifically warns users that implants will not prevent HIV or other STDs unless used with a condom.
“To say, however, that there is a ‘link’ between Depo-Provera use and increased risk of acquiring HIV; in other words to imply that HIV might be caught from using Depo-Provera is misleading and wrong.”
I may get around to checking the assertion – about a conspiracy – at a later date. In any case, I’m not dutuy bound to defend everything Hartmann says and her views on one issue do not necessarily invalidate those on another, which is something Alan seems to be assuming here. If we had approvingly quoted her on the conspiracy, that would have been another matter.
Similarly, Hartmann’s views on the “slippery slope” argument are fairly common – and validated by history. I know Alan hates Connelly’s book, but he is really damning on how population control programmes get more and more coercive. You get institutions and bureaucracies set up, which then have to justify their existence, informal targets develop and become more formal, employees under pressure feel the need to “outperform” their colleagues if jobs cuts are in the air. That’s before outright corruption and bribery. Here’s what is in Laurie Mazur’s book, on Peru (not written by her, I grant you): “First, human rights abuses are likely where reproductive health services are seen as a means to an end, rather than as an end in themselves”. To me, what that says is be very, very careful if a bureaucratic institution is proposing a reproductive rights campaign that has a “population clause”. I presume that’s all Hartmann is saying as well.
Now, let’s look at Hartmann and the the Depo Provera issue. Is she really as crazy as to say that “HIV might be caught from using Depo Provera”, as Alan claims? Here’s what The Lancet Infectious Diseases, Volume 12, Issue 1, Pages 19 ‐ 26, January 2012 has to say:
Rates of HIV‐1 acquisition were higher in women using hormonal contraception than in those who were not (table
3). In multivariate Cox proportional hazards analysis adjusted for age, pregnancy, unprotected sex, and
concentrations of plasma HIV‐1 in HIV‐1‐infected partners, use of hormonal contraceptives was associated with a
two times increased risk of HIV‐1 acquisition (adjusted hazard ratio 1·98, 95% CI 1·06—3·68)…….
The rate of HIV‐1 transmission from women using hormonal contraceptives to their male partners was higher than
was the rate of transmission from women who did not use hormonal contraceptives (table 4). In multivariate
analysis adjusted for age, pregnancy, unprotected sex, and concentrations of plasma HIV‐1 in HIV‐1‐infected
partners, men’s HIV‐1 risk was increased two times when their partners were using hormonal contraception
(adjusted hazard ratio 1·97, 95% CI 1·12—3·45; table 4).
Note that the article says “adjusted for unprotected sex”, meaning if you have unprotected sex with an HIV+ partner, then you have double the risk of contracting HIV if you are also using injectable contraceptives. That seems fairly clear to me. It’s nothing to do with “catching HIV from using Depo
Provera” as Alan falsely claims Hartmann is arguing. It’s because the contraceptive has effects other than simply pregnancy prevention (which is not very surprising):
End note: I’m thoroughly fed up with this discussion. I may have said the wrong things on occasion, misrepresented people’s views here and there, but I think that I have shown that I (and Susan and Jane) are more sinned against than sinners. I may at some point try to get back to the substantive issues, but actually all this is not getting us very far.
I hope no comrades with the skills to write something for the web site on Egypt and Syria have not been spending any of their valuable time flogging this dead horse (I haven’t, as I don’t have the knowledge). I find it disappointing that we have not said anything about these major events and that the IVP site only has some rather general, sloganeering statements on these major crises.
Hormonal contraceptives might have physiological actions beyond pregnancy prevention, including possible risks of
bone‐density loss, cervical cancer, and Chlamydia trachomatis.28—30 Clinical and laboratory studies have suggested
possible mechanisms by which hormonal contraception could influence HIV‐1 susceptibility and infectiousness
including changes to vaginal structure, cytokine regulation, CCR5 expression, and cervicovaginal HIV‐1 shedding.
Sheila Malone’s Reply to Ian Angus January 13 2012
In my first article on population (SR 57), I tried to take a different approach from the old polemics around Malthusianism and population controls by calling it ‘Population growth is a feminist issue’. I still think the key to the issue is women’s empowerment. However ‘Too Many People?’ seems much more in the old mould.
I agree with the authors that the main cause of social and ecological un-sustainability and inequality is capitalism (although not discounting pre-capitalist systems too). But I also see rapid population growth as a factor exacerbating already existing problems.
Historically promoted and encouraged by capitalism and its ideologues (because it means more producers, consumers, warriors, believers), high birth rates have nevertheless brought high costs socially and ecologically and have been especially damaging for women – who have mostly struggled against them to control and limit their fertility.
Maybe some overkill in the Marx/Malthus debates has deterred future Marxists from paying much attention to population. However, when they have taken it up, it has often been one-sidedly, not fully recognising the impact of population policies socially and ecologically [Brenner] In addition they often want to keep women’s rights separate from both demographic and development issues.
This seems to be TMP’s approach. This means that when they explain the ‘demographic transition’ it is presented as happening more or less automatically. For instance, poverty reduction is seen as necessarily and always resulting in lower fertility rates. Hence ‘development is the best contraceptive’.
This ignores high birth rates in some wealthy countries (Saudi Arabia), or the continued above replacement level in the USA. Secondly, and pertinently, their one-sidedness leaves out the important role of women’s own struggles in gaining the reproductive rights and resources which have ensured the big drop in fertility levels in the North. Nor do we hear much of women’s movements around these issues in the global South.
In many countries in the South agriculture and industry has been geared to export and to benefit only local elites. This has created huge social and ecological problems. Nevertheless, women often remain under great pressure from state, religion, culture and clan to have more and more children. This exacerbates existing problems, as rapidly growing families are forced to degrade their own environments to get food, water and fuel just to survive.
A better understanding of this situation might have led Ian and Simon to a more sympathetic view of the 1994 UN Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, and the Action Plan resulting from it. This was not a top-down programme, imposed from outside and harking back to coercive population controls, as they imply. On the contrary, Cairo was a response to what women themselves were asking for. As I discuss in my review of Laurie Mazur’s ‘A pivotal Moment’ its approach enabled women to set up centres where they could meet together, discuss and decide on their own needs and aspirations and those of their communities (and out of earshot of sometimes hostile partners)
Here constant childbearing and rearing was seen by most women as exhausting and as restricting their and their children’s educational and job prospects. So they wanted the rights and means to control their own fertility. In addition gaining skills and a different future through something like small-scale organic farming and trading was seen as a way out from a poverty and high fertility trap, as well as beneficial to the wider community [and the planet!].
In other words, women themselves linked the issues of population and development.
I don’t disagree with Ian and Simon’s and their co-thinkers advocacy of ‘a woman’s right to choose’, nor with the sentiments behind the current ‘ecological justice is the best contraceptive’ [Vandana Shiva]. But in some ways bolder but equally pertinent were the old National Abortion Campaign in Britain’s ‘Every child a wanted child’ and ‘Not the church, not the state, women must decide their fate’.
This approach linked women’s individual needs and rights to the wider social issues. But, whichever approach you support, people usually need resources, skills and information to realize their wants and aspirations. These the Cairo programs provided. They are what I would call population policies which empower women. If either international bodies or national governments promote them, then I support this – as have women in countries as varied as Bangladesh and Philipines. Here many women’s wellbeing, status and prospects have greatly improved, as well the birth rate decreasing.
So, I agree with TMP on the need for an alternative development model to capitalism, one that is socially and ecologically sustainable and just. But this must also address and integrate women’s specific needs, interests and wishes. We can then work out something which is good for women, good for our communities, our societies and good for our planet!
Regarding Phil W’s comments – Alan
Regarding Phil W’s comments. No one in this debate (as far as I am aware) sees aging as a ‘problem’. We all want to see people having a full and healthy life span, which would be a major victory for human kind. What Dave B has raised is whether we would support the indefinite extension of the human life span if medical science came up with it. I have no idea if it is scientifically possible, but I would be reluctant to accept that it is not. Phil has warned us against discussing this, but I think he is wrong. I don’t think we should be frightened to discuss these issues, we discuss everything else, and we would have to discuss them if a breakthrough on this was made. Whether it would be better as a separate discussion is another matter, but let’s not have another taboo subject.
On the issue of aging (as opposed to the indefinite extension of the life span) it is clear enough that longer life expectancy is a major driver of population increase, as are the factors which bring it about: reductions in infant mortality, improvements in health care, sanitation, disease control and so on. Phil was quick to point this out when I failed to mention this (for short hand purposes) in one of my earlier texts. All these things are advances that we should celebrate, but we should also discuss the implications of rising population and develop an approach it.
On sustainability Phil says: “It’s already been said many times by those who oppose Alan’s analysis in this debate that it is agreed that “rising population” is “unsustainable” under capitalism.” Of course many things are unsustainable under capitalism so lets not have a false debate. I am saying more than that. I am saying that whilst capitalism compounds the problem the current rate of increase would also be unsustainable under socialism. We would still have to consider the issue of population, its impact on the planet, and also what we would do, based on free choice, to stabilise it.
Phil’s conclusion from his position on this is bleak indeed: that nothing can be done this side of the revolution, which he has implied before in previous texts. He puts it this way: “So, to reiterate, “population growth” has always been “unsustainable” under capitalism. That begs the question of what kind of solution is possible under this system. To which my answer is none: as long as the system exists, there will be starvation and calamitous ecological destruction.” I have already taken this up in my text Reply to Jane Phil and Susan in IDB No 4 so I won’t repeat it here.
Phil says that Dave B ‘bangs on’ about biodiversity (I don’t know if the pun was intended) and that Dave should understand that his (Phil’s) side of the argument ‘are arguing for a solution to this issue as well’. Well, if this is the case it is not reflected in Phil’s writings on the subject. In A Reply to Alan Thornett (which I gather Phil drafted) he only refers to it in relation to the excessive use of herbicides, pesticides and fertilisers and rebukes me for suggesting that the wider issue of ‘human actively’ was responsible: “we presume this is a slip on his part’ he says. Well it was not a slip. It was to argue that the size of the human population itself puts a huge pressure on biodiversity in a multiplicity of ways – even with a carbon free energy system. I hope Dave B continues to ‘bang on’ about it! I certainly intend to.
On land I was simply responding to the contention that land is not finite. I was arguing that it is indeed finite unless you reclaim it from the sea, or the salt marshes or the mud flats. The matter of the use and treatment of existing land and whether it can be used to feed 10 or 12 billion people without the use of fertilisers and factory farming is something I discuss at some length in my Reply to Jane Phil and Susan.
Finally on reproductive rights. Phil says that we all agree on the provision of reproductive right, and as a general principle that is true. It depends who you mean by ‘all’. Ian Angus and Simon Butler (who my articles are mainly directed towards) say that they are in favour of the provision of such rights but then denounce Cairo conference and its Action Plan (which called on all governments to implement comprehensive reproductive rights programmes, by 2015, based on a woman’s right to choose) and quote extensively from Vandana Shiva on it who virulently opposes the Action Plan and appears to oppose the provision of reproductive services per se – as I argue in my IV article.
Rising global population: an important issue for socialists.
A rejoinder to Jane, Phil and Susan.
Alan (April 2013)
As ecosocialists our starting point on the question of population should be—as it has been on a range of other ecological issues—to re-examine the traditional positions of the left and challenge them if they are wrong.
Human beings are a part of nature and have an obligation to live in harmony with it, rather than becoming the destroyers of biodiversity. This should be our approach as ecosocialists. This means recognising that the current rate of population increase is unsustainable. It means looking towards a society in which humankind can exist alongside other species without setting itself against their very existence. Such an approach is not anti-people but entirely pro-people. It is not a reactionary objective but a wholly progressive one. It is good for the planet and its biodiversity.
The global population has almost tripled in the last 60 years—from 2.5bn in 1950 to over 7bn today! This is a rise of around 70 or 80 million every year or the equivalent of adding the population of the USA to the planet every four years. Nor does this annual rate of increase show any signs of going down—in fact it has been remarkably consistent over the past 60years (i.e. 1950s 48.3m, 60s 70.7m, 70s 74.7m, 80s 82.4m, 90s 80.4m, 20s 76.5m). Meanwhile, nearly half the current world population (i.e. 3bn people) are under 25 years old—the biggest ever new generation—which is a huge basis for further growth.
According to the UN the global population will reach somewhere between 8 and 11 billion by mid-century. This is further compounded when you take into account that the per capita consumption of food, water, meat, and manufactured goods is increasing faster than the population itself.
It is argued that the global population could stabilise by the end of the century—i.e. in 80 or 90 years time. But even this is far from certain. Population predictions are notoriously difficult to get right because of changing economic and social conditions. Such a situation should at the very least invoke the precautionary principle: i.e. that we should assume that the population will continue to rise until we see reliable evidence to the contrary. This is particularly the case given the latest evidence on the advanced stage global warming has reached.
John Bellamy Foster in an article in the February 2013 Monthly Review says the following:
‘The world at present is fast approaching a climate cliff. Science tells us that an increase in the global average temperature of 2°C (3.6° F) constitutes the planetary tipping point with respect to climate change, leading to irreversible changes beyond human control. A 2°C rise is sufficient to melt a significant portion of the world’s ice due to feedbacks that will hasten the melting. It will thus set the course to an ice-free world. Sea level will rise. Numerous islands will be threatened along with coastal regions throughout the globe. Extreme weather events (droughts, storms, floods) will be far more common. The paleoclimatic record shows that an increase in global average temperature of several degrees means that 50 percent or more of all species—plants and animals—will be driven to extinction.’
Interestingly Al Gore, in his new book The Future, also takes up the issue of population from an ecological point of view, and he puts it stronger than I do. He also points to a pending tipping point and argues the following: ‘The cumulative impact of surging per capita consumption, rapid population growth, human dominance of every ecological system, and the forcing of pervasive biological changes worldwide has created the very real possibility, according to 22 prominent biologists and ecologists in a 2012 study in Nature, that we may soon reach a dangerous tipping point.’
I am not suggesting that Al Gore is an authority in this, and he does not have our agenda of course, but it is interesting that he is raising this issue.
1) The debate
Jane, Phil and Susan will not be surprised that I disagree with the critique they have made of my discussion paper ‘The rising population of the planet: an eco-socialist and feminist issue’ which appeared in the Internal Discussion Bulletin 1 (new series) in September 2012. Their response: Ecosocialism and Population – A Reply to Alan Thornett (in IDB2 December 2012 ) is, in effect, a defence of Too Many People? (TMP) by Ian Angus and Simon Butler, which I reviewed, from a critical standpoint, on the SR website in January 2012, http://socialistresistance.org/?p=3013) which theorises the idea that there is nothing to worry about.
They repeat what I see as two of TMP’s key misconceptions. The first is that the size of the global population is irrelevant to the ecology of the planet. The second is that the resources of the planet are not, in fact, finite. Like TMP the only resource issues they raise in relation to rising population are energy and food. They make virtually no mention of biodiversity and the mass extinction of species—or the sixth great extinction as many biologists call it—which, in my view, is the most serious upshot of rapidly rising population.
They also reject my contention that rising population is an important issue for the left to address. In fact they insist that it is neither under-discussed or an issue of great importance. In the first sentence of their text they say: “The purpose of this document is to illustrate our main arguments against Alan’s view that population is an important issue for socialists.” I think they are wrong about this.
They say that I have not made clear why I wrote a paper on population. It was, and is, an attempt to open a new discussion on the subject—which I think is long overdue. I hope I can convince comrades of the line I am arguing, but let’s have the discussion. Maybe we can develop the arguments in the course of it.
A major point of agreement, between the comrades and myself, of course, is that it is the capitalist mode of production, with its destructive drive for profit and its obsession with growth, which makes rising human population levels so destructive. This is not something I concede, as the comrades suggest, but something I insist on. This does not mean, however, that unlimited population growth can be sustained by the ecosystems of the planet, even if the ravages of capitalism are removed. This is why we have to make the ecological struggle an integral part of the struggle against capitalism today.
The comrades argue that there is a ‘traditional position’ on population on the Marxist and wider left (along the lines that they argue) which I reject and which I am trying to change. This is true, and I am, and it is right to do so. We should not automatically defer to ‘traditional’ positions—particularly where ecological questions are concerned—but subject them to critical examination.
The left, including the Marxist left, have traditionally avoided the issue of population except to oppose population control and population controllers when they have emerged. No problem with that, of course. We all in this debate oppose population control. This approach, however, has been, and is, far too narrow and defensive, and in my view, has distorted the debate on population for along time. It has also inhibited the development of a progressive approach to the issue.
In any case the extent to which this particular traditional position is a considered one—for most of those who hold it—or a left over from old debates with Malthusianism is far from clear. What is clear is that many on the left avoid the issue of population because they find it an uncomfortable subject to raise. They are made defensive by the old debates.
We should insist, on the contrary, that the rapidly rising population is a completely legitimate, and important, issue for socialists to discuss—just like any other aspect of world politics. This is not in some way anti-people (or anti-life)—which appears to be the implication of some of the arguments set out in TMP—any more than it is anti-people to discuss and fight for reproductive rights, which also result in less people existing by avoiding unwanted pregnancies.
The ecological crisis has become far more acute since the debates of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, when many of the arguments defended by the comrades (and by TMP) were shaped. It is now clearer than ever that climate change threatens a catastrophe of unknown proportions. Carbon emissions have increased and global warming has accelerated. The seas are rising, the glaciers are retreating and the deserts are expanding. Rising population is not the main driver of climate change but it clearly compounds the problem.
The fact—as the comrades rightly point out—that the population increase of the past 50 years has been bolstered by a big fall in the global birth and death rates (particularly infant mortality) and an increase in life expectancy (mainly in the North)—which are major gains for humanity—does not mean that the current rate of increase is sustainable or that it will not continue. Nor does it mean that the empowerment of women (worldwide) to control their own fertility could not be an important factor in stabilising it—whilst improving the lives of women at the same time.
2) Empowerment
There are plenty of reactionary ‘solutions’ to rising population based on population control and coercion, which we should completely oppose. It is crucial, therefore, that we develop a clear way for forward on this based on human rights and social justice. This means the empowerment of women. It means supporting women in their struggle to control their own fertility. It means ensuring that they can make free and informed decisions as to when they have children, how many, and the spacing between them. It means women having free access to family planning services and the right to an abortion when necessary.
Such empowerment would reduce family size, and therefore the population, or at least the rate of increase in population, and would likely improve the lives of millions of women in the process. This was the central point of my previous paper and it is the central point of this one. It is a win-win situation.
Interestingly Al Gore proposes a similar approach, which shows that it is having a broader appeal. He stresses the following: ‘The education of girls… The empowerment of women in society, to the point where their opinions are heard and respected, and they have the ability to participate in making the decisions with their husbands and partners about family size and other issues important to their families.’ Plus ‘the availability of fertility management knowledge and technique, so as women can effectively choose how many children they wish to have and the spacing of their children.’
To these demands we should add support for women’s struggles to lift themselves out of poverty and to challenging the influence of religion and other conservative influences, such as patriarchal or communal pressure, which denies them the right to choose and which result in large families that many of them would not have if they had genuine choice. These are important objectives in and of themselves, which we would support whether or not they exert a downward pressure on the birthrate. One is not dependent on the other. Rising population levels simply give them an added urgency.
The comrades argue that because I talk about ‘giving’ women the means to control their own fertility by making contraception and abortion services available to them I am opposed to the socialist feminist conception of the self-organisation of women. This, they say, is the ‘central methodological problem’ of my text!
This is not the case. They have erected a semantic argument by taking my use of the word ‘giving’ out of context and using it to imply that I am arguing for reproductive rights to be handed down as a gift to women rather than supporting women in their struggle for such rights. It is clear, however (including with the quotation the comrades use), that my whole piece was written from the point of view of the self-organisation of women and the need for solidarity with the struggles they conduct.
My previous paper could hardly be clearer on this:
‘Not that women are passive observers in all this. The right to control their own fertility is something women have historically demanded and fought for, and continue to do so today—including in those parts of the world with the highest birthrates. They are the active agency of change in this field and this struggle has always included the fight against reactionary measures of enforced control. Reproductive rights were a lynchpin of the feminist movement of the 1970s and 80s. We should also remember how in struggling for their own specific interests, women often also become the agents of wider change.’
I am not arguing—as I made clear in my previous paper—that the stabilisation of the global population, would, in itself, resolve the ecological crisis or halt global warming. It would not. Such things will need a range of ecological, economic and social measures if they are to be achieved. The chances of success, however, in these objectives, would be better if the global population was stabilised rather than if it continued to rise. It would be easier to provide food, fresh water, energy, and waste disposal and protect the plant’s crucial bio-diversity with a population of 8bn rather than 9, or 10 billion people.
3) Population is a feminist issue
The comrades reject my (and Sheila’s) contention that the issue of rising population is first and foremost a feminist issue. They put it this way: ‘Nor, just because women bear children, should we see population as ‘a feminist issue’.
But it is precisely because women bear children and thereby physically create each generation, whilst men don’t, that makes population a feminist issue. Women also take the main responsibility for nurturing each generation, whilst men don’t. The extra burden that arises from bigger families—feeding and caring, looking after the home, and tending the sick and infirm—falls disproportionately on women. In fact over 80% of all domestic work is still undertaken by women. In some parts of the Global South the women grow and produce the food as well as cook it and put it on the table.
The rate of increase (or otherwise) of the global population is determined by the size of the families women have. This in turn is directly related to whether they have access to contraception, abortion, and education and whether they are exposed to reactionary ideologies that oppose their access to these things. These are all issues that have long been the preoccupation of the feminist movement. We have rightly supported slogans that say abortion is a woman’s right to choose—the same is true for contraception.
4) Are the resources of the planet finite?
An important issue in this debate is whether the resources of the planet are finite? My contention is that they are. That rapid population growth, and rising consumer expectations, are threatening the availability of a range of key natural resources. The comrades don’t agree. The planet, they say, can sustain the current rate of population increase providing ‘enough money/labour is thrown at the problem’.
They put it this way:
‘Currently, if you damage the soil enough, you render land useless and need to move on. Eventually, all agricultural land will be used up. But this is a reflection of capitalist relations of production: the exhausted land is only so because the market cannot support the costs of remediation. There are things which can be done to recover damaged land. The same approach applies to other resources: water can be used more efficiently if enough money/labour is thrown at the problem, production and recycling can be made more efficient and so on.’
Yet humanity is reaching a point where the expansion of agriculture is a direct threat to biodiversity, demand is rising for food, fresh water, energy and commodities of all kinds. To suggest that the rapidly rising global population is not a factor in this, or that it can be offset by a few efficiencies and improved recycling, is remarkably complacent.
Not all resources are finite, of course, as the comrades point out. There are renewables and resources we would prefer were not exploited, like fossil fuels. There are also, however, a swathe of key resources, which are indispensible to the basics of modern life (even modern life organised better than it is now) that are finite and to which there is no alternative. Fresh water, land and topsoil are finite, living space is finite, the resources of the oceans are finite—and are being depleted at an alarming rate—and many of the mineral resources required to sustain industrial production, medicines, transport, and communications depend are finite and are running out.
The demand for water is set to increase dramatically both from rising population levels and rising expectations. Demand is increasing not only for drinking water but for food production—which accounts for 60% of water use. Fracking for deep shale gas is taking vast amounts of water for every well brought into production. The production of biofuels from palm oil is taking huge amounts of water out of food production.
Yet ground water aquifers—many of which only regenerate at a rate of 0.5% per 500 years—are being depleted at an alarming rate, with the rate of shrinkage doubling during the last century. This has accelerated further in recent years with pressure from emergent economies such as China and India and from new drilling and pumping technology. Over 25% of all river water is now extracted before it reaches the ocean, many of them dry up before they get there. One in six people on the planet get their drinking water from glaciers and snowpack, on the worlds mountain ranges, which are receding. They do not regenerate and when they are gone the water they supply will disappear with them.
The capacity of the planet to absorb waste is also finite. Al Gore quotes the World Bank that the per capita production of garbage alone from urban residents in the world is now 2.6 pounds per person per day, and is projected to increase rapidly. When you add to this is the waste produced by energy production, the making of chemicals, manufacturing, paper production and agricultural waste the volume is enormous. The volume of waste created every day weighs more than the entire 7bn inhabitants of the planet.
5) Biodiversity
The most important finite resource of all, which the comrades hardly mention, is the planet’s biodiversity—in both animals and plants. In the last fifty years (as I argued in my previous paper) human beings have had a greater impact on the earth’s ecosystems than in any period in history. We are now losing species a thousand times faster than the average during the preceding 65 million years—and once a species is gone it is gone.
This is due directly to the over-exploitation and pollution of the natural resources of the planet caused by human activity. Global warming is destroying habitats, altering the timing of animal migrations and plant flowerings, and shifting species toward the poles and to higher altitudes.
The oceans have absorbed about half of the carbon dioxide emitted by humans in the last 200 years. The acidification of the oceans has already resulted in mass ocean extinction events in some parts of the oceans—in parts of the Baltic Sea for example. It is interfering with currents that move vital nutrients upward from the deep sea. Stocks of every species of fully-grown wild fish have shrunk by 90% in the last 50 years. About 30% of the seafood stocks available in 1950 have collapsed.
Moreover, because the extinction of one species often leads to the extinction of others a domino effect is created which accelerates the process.
Nor, as Dave B points out, did this process start with the rise of capitalism, despite the driving force it represents in this today. Pre-capitalist systems of agriculture in particular were already degrading the ecology of and the biodiversity of the planet before capitalism arrived.
6) Can enough food be produced?
It is possible, but unwise, to dismiss fears about the global food supply by pointing to the fact that at the moment enough food is produced to feed the 7bn inhabitants of the planet if it was efficiently and equitably distributed and not subject to the ravages of the market, with it’s hugely wasteful distribution systems.
It is also possible, though again unwise, to dismiss such fears by pointing to the false or premature predictions made in the past, such as those of Malthus or Ehrlich—as I mention in my previous paper. One of the factors which upset their calculations was that ever bigger agribusiness, and ever more chemical fertilisers, have until now largely offset rising population, and rising per-capita consumption, by increased productivity. This was fragile in the extreme, however, as the food shortages of 2008 and 20011 testify. It left hundreds of millions at starvation level, but it did massively increase food production.
Continuing to increase food production on this basis, however, is not an option. The fact is that the current world population, of which nearly a billion are malnourished or starving, is fed by a system of production that is destroying the ecosystems of the planet.
The key question, therefore, is not just whether enough food can be churned out by ever-bigger agribusiness and ever more chemical fertilisers, or even whether it can be distributed across the globe in a reasonably efficient and sustainable way, but whether it can be produced and distributed without destroying the ecology of the planet. In other words even if it was possible to feed 10 or 11 billion people by ever more intensive factory farming/agribusiness, though that is far from certain, what would it do to the planet in terms of biodiversity, pollution and food miles?
On top of this there are the effects of global warming. Topsoil is being eroded at unsustainable rates—and topsoil only regenerates at a rate of 2.5 centimetres in 500 years. Desertification is depleting the grasslands. Erratic and extreme weather patterns result in droughts, floods and fires. Land is being diverted from food to ethanol and biofuels and absorbed into urban sprawl.
The fact is that agricultural production based on ever-bigger agribusiness is unsustainable. Climate change and extreme weather events mean that agriculture could enter a major crisis in the medium term with untold consequences for billions of people.
I am not suggesting that the comrades support agribusiness, of course, when they argue that feeding an increasing population is not a problem, because they do not. What I am saying is that I find it hard to accept that there is an alternative when it comes to feeding 8, 9, or 10 billion people. Claims that this can be done by a massive expansion of small-scale production without the use of chemical fertilisers are completely unconvincing. The amount of land and water which would be needed, for such a project, would have an devastating impact on biodiversity even if it was possible.
The alternative that we have been increasingly putting forward is food sovereignty—a positive example of how we have all used what I would call a transitional rather than maximalist approach to ecosocialist demands—which is a much better alternative at almost every level. Food sovereignty means those who till the land owning it, it means the growth of organic agriculture which is better both for the soil and for the people who eat the crops and it restores biodiversity when compared to the devastation caused by mono-cropping.
There are serious limits to this, however, because small scale farming without chemical fertilisers and pesticides requires far more land per ton of food than intensive farming. This is the way forward to sustainable food production but it is not an answer to ever rising population figures.
7) Carbon emissions and the Global South
The comrades seek to minimise the impact that the higher fertility levels of the Global South have on global carbon emissions, which they say is ‘small beer’. They argue that whilst the impoverished populations of the South have a higher birth rate than the affluent North they have a much smaller carbon footprint—of around 1 metric ton a year. The task, therefore, the comrades argue, is not to reduce their footprint but that of the Northern populations.
Whilst this is true to imply that rising population levels in the Global South do not matter, in my view’ is wrong. Of course the high polluting populations of the North are the top priority as far as reducing carbon emissions are concerned. But we have to address both, North and South, because they are ultimately a part of the same problem.
In any case we live in a fast changing world. Populations trapped in poverty today aspire to change their situation—and we are with them in their effort to do so. In some cases countries with the lowest carbon footprint today have the highest economic growth rates and therefore a big potential for such change. China’s footprint is already approaching 7 metric tonnes, after just 2 decades of capitalist growth. There is little point in assessing the impact of carbon footprints over the next 50 years on the basis of a snapshot of the situation as it is today.
There is another factor in this as well. As I argued in my previous paper, rising population is not just about carbon emissions but the total impact of the human population on the ecology of the planet. Whilst it is true that the carbon footprint of the South is much smaller than that of the North if we talk about the ecological footprint—i.e. the total per capita impact on the environment including soil erosion and depletion, deforestation and the impact on biodiversity—the footprint of the South becomes far more significant.
Total numbers, therefore, matter.
8) Does empowerment ‘target’ women of the South?
The comrades also continue to insist, along with TMP, that to call for women in the Global South to have access to reproductive services is in some way to negatively target them.
They put it this way: ‘A family planning programme that is in part based on population issues has to end up “blaming” individuals (women, in particular) for their “contribution” to environmental degradation through reproduction. This is a strange concept. As I argue in my previous paper what empowerment actually targets is the appalling conditions under which women of the Global South are forced to live and the denial of the right control their own fertility to which they are subjected.
There is a huge demand for reproductive services in the impoverished countries of the South. As I said previously more than 220m women in the Global South are denied family planning services—which can be (and often is) the difference between life and death. There are 80m unintended pregnancies a year—of which 46m end in abortions. 74,000 women die every year as a result of failed back-street abortions—a disproportionate number of these in the Global South. Every year, around 288,000 women die from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth—and 99% of them occur in developing countries. Many of these are as a result of multiple pregnancies close together with inadequate or non-existent medical facilities.
Programmes and agencies offering reproductive services have a responsibility to do so on the merits of the improvement they will bring to the lives of the women involved, even if they are aware that it might exert a downward pressure on the birthrate, and this must be enforced. Any effect reproductive services may have in reducing the birth global rate is subordinate to that objective. That is what the right to choose means. How can it be a form of oppression to campaign for women to have access to rights and facilities that women have historically fought for?
The comrades even argue that since the provision of reproductive rights would be unlikely to stabilise the global population by 2030 (which they say is my target, I don’t know why) it would automatically lead to coercive measures! That does not make any sense either. Why would it if coercive methods are ruled out from the outset?
9) Who should deliver reproductive services?
The delivery of reproductive services (on which the comrades say I am silent) is the responsibility of governments, rather than mega-rich individuals or charitable organisations. Such provision should be readily available, free of charge, and devoid of any form of coercion. The Cairo conference in 1994—the International Conference on Population and Development organised by the UN)—which is so roundly denounced by TMP, was an important step forwards in this regard because it called on governments to make family planning services universally available, on the basis of free choice and the empowerment of women, over the next 20 years, i.e. by 2015.
It produced an Action Programme which explains its approach this way: ‘Key to this new approach is empowering women and providing them with more choices through expanded access to education and health services and promoting skill development and employment. The Programme advocates making family planning universally available by 2015, or sooner, as part of a broadened approach to reproductive health and rights, provides estimates of the levels of national resources and international assistance that will be required, and calls on Governments to make these resources available.’
The Action Programme is based entirely on the right to choose but if any of the initiatives which come out of it adopt coercive methods they should be shut down. To oppose all such programmes, however, because some might go off the rails makes no sense. The upshot of this would be to deny large numbers of impoverished women the reproductive services that they desperately need. Transparency and vigilance over such programmes are the safeguards that are needed.
Nor should we oppose reproductive right programmes simply because they are funded by rich individuals such as the Gates’ foundation or by charities. Such programmes are not within the political or social framework we would advocate, of course. But providing they are based on free choice and socially and medically accepted practices they are a lot better than nothing. Impoverished women flock to them in vast numbers and to oppose them would be to deny them the vital facilities they need. It would also fly in the face of the scale of the problem that exists in these impoverished communities and would reduce the call for the provision of reproductive rights to an abstract slogan.
10) Reproductive rights
The problem with insisting, as the comrades do, that the provision of reproductive rights inevitably leads to coercive methods if one of the objectives is to reduce population growth is that it can lead its advocates to find all kinds objections to such programmes, in order to make their case, and even to opposing them per se—and under conditions where there is a desperate need to be met. It can also lead to some frankly alarmist claims about contraceptive methods.
The comrades quote US academic Betsy Hartmann in this regard. Hartmann is a long time partisan of the TMP position. She argues—in her book Reproductive Rights and Wrongs published in 1987—that the idea that rising population is any kind of problem is nonsense, that reproductive rights per se are a conspiracy to persuade women to have fewer children against their best interests and that most of the women involved do not want them. The provision of contraception, she argues, is a substitute for social change.
She goes on to warn against the use of implants such as Depro Provera on the basis that they do not prevent HIV infection! She puts it this way: “For over a decade now, studies have pointed to a possible link between Depo-Provera use and increased risk of acquiring HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS.
This claim is irresponsible, in my view, since it could deter women from using the contraceptives they need. It is self-evident that implants will not prevent HIV infection, or STDs infection, any more than the pill will prevent them—unless used with a condom (which is the only method that will prevent such infections). In fact the manufacturer, Pfizer, specifically warns users that implants will not prevent HIV or other STDs unless used with a condom.
To say, however, that there is a ‘link’ between Depo-Provera use and increased risk of acquiring HIV; in other words to imply that HIV might be caught from using Depo-Provera is misleading and wrong.
The comrades, themselves, quote Pfizer as saying that women should consider implants ‘only if other methods of birth control are not right for you’. This is because all chemical/hormonal contraceptives like implants and the pill have side effects, unlike condoms that do not. In the case of an implant a procedure would be necessary to remove it before its planned term of use. This should not imply, however, that women should be discouraged to choose these methods if they suit their personal circumstances or that only condoms should be made available to women—which seems to be the burden of what Hartmann is saying.
Chemical methods are a valid option for reproductive rights programmes providing women are fully informed as to the implications or side effects of them. Women have a right, not only to access to contraception per se, but to those methods which best meet their needs—and that includes methods which have side effects if that is what they think is right for them. Given the devastating consequences that unwanted pregnancies can have for many women they often prefer methods that are a better protection against pregnancy but have other side effects that they will have to deal with.
Some women prefer implants because they don’t trust men to use condoms, or because they don’t feel that they are organised enough for other methods, or because they fear being pressurised into unprotected sex, or because they are so worried about pregnancy that they want to be doubly sure. It is hard to see why they should be denied such a choice—providing it is a genuine choice, and providing any dangers and/or side effects are clearly pointed out to them by the manufacturers and by the providers.
11) An integrated approach
The comrades appear to reject the Cairo Action Programme (along with TMP) because it (rightly in my view) takes an integrated approach that embraces women’s empowerment, development, demography, and reproductive rights. The UN puts it this way: ‘the three main areas of focus—reproductive health, women’s empowerment, and population and development issues—are inextricably linked’.
The comrades quote the Indian feminist and environmentalist Vandana Shiva, in this regard, who has long argued for the separation of population and reproductive rights as a first principle. Vandana Shiva has a long and distinguished record on ecological issues in the Global South that can only be admired. On population, however, she has long been a key protagonist, in this debate, along the lines of TMP. She has been influential in shaping the debate on the left for the past 20 years.
In my view, she takes a one-sided approach that denies that women play an independent role in fertility patterns and therefore in population levels— suggesting that they simply respond to social and economic conditions.
Shiva wrote a blistering denunciation of the Cairo conference and its Action Programme denouncing it as concentrating far too much on the provision of reproductive rights and not enough on development – which she called ‘biological reductionism’. She was heavily critical of Western women at the conference, including Western feminists, and Western women’s organisations, from this standpoint.
Of course lifting impoverished women out of poverty is a major part of their emancipation and empowerment, as I argued in my previous paper. It is wrong, however, to counterpose this to the provision of reproductive rights. We have to support both struggles.
In any case the Cairo Action Programme was not handed down to women as a gift from the UN elites. It was hard fought for by feminists and feminist organisations in the teeth of opposition from pro-life forces organised by the Catholic church, which continued to demonise it long after the conference was over. Feminists were sharply divided over Cairo.
Shiva’s critique of the conference, however, is not just critical of the provision of reproductive rights to third world women if one of the objectives was to reduce the birthrate, but of the provision of reproductive rights per se. She does not have a single positive thing to say about reproductive rights, either contraception or abortion. Every such reference is negative. She creates a false counter-position between economic security and reproductive rights. Her theme is that the promotion of such rights is being used as an alternative to development and it should stop.
In fact her attitude to reproductive rights per se is reflected in the quote the comrades use from her in their text. In that quote, after making some useful points about multiple influences on family size she goes on: ‘Population growth is a symptom of economic insecurity, so unless you address it as an economic issue of justice, if you keep treating pregnancy as a disease needing a technological intervention, contraceptive pills, you never get it right because you will have to violate women reproductive rights.’
This is a strange argument since although lifting women out of poverty opens the door to empowerment it does not necessarily reduce the use of reproductive services since, as in the affluent North, women would be better placed to fight for such services and to make them more readily available.
12) Does poverty cause (or require) large families?
The comrades argue that poverty creates large families because large families are needed to provide labour, including child labour, and help in old age. That as women are lifted out of poverty they will automatically have les children—that development is the best contraceptive.
I don’t agree with this. In fact reproductive rights have still had to be fought for in rich countries where development has taken place and have been won more or less successfully, often depending on the strength of opposition from religion and other reactionary ideologies.
Impoverished women do, of course, come under great pressure to have ever-larger families for these reasons, but it is far from an automatic process—fertility is not economically determined. Whilst poverty is clearly one of the factors involved in fertility levels it is far from the only factor. Women come great under pressure from religion, patriarchy, and cultural factors, which pressurise them against the use of contraception, independent of economic circumstances. This varies from country to country, of course. In Catholic Italy for example religious pressure is outweighed by other factors but in Saudi Arabia it has a huge effect.
Nor do large families relieve the pressure on women bringing them up. Women still perform at least 80% of domestic labour, and more in some parts of the world. Yet every new pair of new hands, which provides extra labour, is also another mouth to feed. This exacerbates existing pressures on women with those responsibilities. Expanding families, moreover, are forced to degrade their own environment in order to get food water and fuel to survive.
There is another problem with an economic determinist view as well. That it that it can lead to the conclusion that rising population will disappear once poverty is abolished—though when that will be is any ones guess.
13) Does SR have a position on rising population?
Whilst SR (or the ISG before it) has not had anything like a full discussion on population it did adopt a position on it at its AGM in September 2007—something I had forgotten when I wrote my previous paper.
It was adopted in the form of an amendment by Sheila to Savage Capitalism—a defining (or founding) text for SR, and a milestone in our transition to ecosocialism, which was adopted by that AGM. It became section 5 of Savage Capitalism. It advocated an empowerment of women position broadly similar to that which Sheila and I have argued subsequently. In section 5 entitled ‘Population growth and the empowerment of women’ It said the following:
‘World population is forecast to rise from a current 6bn to 9bn by mid-century, if not before. Such levels are unsustainable under capitalism. So the debate about population control is already with us. If Malthusian, misogynist and racist solutions are not to triumph, ecosocialist solutions based on overcoming poverty and empowering women have to be fought for.
‘Whilst it is true that high birth rates generally accompany poverty and ignorance, most poor women do not actually want to spend their lives in childbirth and rearing. So a central demand of woman’s movements in both North and South has always been for access to safe and reliable (preferably free) abortion. Poor people often have large families as an insurance against poverty in old age. When people become richer, birth rates go down.’
Savage capitalism, as amended, was then included in the second edition of Ecosocialism or Barbarism that we published in February 2008, edited by Sheila and Jane.
I am not arguing that this should determine our position today, of course not. We need a new and full discussion. But it is not true, as the comrades imply, that to the extent that SR has had a position on population it has been the one they advocate.
After that AGM a debate opened up in our press on the issue of population that went on intermittently for over two years. Phil (W) wrote a two-part article in Socialist Outlook magazine—in the Autumn 2007 and February 2008 editions (issues 13 and 14)—on the lines that he and the comrades (and TMP) argue today. In fact these articles were entitled Too many People?—a title later adopted by Angus and Butler.
Issue 57 of SR magazine in 2009 (SR and the ISG had by now merged) then carried an article by Sheila supporting the line of her amendment—that we should see population as a feminist issue. Jane replied to this in issue 60 arguing that: ‘Population control is a feminist issue: only in so far as we should oppose it’.
Sheila, however, had not been talking about population control (which she opposes) but about the empowerment of women—which is a very different matter. She had put it this way: ‘So we need not ignore the issue of population growth, or see it as irrelevant or uncomfortable. Instead, woman’s real needs, interests, wisdom and empowerment need to be brought to the fore. Human numbers then tend to take care of themselves, coinciding with the interests of our planet.’
At the 2009 SR AGM Sheila and I tabled an amendment on population, from an empowerment position. This time it was contentious with some comrades. A procedural resolution was agreed to the effect that it was too contentious to go to conference at short notice and it was withdrawn from the agenda. Population has not been discussed by the EC or NC of SR since then—though I would propose that the incoming NC takes a discussion on it after the conference.
The discussion continued, however, in the SR magazine. In SR 59 in May 2010 there was an exchange between Ian Angus (arguing the TMP position) and Kathy Lowe who put a view a similar to Sheila. She argued that: ‘Ecosocialists need not be squeamish about population issues. Looking at population policies as a part of the struggle for a just an environmentally sustainable alternative to capitalism makes sense.’
In the summer of 2010 SR 60 carried a more developed article by Sheila in the form of a review of Laurie Mazur’s new book A Pivotal Moment – Population Justice, and the Environmental Challenge. Sheila (rightly in my view) welcomed the book as a positive contribution and pointed to Mazur’s Call to Action which set out three priorities for population justice: the securing of universal access to family planning and other reproductive services; equal rights for girls and women; and reduced consumption in the affluent countries.
There were no further exchanges in SR publications on this until my review of TMP went on the SR website last year.
The comrades say that the issue was discussed by the ISG at its pre-16th World Congress conference in January 2009, shortly before SR was re-launched, around an amendment Sheila and I moved to the ecosocialism resolution. I think this is a misunderstanding (or a misremembering), however, since I can find no reference to it in the documentation of the conference.
There was a paragraph on population in the resolution, which the comrades quote in their text. As I remember it, however, neither this paragraph nor any amendment to it, was discussed either at the ISG pre-World Congress conference. Nor was it explicitly discussed at the World Congress itself, although it was in the resolution adopted.
I took the view, rightly or wrongly, that it was more important to get the resolution through the World Congress defining the FI as ecosocialist and making climate change more central to its work than having a debate on population around one paragraph in a 7,000-word document.
14) Why is there so little discussion on population on the left?
The comrades reject my contention that there has been a lack of discussion on rising population on the left or that it has been made into any kind of taboo subject by past debates.
I have never, however, seen an article on population in any of the publications of the SWP or of the SP—other than the SWPs positive review of TMP. The Green Party has an empowerment position but it has been on the back burner. Caroline Lucas, supports this and expresses from time to time, as does (as I understand it) Natalie Bennett. Sheila recently had as article on population and empowerment in the Green Party magazine which as not been challenged. The Green Left appears to support the TMP Position—though whether this is a result of a collective decision or just individually held views I don’t know.
If there is a lack of discussion, the comrades argue, it is because most people on the left regard the debate as settled—and settled along the lines they and TMP advocate. I don’t accept that. The spectre of Malthusianism, with all its intimidating connotations, has long been raised against anyone arguing that the rising global population is an important issue to address. This is what set the terms of the debate in the 60s and 70s. It also prompted me to write my review of TMP—which I saw as reinforcing (or resurrecting) this approach.
This approach was strongly challenged at the time by the Canadian Marxist and sociologist Wally Seccombe in an article in NLR (1/137) in January-February 1983. He argues that constant reference to the spectre of Malthus placed the debate on population beyond the pale of legitimate scrutiny and investigation, and that in doing so Marxists had abandoned the terrain to our enemies:
‘The primary form of Marxism’s traditional address to demography, dating back to Marx himself, has been through a virulent denunciation of its Malthusian versions. These polemics, however programmatically justified in countering largely reactionary Malthusian population policies, nevertheless have had an anaesthetic effect upon historical materialism—placing the demographic realm itself beyond the pale of legitimate scrutiny and investigation. In the process of dismissing Malthus and his successors, Marxists have abandoned the terrain to our enemies. And with the notable exception of some analysts of the Third World like Meillassoux, this abdication has been perpetuated within contemporary Marxism. Indeed there has been an unfortunate counterposition of the socio-economic to the demographic, as if these two dimensions of social relations were materially separable under capitalism or elsewhere, and as if the lines of causality ran, undialectically, only one way from the socio-economic and political to the demographic.’
The spectre of Malthus was a central message in Phil’s articles in 2007 and 2008. They were all about how Malthusianism was re-emerging in the form of people arguing, once again, that rising population was a problem and that it needed to be addressed. This message is also strongly reflected in the books the comrades recommend for further reading at the end of their text. In fact they are the same books Phil recommends in his articles.
The comrades say they recommend these books because of the stand they take against advocates of population control, who were prominent in these debates in the 60s, 70s and 80s. No problem with that. Population control should be opposed in any form it takes, whether it is the Chinese one child policy or coercive family planning programs. This, however, is not the only thing these books have to say.
15) Conflating the issues
A common thread in these books is that they all insist on conflating the issue of ‘population’ (i.e. the demography of the planet) and that of ‘population control’—which are totally different things. They all lump together, as advocates of population control, both those such as myself who reject such control and advocate instead the empowerment of women, and those who do indeed advocate population control—often by coercive measures. According to these books (and TMP of course) all such people are ‘populationists’.
This conflation denies the existence of the strand of opinion to which I, and others, subscribe. That is that rapidly rising populations is a problem and does have to be addressed, but only by socially progressive methods based on free choice and social justice: i.e. empowerment.
Nor would I give credit to these books, as the comrades do, for any of the progress which has been made in recent years towards seeing empowerment as the way forward, since they all opposed empowerment if the objective is to reduce the birth rate by improving the lives of the women involved. In fact these books all insist (along with TMP) that there is an inevitable slippery slope between the provision of reproductive rights and coercive population control if reducing the birth rate is seen as an objective as well as improving the lives of the women concerned.
Betsy Hartmann, in her book Reproductive Rights and Wrongs (written in 1987) is the most systematic advocate of this approach. She has no hesitation in linking this argument directly to Malthusianism:
‘To say that guaranteeing these two basic rights [i.e. lifting women out of poverty and giving them the means to determine their own fertility] will help to reduce population growth is not to say that these rights should be pursued for this purpose. On the contrary, once social reforms, women’s projects, and family planning programs are organised for the explicit goal of reducing population growth, they are subverted and ultimately fail. The individual no longer matters in the grand Malthusian scheme of things, which is by its very nature hostile to social change.’
Joe Hansen (an historic leader of the US SWP) who is the only Marxist writer on the comrade’s booklist (other than TMP) is by far the most extreme, and the crudest, advocate of this approach.
In his 1960 pamphlet ‘Too Many Babies – the Myth of the Population Explosion’ he not only denounces the evils of Malthus at great length but rants on about ‘neo-Malthusians’—i.e. anyone who thinks that rising population is a problem to be addressed—who advocate the sterilisation of the poor.
He ridicules the idea that rising population is the slightest problem for the planet (the global population has more than doubled since he wrote his pamphlet by the way) and argues that what the world was facing was not a population bomb but a food bomb: i.e. the massive over-production of food.
Remarkably he argues that enough land can be ‘reclaimed’ (whatever that means) for food production, which along with the application of modern farming techniques (i.e. factory farming), would allow enough food to be produced feed a global population of 28bn—yes 28bn, he actually says that! This would be, he explains, a ten-fold increase on the current (1960) population figures.
16) On the practical (campaigning) issues raised
The comrades raise several practical issues that they say demonstrate the problems involved in the positions I am arguing.
Firstly I am baffled by the question the comrades raise about the defence of the current abortion time limits in Britain since the defence of this limit does not reveal the contradiction in my position that the comrades claim. But yes, of course, SR could and should strongly defend the current time limits for abortion because we support a woman’s right to choose and the availability of the best possible abortion facilities are a crucial part of that right. The defence of the time limit is good for women and good for the planet.
The comrades question whether SR could (or should) raise the issue of rising population in the Campaign Against Climate Change (CACC) if my views were adopted. The comrades say we should not raise it because it would divert the campaign from the real issues.
I don’t agree. Yes, of course, we could and should raise it. In fact it has already been raised. There was a workshop on it at one of the CAC conference and it came up and was discussed at the recent meeting on the decline of the arctic sea ice when a question was raised as to whether rising population was a problem which was making the situation worse. Sheila intervened in the discussion and was approached afterwards by several young women who strongly supported what she had said. (The speaker, by the way, responded by saying that yes he did regard population is a serious problem because the current population can only be fed a systems of industrialised agriculture which is destroying the ecosystems.)
We should not attempt to get the CCC to adopt a particular view on population but it should be a part of the discussions that take place inside the campaign.
The comrades question whether we should support existing empowerment/population programmes such as that being initiated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? They say no because there is an implication in their position that population control is necessary’.
Again I don’t agree. Whilst this is not the way we would choose for such services to be delivered there is no reason why we should oppose it. As argued above to do so would deprive huge numbers of impoverished women vital services they need which might not be available elsewhere. Of course if any kind of coercion can be identified we should denounce it and refuse support – but not on the basis that there is an ‘implication’ in their position.
And finally they raise the issue of whether we would do joint activity with Population Matters (PM). They say no because the changes they have made toward empowerment have not been as strong (or complete) as I have suggested.
It depends what working with them means, since they are in the CCC and so are we. No doubt we are at the same protests from time to time. There have been several workshops at CCC events on population, and if I remember rightly, there was one with Phil debating with an invited speaker from what is now PM.
I am not proposing to go further than this with PM. My point, however, was that they have changed for the better and we should take that into account although there remains plenty we would disagree with them about.
17) The struggle for change under capitalism?
The comrades also say: ‘we are not in the game of seeking a solution within the capitalist system, or ameliorative measures that point in the opposite direction to socialist revolution, which is what a policy of population stabilisation is.’
In my view this statement is wrong on all counts. The claim that the stabilisation of the global population is a pro-capitalist demand does not make sense. In fact the opposite is the case. In fact capitalism also promotes high birth rates because it gives them the workers, consumers, police, soldiers etc, they need for the endless growth they crave. Far from pointing in the opposite direct to socialist revolution it should be one of the objectives, along with a range of other ecological and social measure which are integrated into our programme for social revolution.
The comrades appear not only to be against reforms under capitalism but have a pessimistic view of the ecological struggle today under capitalism. They quote the following paragraph from my paper:
‘Like women’s liberation, however, the ecological struggle has to be carried through as an integral part of the struggle to overthrown and replace capitalism, not as a separate and later stage to it. Otherwise by the time capitalism is overthrown the environment will be so damaged that it will be a matter of picking up the pieces.’
They reply to it as follows:
‘Of course, the first sentence is perfectly correct, but the second carries with it the assumption that the capitalist system can be forced to make major changes in direction, in order to protect ecosystems. Alan has argued in the past that a mass movement could force the system to make such changes, but in our opinion, the evidence for this contention is lacking, especially in relation to climate change. The system is too locked into dependence on fossil fuels and its current mode of agricultural production, to do any more than tinker at the edges with a few energy conservation measures, renewable energy projects or agricultural experiments.’
I don’t agree with this. We are in a very defensive period, of course, where the balance of class forces tends to be reflected in the level of resistance to the attacks of neo-liberal capital against the workers movement, rather than by advances made, but that does not mean that nothing can be changed whilst capitalism still exists. The Arab spring is a clear indication of that.
In any case this underestimates the role the left has played in changing society under capitalism as a part of its struggle to end it. It was the left, along with the autonomous movements, that led the struggle against racism, sexism, and homophobia, for example, and many of the advances we can see today on these issues (incomplete as they are) are as a result of that. Today more than half of the population of Britain are in favour of gay marrage.
Although there are huge vested interests involved in defending the environmentally disastrous carbon based status quo there have been significant victories by environmental campaigns over climate change. Airport expansion has been stopped at Heathrow and Munich (at least). Nuclear power has been defeated in Germany and Japan. The ozone layer has been saved, for now at least, by an 80% reduction in the use of CFCs. These are not things which would have happened without campaigns.
Unless you are confident that world revolution is around the corner, and that is a hard one to be confident about, what we do now is crucial—difficult as it might be. In fact struggle for change today is an integral part of a struggle for socialism. The way to win a hearing for socialism is in defensive struggles and in the struggle for reforms and improvements. If you can’t create the balance of forces to win concessions under capitalism how can you create the balance of forces for social revolution.
In any case, as I argued previously, if we wait for socialism in order to tackle climate change, the ecosystems of the planet could be damaged beyond repair. Indeed there is already a danger of that. We cannot afford to have a socialist revolution in a devastated planet.
This is why the struggle to defend the ecosystems and to stop global warming has to be as much a part of the struggle for socialism as fighting poverty, austerity, imperialist war, racism, women’s oppression and other parts of our programme – indeed it has implications for all these things. This, in my view, is what ecosocialism is about.
Population – Alan’s Latest Missive – Phil Ward
In his latest email, Alan distorts and misrepresents practically everything I say. The following points are my final remarks in this debate. I won’t defend myself from Alan’s attacks in future.
On extension of life: Maybe there is a misunderstanding, but when Dave said he didn’t want to live too long, I assumed that this meant that people getting very old is a population issue. There is a world of difference between that and my comments in my last email, where I point out that increases in life expectancy are almost entirely due to more children surviving into adulthood. The increasing proportion of old people in many societies is an interesting one and I didn’t say don’t discuss it: I said it doesn’t help to link it with discussions of population growth. In fact, that was the first sentence of my last email. Why do I have to go on repeating the same things time and again?
The society where ageing is most marked (Japan) has a static population that will soon start declining fast (barring changes in immigration policy etc.).
Biodiversity: My last email I said that I thought Alan latched onto Dave’s raising of ‘who takes biodiversity most seriously’ (where he plumped for Alan) as a “debating ploy”. He also says that I imply that he has nothing to say on the issue, just because I say Dave approved of his views. I fail to understand the logic of that.
He then argues that he takes biodiversity much more seriously than us, by quoting a paragraph from his second document, written after (he latched on to) Dave Bangs’ contribution. This is exactly the passage where, on reading it, I thought “why on earth is Alan making such a big deal about this? We all agree that the ecological crisis is very much one of biodiversity.” And of course, I agree with all the points that he makes in the relevant paragraphs quoted in his most recent email. This is why I have made my complaints about “appropriation” of issues into the population debate. Alan’s approach seems to be to claim that not only does only he have the answer (which he would, understandably, say), but more damagingly, that his opponents don’t think biodiversity’s even important.
Here is an example of how that works. Alan says: “Phil has a blind spot about population and biodiversity when it comes to population increase”. He then says that I’ve hardly mentioned biodiversity in my articles on population and then, after several sentences pointing out my failings in comprehensively anlaysing issues of biodiversity loss: “If I have missed something Phil mentions on biodiversity, he should draw my attention to it”. Notice how the word “population” has now disappeared? I don’t want to go through all the stuff, published in SO or SR, not on population, but definitely on the environment, where I have taken up biodiversity issues, to prove that I do think it is a (very) serious matter. Alan should just agree that I think it is. What I don’t think is that a minor reduction in population growth rates is any kind of solution, or would have much of an impact at all (ecologically), so it is understandable that I wouldn’t go into it at length in a discussion of the population issue.
You can’t just counter that point by saying “Phil doesn’t take biodiversity seriously”. I don’t say (or even imply) Alan doesn’t take it seriously. Why can’t he just accept that we both do, as we do women’s reproductive rights (but see below on his attitude to my attitude to that)?
I also don’t know where Alan got the idea that I think he’s not qualified to write about “the subject” (quite what subject, I’m not sure, but I presume it is biodiversity, as it follows his remarks on that). Alan clearly works very hard to inform himself about these matters, as I do (my articles on the SR web site usually require about 10 hours’ work). It is not a matter of qualifications at all and I acknowledge that Alan’s contribution to the FI’s positions on the environment have been crucial to our politics. Indeed, that is one reason why it is so disappointing that he should have adopted the position he has on population.
On population stabilisation – Alan accuses me of saying that I ignore his remarks that other measures are necessary to deal with the ecological crisis as well as this. There is some truth in this, which I will explain in another document at a later date. But first of all, it is unfortunately necessary to remind Alan of some of the points we tried to make in our first reply to him. There, we tried to show that, even assuming women’s reproductive needs were fully met (which, of course, would be an excellent thing), the impact on GHG emissions would be small and population would not be stabilised in any case.
Alan has responded to the first point in his IV article, arguing that because we say the emissions “attributable” to most of the people who would not be born as a result of such a victory are very low, we are somehow omitting the potential effects of capitalist growth (our argument was using on population projections up to 2030), pointing to how China’s emissions have grown in 20 years (approximately tripled, per head of population). In our argument, we allowed for a doubling of emissions per head in the period up to 2030, of the poor people who would not be born were there a comprehensive reproductive rights programme (about 650 million). In my opinion, it is not useful to base the argument on a country’s emissions, including all social classes, as Alan does, because those most likely now to be forced into having children are predominantly from those sectors of society where per capita emissions are very low. So, I think our argument is still valid.
Alan also responds by saying that there are other ecological effects of population growth too, claiming that the overall “ecological footprint” of impoverished people in the global south is significant. Perhaps China is also a good example here, because it’s absolutely clear that rampant capitalist development, partly to meet the consumption demands from the West, is overwhelmingly the driver of ecological destruction. Here’s another example: just last night, I read the article in this week’s Weekend Guardian about the destruction of the Masaai Mara game park. Some may attribute this to “population pressures”, as cattle grazing, for example, is one of the causes, but it’s clear that absolutely central to the decline is the capitalist drive for profit, big companies both in Kenya and the West, lubricated by extensive corruption.
The second point we made was that meeting women’s needs for reproductive rights would not cut the population growth rate enough to achieve population stabilisation. I am unsure whether Alan sees this population stabilisation as an aim of a reproductive rights campaign, but a response to our analysis on this would be helpful.
On the Cairo Conference, the UNFPA, Vandana Shiva China, Peru and Mathew Connelly: I tried to be very circumspect about all these issues, as can be seen from the way I dealt with them in my email. This is partly because there are contradictory accounts of the Cairo Conference and of the activities of the UNFPA since the conference. I was really saying that we (I) need to be more informed about these issues before making any definitive decisions about the UNFPA.
In response, I get things like:
- a) That I “oppose the implementation of the Programme of Action – in particular the call for the provision of reproductive services worldwide on the basis of free choice by 2015”. Where did I say that? If you had said that “Phil wants more information before he endorses the activities of the UNFPA”, then that would be accurate, but what you say I say sounds like I oppose women’s reproductive rights (I thought we had got beyond that kind of argumentation) – and of course, you DO say that:
- b) I “oppose the UN demand for worldwide provision of reproductive rights”. Huh?????????
- c) That I am “still trying to defend Vandana Shiva”. Oh yeah? Here’s what I said: “I think it is worth
trying to understand Vandana Shiva’s point of view”, with reference to experiences of population control programmes in India. I don’t agree with the views expressed in her document for Cairo and I have no idea if she still holds them (although it matters, due to her massive reputation in India: so do her apparently strange views on Science). I was trying to say that her views on contraception and abortion are partly formed by what happened in population control programmes in the past. It is not uncommon for left-wingers in the Global South to express such views: I first wrote about this issue in an IMG Africa Commission document in the late seventies, if you want to dig it out.
- d) Complete dismissal of my suggestion that we look into what the UNFPA did in Peru and China on the grounds that I don’t present any evidence. (We are talking about after the Cairo Conference: before it, the UNFPA supported the one-child programme in China, training 17,000 people to implement it, covering up the coercion and giving large quantities of money). All I was saying is that it needs looking into: see if there is any evidence. I don’t know enough about the FPA to endorse its current activities and I won’t until I know more. Furthermore, I’m concerned about its links with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and about its age of marriage campaign, which Alan doesn’t comment on. Alan calls what happened in Peru “alleged forced sterilisation”. I’m afraid it’s fact. I presume he read about it in Laurie Mazur’s book, that he normally quotes so favourably (p 292-299).
- e) An unnecessary attack on Matthew Connelly’s book for being “dreadful” and “internally contradictory”, whatever that means. Alan perhaps could expand on this, as his criticism is not very informative. The book is packed with facts and information about the international population control programmes of the 20thC, up to the Cairo Conference. I should add that I was mistaken about what Connelly says about Cairo: he is much more positive: “Population control as a global programme was no more. The Cairo program constituted and instrument of surrender.” I’m still undecided on this. I don’t quite know where I got the idea that Connelly viewed Cairo as a compromise. He gives detailed accounts of several conferences prior to Cairo (which he shows didn’t come out of the blue with its moving away from population control programmes) and it may have been in his summing up of one of those.
More distortions: There is another case in which Alan distorts someone’s statements to suit his own ends. That is in his IVP article, where he harnesses a 1983 article in New Left Review by the Canadian Marxist, Wally Seccombe, in support of his claim that the left ignores population issues. So, immediately after a paragraph suggesting that not “to regard rising population as a problem” is to give a reactionary, authoritarian agenda a free hand, Alan states that Seccombe
“argued that constant references to Malthus had ‘placed the debate on population beyond the pale of legitimate scrutiny and investigation’, and that in doing so Marxists abandoned the terrain to our enemies. He was absolutely right.” (Actually Seccombe uses the term ‘demographic realm itself’ here, not “population”: I don’t know why Alan felt the need to alter that).
You would think that Seccombe was discussing current (or, at least, 1980’s) debates about population control.
In fact, Seccombe’s comment about the apparent linking by leftists of demography and Malthus is nothing to do with that.
Seccombe’s article discusses “the transformation of fertility patterns in the families of the labouring classes which occurred” during the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western Europe: i.e. its subject matter is not relevant to what we are discussing here.
Seccombe’s methodological argument (which is relevant) is with those Marxists, who he claims do not integrate demographic factors into their class analysis: “there are compelling feminist reasons for paying close attention to the demographic regulators of women’s fertility and their change over time”, and that “there has been an unfortunate counterposition of the socio-economic to the demographic, as if these two dimensions of social relations were materially separable under capitalism or elsewhere, and as if the lines of causality ran, undialectically, only one way from the socio-economic and political to the demographic”.
I presume Alan didn’t read the whole Seccombe article (his quotes are form the first paragraph), or he thought no-one else would bother to do so.
More Distortions 2 (and the end, finally): In his very long first reply to our reply, “Population – A Rejoinder to JPS”, Alan attacks Betsy Hartmann a veteran feminist and anti-population-controller. We (JPS) had previously quoted two passages from her, one about the approach of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and another linking HIV and the use of Depo Provera, an injectable, long-acting contraceptive.
Alan attacks Hartmann on several fronts:
“She argues—in her book Reproductive Rights and Wrongs published in 1987—that the idea that rising population is any kind of problem is nonsense, that reproductive rights per se are a conspiracy to persuade women to have fewer children against their best interests and that most of the women involved do not want them. The provision of contraception, she argues, is a substitute for social change.
“She goes on to warn against the use of implants such as Depro Provera on the basis that they do not prevent HIV infection! She puts it this way: ‘For over a decade now, studies have pointed to a possible link between Depo-Provera use and increased risk of acquiring HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS.’
“This claim is irresponsible, in my view, since it could deter women from using the contraceptives they need. It is self-evident that implants will not prevent HIV infection, or STDs infection, any more than the pill will prevent them—unless used with a condom (which is the only method that will prevent such infections). In fact the manufacturer, Pfizer, specifically warns users that implants will not prevent HIV or other STDs unless used with a condom.
“To say, however, that there is a ‘link’ between Depo-Provera use and increased risk of acquiring HIV; in other words to imply that HIV might be caught from using Depo-Provera is misleading and wrong.”
I may get around to checking the assertion – about a conspiracy – at a later date. In any case, I’m not dutuy bound to defend everything Hartmann says and her views on one issue do not necessarily invalidate those on another, which is something Alan seems to be assuming here. If we had approvingly quoted her on the conspiracy, that would have been another matter.
Similarly, Hartmann’s views on the “slippery slope” argument are fairly common – and validated by history. I know Alan hates Connelly’s book, but he is really damning on how population control programmes get more and more coercive. You get institutions and bureaucracies set up, which then have to justify their existence, informal targets develop and become more formal, employees under pressure feel the need to “outperform” their colleagues if jobs cuts are in the air. That’s before outright corruption and bribery. Here’s what is in Laurie Mazur’s book, on Peru (not written by her, I grant you): “First, human rights abuses are likely where reproductive health services are seen as a means to an end, rather than as an end in themselves”. To me, what that says is be very, very careful if a bureaucratic institution is proposing a reproductive rights campaign that has a “population clause”. I presume that’s all Hartmann is saying as well.
Now, let’s look at Hartmann and the the Depo Provera issue. Is she really as crazy as to say that “HIV might be caught from using Depo Provera”, as Alan claims? Here’s what The Lancet Infectious Diseases, Volume 12, Issue 1, Pages 19 ‐ 26, January 2012 has to say:
Rates of HIV‐1 acquisition were higher in women using hormonal contraception than in those who were not (table
3). In multivariate Cox proportional hazards analysis adjusted for age, pregnancy, unprotected sex, and
concentrations of plasma HIV‐1 in HIV‐1‐infected partners, use of hormonal contraceptives was associated with a
two times increased risk of HIV‐1 acquisition (adjusted hazard ratio 1·98, 95% CI 1·06—3·68)…….
The rate of HIV‐1 transmission from women using hormonal contraceptives to their male partners was higher than
was the rate of transmission from women who did not use hormonal contraceptives (table 4). In multivariate
analysis adjusted for age, pregnancy, unprotected sex, and concentrations of plasma HIV‐1 in HIV‐1‐infected
partners, men’s HIV‐1 risk was increased two times when their partners were using hormonal contraception
(adjusted hazard ratio 1·97, 95% CI 1·12—3·45; table 4).
Note that the article says “adjusted for unprotected sex”, meaning if you have unprotected sex with an HIV+ partner, then you have double the risk of contracting HIV if you are also using injectable contraceptives. That seems fairly clear to me. It’s nothing to do with “catching HIV from using Depo
Provera” as Alan falsely claims Hartmann is arguing. It’s because the contraceptive has effects other than simply pregnancy prevention (which is not very surprising):
End note: I’m thoroughly fed up with this discussion. I may have said the wrong things on occasion, misrepresented people’s views here and there, but I think that I have shown that I (and Susan and Jane) are more sinned against than sinners. I may at some point try to get back to the substantive issues, but actually all this is not getting us very far.
I hope no comrades with the skills to write something for the web site on Egypt and Syria have not been spending any of their valuable time flogging this dead horse (I haven’t, as I don’t have the knowledge). I find it disappointing that we have not said anything about these major events and that the IVP site only has some rather general, sloganeering statements on these major crises.
Hormonal contraceptives might have physiological actions beyond pregnancy prevention, including possible risks of
bone‐density loss, cervical cancer, and Chlamydia trachomatis.28—30 Clinical and laboratory studies have suggested
possible mechanisms by which hormonal contraception could influence HIV‐1 susceptibility and infectiousness
including changes to vaginal structure, cytokine regulation, CCR5 expression, and cervicovaginal HIV‐1 shedding.
Population and the environment: a socialist approach – submitted by Alan in June 2013 for the SR NC.
I am submitting this as a discussion paper for the planned discussion on the NC—the date of which has not yet been fixed. This is a much shortened version of my IV article. It leaves out most of the historical debates and concentrates on presenting a position on the issue itself. I am not calling for a vote on this text because I think it should be the opening of a discussion in the organisation rather than the end of it. Hopefully other texts will also be written and circulated in advance.
The pace of global warming is speeding up. The carbon level in the atmosphere has just reached 400ppm, earlier than most analysts had expected. Summer arctic sea ice is disappearing and the Greenland and polar ice caps are melting at much faster rates than previously estimated. This will cause sea levels to rise, threatening coastal regions and island communities throughout the globe. Extreme weather events (droughts, storms, floods) will be far more common. It is a very dangerous situation.
The threat to the planet’s biodiversity is also increasing. In the last fifty years human beings—by far the most destructive species the planet has seen—have had a greater impact on the earth’s ecosystems than in any period in history. We are now losing species a thousand times faster than the average loss during the preceding 65 million years—and once a species is gone it is gone. This is the biggest mass extinction of species since the demise of the dinosaurs. This is often known as the sixth mass extinction, and is the first which has not been as a result of natural processes.
This is due to pollution, deforestation, the over-exploitation of natural resources, and habitat loss caused by human activity. Global warming, from fossil fuels, is destroying habitats and is altering the timing of animal migrations and plant flowerings. Many species are being pushed towards the polar regions and towards higher altitudes.
Yet human beings are a part of nature and have both a need and an obligation to live in harmony with it. We share with other species an extremely fragile and interrelated biosphere. As ecosocialists should look towards a society in which humankind can exist alongside other species without threatening their very existence.
All this is compounded by the fact that the human population of the planet has now reached 7bn, and continues to increase at an unsustainable rate. In fact he global population has almost tripled in the last 60 years—from 2.5bn in 1950 to over 7bn today! This is an increase of between 70 and 80 million people every year—or like adding the population of the USA to the planet every four years! And it shows no signs of slowing down. In fact the rate of increase has been remarkably stable for the past 50 years.
According to UN estimates the global population will reach somewhere between 8 and 11 billion by mid-century. Meanwhile nearly half of the current global population is under 25. This is the biggest new generation ever, and a huge potential for further growth. At the same time the per capita consumption of food, water, and manufactured goods is increasing even faster than the population itself.
Today’s rising population is mainly due to a big fall in the global death rate (particularly infant mortality) and an increase in life expectancy (mainly in the Global North) rather than by the birth rate, which has fallen. This does not, however, make the current rate of increase any more sustainable or the issue any less urgent. The UN itself says that: ‘despite recent declines in birth rates in many countries, further large increases in population size are inevitable.’
Rising population is not, of course, the root cause of the ecological crisis and global warming. That is the capitalist system of production and the commodification of the planet—although pre-capitalist systems of agriculture were already degrading the ecology and the biodiversity before capitalism arrived. It is, however, a major contributory factor.
Nor would the stabilisation of the global population, in itself, resolve the ecological crisis or halt global warming. It would not. Such things will need a wide range of ecological, economic and social measures if they are to be achieved—I won’t list them here. The chances of success, however, in these objectives, would be better if the global population was stabilised rather than if it continued to rise. It would be easier to provide food, fresh water, energy, and waste disposal and protect the planet’s bio-diversity with a population of 8 rather than 9 or 10 billion people.
The problem is that the resources of the planet are finite and they are running out! The demand for water is set to increase dramatically, both from rising population and rising expectations. Yet ground water aquifers—many of which only regenerate at a rate of 0.5% per 500 years—are being depleted. This has accelerated in recent years with pressure from emergent economies such as China and India and from new drilling and pumping technology.
Over 25% of all river water is now extracted before it reaches the ocean. Many rivers dry up before they get there. One in six people on the planet get their drinking water from glaciers and snowpack, on the world’s mountain ranges, which are receding. These do not regenerate and when they are gone they are gone.
Land and topsoil are finite as are the resources of the oceans—which are being depleted at an alarming rate. Stocks of every species of fully-grown wild fish have shrunk by 90% in the last 50 years. Many of the mineral resources on which industrial production, medicines, transport, and communications depend are finite and are running out.
Recently in Britain 25 wildlife organisation published a major biodiversity audit entitled The State of Nature Report. This finds that of more than 6,000 species studied more than one in ten are thought to be under threat of extinction.
The capacity of the planet to absorb waste is also finite. Al Gore in The Future quotes the World Bank in saying that the per capita production of garbage alone from urban residents in the world is now 2.6 pounds per person per day, and is projected to increase rapidly. When you add to this is the waste produced by energy production, the making of chemicals, manufacturing, paper production and agricultural waste the volume is enormous. In fact the volume of waste created every day weighs more than the 7bn inhabitants of the planet!
Great score is put on various claim that the global population might stabilise, some claim by mid-century others by the end of the century. These predictions, however, are far from certain. Population predictions are notoriously difficult to get right because the economic and social conditions that underlie them are themselves changing and unpredictable—particularly over such a long period of time. In any case there is the precautionary principle.
The left, therefore, needs a radically new approach to the whole issue of population and the environment. Such an approach should be based on the empowerment of women.
Such an approach would see population as first and foremost a feminist (or eco-feminist) issue. Women physically create each generation. They produce children and take the main responsibility for nurturing them. Global fertility rates are ultimately determined by the size of the families they have—which in turn is related to whether they have access to contraception and abortion, education and jobs, and whether they are exposed to conservative ideologies that oppose such access.
This approach is based on the view that most women, if they had free choice, would be unlikely have the large families that prevail in much of the Global South. Some would, most would not. It argues that if women are able control their own fertility, get access to education (which crucially important in all this) and jobs, and shed the influences of patriarchy and religion, global fertility rates would fall further and the population would stabilise. And it would improve the lives of millions of women in the process. It is a real win-win situation.
It means supporting women in their struggle for the contraception and abortion facilities. It means supporting their fight to lift themselves out of poverty, and ensuring that they get access to education and jobs. It means giving women real choice over contraception—by not, for example forcing them to sign up to implants or coils which can only be medically removed when they give birth.
These are, in any case, issues that have long been the demands of the feminist movement and the left. We have rightly advocated a woman’s right to choose in relation to abortion – the same is true for contraception. Interestingly Al Gore, in The Future, advocates women’s empowerment as a way of stabilising the global population—as does Natalie Bennett, the leader of the Green Party in Britain and Caroline Lucas the Green Party MP.
One of the arguments sometimes deployed against this approach is that since the highest fertility rates are in the Global South such a policy would be to ‘target’ the women of that region—who are not responsible for the climate crisis.
The only thing empowerment targets, however, is the appalling conditions the women of the Global South face and the unmet need for reproductive services. More than 220m in the region are denied reproductive services – which can be (and often are) the difference between life and death. There are 80m unintended pregnancies a year. 74,000 women die every year as a result of failed back-street abortions – a disproportionate number of these in the Global South. Every year, around 288,000 women die from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth—and 99% of them occur in developing countries. It is a policy that helps the women of the Global South and helps the planet at the same time—it is win-win again.
According to the UN the full range of modern family-planning methods still remain unavailable to at least 350 million couples world wide, many of whom say that they want to prevent another pregnancy or create more space between them.
It should be stressed, however, that it is not just a matter of contraceptive services—important as they are. The whole empowerment package is necessary for this to be successful: contraception and abortion, lifting women out of poverty, giving them access to education and jobs and protection from patriarchal pressure. Education in particular has a hugely positive impact on the lives of women and gives them the ability to tackle many of the other issues involved. It is this combination of factors which can change the lives of the women involved and through that the birth rate.
It is also argued that whilst the impoverished peoples of the Global South have higher birth rates than the affluent North they have a much smaller carbon footprint—of around 1 metric ton a year. The task, therefore, is not to reduce their footprint but that of the Northern populations.
This is true of course. The high polluting populations of the Global North must be the top priority as far as reducing carbon emissions are concerned. The notion that the rapidly rising population levels in the Global South do not matter, however, is, in my view, mistaken. We have to address both, North and South, because they are ultimately a part of the same problem.
In any case populations trapped in poverty today rightly aspire to change their situation as soon as they can. In fact some countries with the lowest carbon footprint today have the highest economic growth rates and therefore a big potential for such change. China’s footprint is already approaching 7 metric tonnes, after just 2 decades of capitalist growth. There is little point in assessing the impact of carbon footprints over the next 50 years on the basis of a snapshot of the situation as it is today.
Also rising population is not just about carbon emissions but the total impact of the human population on the ecology of the planet. Whilst the carbon footprint of the South is much smaller than that of the North if we talk about the ecological footprint—i.e. the total per capita impact on the environment including soil erosion and depletion, deforestation and the impact on biodiversity the impact of the South becomes far more significant. Total numbers, therefore, matter.
It is argued that women have large families in impoverished societies because they are needed to provide labour and to help their parents in old age. Impoverished women do indeed come under great pressure to have ever-larger families for these reasons, but it does not necessarily ease the burdens they face. In fact women’s health is undermined by repeated, often annual, pregnancies and smaller families would improve both their health and their quality of life. In fact it would give them a better chance of reaching old age.
Every new pair of new hands, moreover, is also another mouth to feed. Women still perform at least 80% of domestic labour. More than a third of households in the Global South are female headed, and where they are not women remain the primary providers of support. Expanding families are forced to degrade their own environment in order to get food water and fuel to survive.
It is argued that as women are lifted out of poverty they will automatically have fewer children. It is not, however, an automatic process—crucial as it is. As women are lifted out of poverty they still face pressure from religion, patriarchy, and cultural factors, which oppose the use of reproductive services. This varies from country to country but it is a powerful factor. In Catholic Italy for example religious strictures and laws are outweighed by other factors but in Saudi Arabia they are dominant.
It is argued that enough food is produced today to feed the 7bn inhabitants of the planet if it was efficiently and equitably distributed and not subject to the ravages of the market with its hugely wasteful distribution systems. Whilst there is some truth in this the distribution of vast quantities of food across the globe, in a sustainable way, is extremely problematic.
It is true that past predictions that population would outstrip food supply have turned out to be wide of the mark. This was not only Malthus in the early 19th century but by Paul Ehrlich (in The Population Bomb) in the late 1960s. It would be a big mistake, however, to conclude from this that there is therefore no problem in feeding an ever-increasing population—even if the distortions of the market were removed.
What these predictions failed to take into account was the ability of ever bigger agribusiness, and ever more chemical fertilisers, to increase the productivity of food production. It left hundreds of millions at starvation level or worse in the process, and it produced increasing global food crises, but it did massively increase food production.
The problem, therefore, is not whether enough food can be churned out by ever-bigger agribusiness, using ever more chemical fertilisers, pesticides, and mono-cropping techniques, but whether it can be produced and distributed without destroying the ecology of the planet in the process.
What the planet needs is to move towards food sovereignty and towards smaller scale and more localised agriculture. This would be better for the soil, and better for biodiversity, and it would provide better food.
Small scale farming, however, without chemical fertilisers and pesticides requires far more land per ton of food than intensive farming. Whilst is the right way forward is not an answer to ever-rising population. The amount of land and water needed would be prohibitive and it would have a further devastating impact on biodiversity, even if it were possible.
My conclusion, therefore, is that the bulk of the left (and the environmental movement) cannot continue to ignore this issue in the future as it has in the past. The environmental crisis is deepening and the human population is rising. We cannot continue to see these things as largely unrelated issues. We need to take population into account when we present our programme and our alternatives to the crisis.
People and the environment: capitalism’s Gordian knot – submitted by Phil Ward to the SR seminar on population to be held on December 15th 2013
This article has arisen out of an ongoing debate amongst Socialist Resistance members and on its web site, concerning the attitude we feel socialists should take to population growth. The debate is important, but not just because of the issue directly under discussion, on which SR needs to take a definitive position at some point. As I hope will be evident below, the discussion also helps us to look at the issues of capitalist growth and the ecological crisis ‐ climate change in particular – from a different point of view. We hope that this means further discussion of the on‐going and intensifying ecological crisis will follow.
Problem? What Problem?
Capitalism has a “population problem”: it is unable to adequately feed, clothe and provide shelter for a significant proportion of the world’s people. This situation is neither new, nor unique to the capitalist system. However, the problem of human destitution is made more politically potent by the claim that capitalism can eliminate these scourges – something it has signally failed to do.
The system also has an “ecological problem”. Again, historically, ecological destruction has not been confined to the capitalist mode of production, but it has intensified since the industrial revolution and through climate change in particular, and is now not merely local or regional in its scope, but global. The system has never been able to avoid destruction of the environment and consequent squalid living conditions in its quest for profits and for reproduction of its workforce. Such devastation is its way of “externalising” many of the costs of production, distribution and exchange.
Climate change carries with it the threat that problems of destitution and hunger will become more acute in future, especially for the most poor and vulnerable sections of the masses. This could be both by direct destruction of their food sources, homes and livelihoods through extreme weather events, such as occurred with typhoon Haiyan in November 2013, or through more gradual alterations in weather patterns threatening crop production in large regions of the world. We should note that though this latter change may be “gradual” in relation to extreme weather events, it is unprecedentedly fast when compared with past natural changes in climate.
(The above is not meant to be an exhaustive recounting of the world’s ecological problems. Some of the other issues will come up in the course of the discussion below).
Food and Energy
The discussion above therefore raises these issues:
- · Is it possible to provide a nourishing diet for all the world’s people, now and in the future, while at the same time maintaining (in fact, reviving) healthy, diverse ecosystems?
- · Is it possible to provide enough carbon‐free energy for all the world’s people, now and in the future, to live comfortable, fulfilling lives?
Before briefly tackling these questions, we need to establish a context. When we discuss what we think needs to be done in agriculture or energy, we are trying to examine whether we are close to “ecological limits”, set by the finite nature of the earth, available technology and the need to protect ecosystems:
limits concerning land use and its health, marine productivity, mineral, land and energy resources for renewable energy (RE) etc.
The capitalist system has already exceeded many of these limits (seven out of nine, according to some scientists), testifying to its unsustainability. The discussion in this document contends that that capitalism is almost certainly incapable of pulling back from the limits, while a democratically planned, socialist system could conceivably sustain several billion more people within them.
So, it is necessary to look at ways of pulling back from the ecological limits from the point of view of food and fossil fuel emissions.
In the past, when discussing food, we have pointed to the massive amount of waste that takes place in industrialised food production (and consumption, we could add), along with the huge proportion of grain and soya that is devoted to feeding animals.
Most critics of current food production, distribution and consumption systems argue that it is possible to produce enough food for 10 billion people, even while drastically reducing the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, thus providing space and time for regeneration of ecosystems (of which the oceans are probably the most damaged). What this means is an elimination of food waste (50% of all production, according the Institution of Mechanical engineers) and, say, a 90% reduction in the consumption of meat, along with large cuts in dairy, egg and fish consumption. Also necessary will be a whole series of measures to make agriculture an integrated, energy efficient practice that defends rather than destroys biodiversity in contrast to the current system that, according to Marx, squanders the vitality of the soil.
It should be added that the above agricultural system, as it vastly reduces waste and misuse of produce, will be accompanied by commensurate reductions in water use and greenhouse gases.
Clearly, this new form of agricultural production would also require major changes in economic and social structures.
The situation regarding energy supply is also to do with how to reduce demand and pressure on ecosystems. Even if there were efficiency measures that reduced energy consumption by, say, 50%, which is theoretically possible, it is likely that any RE system (mainly wind and solar) would still wreak massive environmental destruction, from the mineral extraction stage, to the space used for the siting of the electricity generating plant. (Other forms of RE, such as methane from waste, are likely to be a minor part of the mix and probably best used in integrated agricultural systems).
It has taken a very long time, but both Marxists and non‐Marxists interested in ecological issues are finally starting to come round to the view that the key to providing for our energy needs has to be decline in economic activity: a break with the “growth” paradigm. This is partly because renewable energies are not “concentrated enough” either geographically or in time: they are intermittent, as well as possessing low power output per unit of land area they occupy, and/or per unit mass of plant required. This applies in particular to the main sources of RE, wind and solar power, which are not ecologically benign, as mentioned above.
If economic activity were perhaps 1⁄4 of current levels, taking a few lessons from the “slow movement” and eliminating wasteful production and other sectors of the economy, then it could be feasible to construct an RE system that serves human/ecological needs, rather than those of capitalism.
Compared with the changes in food and energy supply that are required to mitigate climate change and defend ecosystems, the ecological benefits of a non‐coercive family planning programme, or even a comprehensive reproductive rights programme would be relatively small (the impact for those who cannot now access family planning is another matter). The people born as a result of unmet family planning need will constitute some of the poorest on the plant. Their impact on the environment is likely to be small, but also entirely outside of their control and conditioned by current social relations. Over the next 20 year, they may number 600 million people about 7.5% of the world’s population and but it is generous to suggest that they will be “responsible for” 1% of GHG emissions between now and 2030, when we know that now less that the richest billion people emit half the world’s carbon.
This is not to say that the societies where population growth is highest are not going to suffer major environmental damage, just that the ruling class is in control of this damage – and benefits from it.
What is happening to Population?
That said, it is useful to examine some of the projections that are made concerning population, if only to provide answers to those who see this as a concern that can be abstracted from capitalist social relations when it comes to ecological destruction. This examination will also show that some of the projections are very unlikely to come about.
The most well‐known agency making population projections is the UN, which has produced the much‐ quoted low, medium and high estimates for world population of 8, 9 and 11 billion by 2050 and 6, 10 and 16 billion by 2100, with the current increase in numbers being 80 million per year, or, as has been put, in somewhat emotive terms “the numerical equivalent of adding one United States to the world every four years”.
It can be seen from the figures what a massive range the UN estimates occupy, from more than twice the current world population to only 85% of it in 2100. The source of this range is two‐fold. Firstly, it seems that no‐one really understands all the factors controlling population trends and secondly, current statistics (populations, fertility rates, death rates) are not that reliable either. As these (and past, equally unreliable, statistics) are used to make the projections and the errors are most likely to emanate from places where population growth and growth rates are currently highest, it can be seen that there is plenty of scope for dispute over the numbers.
Another factor is the methodology used by the UN, which is also subject to debate. It has not been possible to study this is detail, but a cursory glance at a UN document on this shows flaws in their approach. One example is that it assumes that all countries will converge (at some time or another) on a minimum fertility rate (average number of children per woman, over her lifetime) of 1.85, well below the replacement level of 2.1.
There seems to be no justification for this assumption. There are currently 81 out of 195 (UN – 2009) or 104 out of 224 (CIA – 2013) countries with a fertility rate below this value and this includes every imperialist country apart from the US (2.05), Norway (1.85) and France (1.89). Also below 1.85 are China (1.73), Brazil (1.74), Russia (1.34) and every single eastern European and Balkan country, apart from Albania (2.06). (These rates are the UN figures: the CIA ones are considerably different, giving 1.55 for the fertility rate in China, for example. There are also World Bank statistics, which appear when you google fertility rate and a particular country: these are different again).
The UN therefore is expecting that in all these 81 or 104 countries, the fertility rate will rise, which seems extremely unlikely, although it may in some, as a result of immigration (Britain) or more women‐friendly childcare policies (Sweden, Iceland). Furthermore, the UN predicts that in those countries that could in the next few years come below the replacement threshold, including India and Bangladesh (both currently 2.83), Indonesia (2.18), Turkey (2.14), Mexico (2.21), Argentina (2.25), Vietnam (2.14), South Africa (2.64), Egypt (2.81) and others, for some reason their fertility rates will stall at 1.85.
This is one reason that several commentators, e.g. the socialist geographer Danny Dorling and the Deutsche bank analyst Sanjeev Sanyal, reckon the UN has over‐estimated the
numbers. Sanyal thinks the world population will peak in 2055 at a value of 8.7 billion people. For (sobering) reasons outlined below, even that could be an over‐estimate.
Dorling discusses another problem with the UN’s projections, using the graph on the left.
This shows actual changes in population growth year‐on‐year, up to 2010, with the UN projections thereafter (grey histogram). Thus, if the population grew by 70 million in 1979 and 71 million in 1980, the graph would show a +1 million change in population change for 1980 (which it does). Dorling argues that the UN projection, which has a
small declining “change in change” from now on, ignores the previous erratic‐seeming trend, which he puts down to generational baby booms, cycles lasting 18 and 22 years respectively, the average ages for women having children. His black line shows what happens if this trend continues to 26 years and 30 years, the latter being the current mean age for women at childbirth in the EU (it is increasing at the rapid rate of 1 month per year). Dorling next directly mapped the shape of previous baby booms onto the future, which I’m not sure is completely justified, but it gives a similar‐shaped graph to the one above and a projected world population in 2100 of 7.3bn, about the same as today, with a maximum of 9.3bn in 2060. Both Dorling and Sanyal therefore are predicting smaller population rises and earlier peaks than the UN.
Anyone who saw Hans Rosling’s interesting, if very apolitical, TV programme on population and statistics in November 2013 will know that much of the UN’s (mid‐
range) projected population growth is expected to be in sub‐
Saharan Africa. Indeed, the figure is around 75% of that
growth (see table, left). This means that any demographer worthy of the name really should be studying that
| Country | 2010 (m) | 2100 (m) |
| Niger | 16 | 204 |
| Nigeria | 159 | 914 |
| DRC | 62 | 262 |
| Uganda | 34 | 204 |
| Kenya | 41 | 160 |
| Tanzania | 45 | 276 |
| Ethiopia | 87 | 243 |
| Angola | 19 | 97 |
| Mozambique | 23 | 112 |
| Chad | 12 | 63 |
| Region | 2010 (bn) | 2100 (bn) |
| Asia | 4.16 | 4.71 |
| Europe | 0.74 | 0.64 |
| Africa | 1.03 | 4.18 |
| Latin American and Caribbean | 0.60 | 0.74 |
| North America | 0.35 | 0.51 |
| Oceania | 0.04 | 0.07 |
continent and examining the economic, social and political dynamics there.
It is impossible to do this in any detail here, but it is worth looking at the UN’s projections for a number of individual countries in Africa (table above right). They look rather incredible, Niger’s population is expected to grow by a factor of 12, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda by six times and the rest in the table four or five times. These data envisage Nigeria becoming one of the most densely populated countries in the world, about 90% of the population density of Bangladesh.
When the state of deprivation of large sections of the masses in most sub‐Saharan Africa is considered, the current economic system cannot possibly sustain these numbers of people at any level of dignity and if it even tries, it will be at a huge cost to the ecosystems of the continent. The strong likelihood is that these population levels will never be reached, as a major social or ecological crisis will intervene first.
Already, in most parts of the continent people’s lives are being jeopardised by destructive ventures such as land‐grabbing, intensification of mineral extraction to satisfy demand for consumer goods, the damming of the Congo River, oil extraction and fracking, to give just a few examples. These and other developments mean that the economies of numerous African countries are projected to grow faster than their populations, as they always have done in the Global North.
So what about economic growth?
The discussion above suggest that it is worth looking at capitalist economic growth, to see just how destructive it might be, relative to population growth.
The Marxist geographer and economist David Harvey in his book “The Enigma of Capital” has stated that the capitalist system needs to grow by 3% per year, so that its constituent firms can cope with increasing levels of labour productivity of their competitors. This observation can be used to make some inferences about the ecological future of the system.
Harvey’s views are discussed and contested in some respects by Ed Rooksby at Marx and Philosophy, on the Permanent Revolution web site by Bill Jefferies and by Richard Seymour, although only Jefferies questioned the derivation of this 3% figure.
Harvey extrapolated from historical data on world GDP, compiled and calculated by the economic historian Angus Maddison. Jefferies objects that Harvey’s analysis is inconsistent with some methods Maddison has carried out in order to get his data, namely treating the former USSR and satellites as part of the capitalist economy and adjusting GDP according to “Purchasing Price Parity” (PPP). These complaints may hold if one is concerned with issues specific to the capitalist economy and is discussing the origins of and prospects after the financial crash, which Harvey and Jefferies are. However, it seems that Maddison’s method is actually more useful for our purposes, as his changes make GDP a better rough proxy for how much “stuff” capitalism (mainly) has produced over the ages, making it a reasonable comparative measure of how much resource use can be expected in the future.
Of course, some of that stuff is now (and more will be) things like software and downloads, and services make up an increasing proportion of GDP in some countries, but the figures discussed in the next paragraph are so outlandish that these qualifications hardly matter.
Population and GDP 1820‐2100
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Years Since 1820 Population GDP
It is not certain how Harvey got the figure of 3% growth from Maddison’s data, so I have looked at the data myself. The graph opposite shows Maddison’s figures from 1820 to 2003 and projected 2.25% growth thereafter, which is my conservative estimate of the “average” growth rate for Maddison’s data. The data show that the world economy has grown by about 75 times in 193 years (while population has grown 7 times). Projecting to 87 years’ time, the economy would be a further 7 times larger than it is now, or just
over 500 times the size it was in 1820. Harvey’s estimate of 3% growth would give a 1000 times growth in the world economy since 1820.
These astronomical figures can never be achieved. Clearly, some kind of ecological or economic “crunch” is in the offing, and well before any “population crunch”. The graph makes truly emphatic Danny Dorling’s observation that “what will matter most is how people behave, not their total numbers [whether population were to peak at 8 or 10 billion]”.
It also places in perspective scare stories about population in 2050 or 2100, or what might happen in certain African countries, as discussed above. The likelihood is that such major changes – socially, politically and ecologically ‐ are going to happen in the next 20 to 30 years, that crystal ball gazing any further into the future is really utterly pointless.
Women’s Reproductive Rights
Those who express a concern about population “rising at an unsustainable rate” often link their concern with millions of women’s unmet need for family planning services, suggesting that population is “first and foremost a feminist issue”, as women create and nurture each new generation. What is needed to stabilise global population is that “women are able to control their own fertility, get access to education and jobs and shed the influences of patriarchy and religion” a “whole empowerment package”.
The question that arises here is how to confront the problem of women being forced into childbearing through lack of access to contraception and abortion, economic circumstances or patriarchal and religious attitudes. Is linking the problem to population and or ecological destruction a politically sensible thing to do?
Clearly, there is a link: when a woman has a child the population rises and there is “one more mouth to feed” and a tiny bit of extra pressure on resources. But as a political strategy for widening women’s access to reproductive rights, education and social and economic power, raising population in the same breath is counterproductive. Not only does it run the risk of “blaming” individual women for their fertility and indeed for a family’s poverty, it raises in the mind of many women activists the spectre of the population control programmes of the past.
Normalised GDP/Populaion (1820=1) Title
This is perhaps why some feminists, especially those concerned with women’s rights in the Global South, are suspicious of any linking of women’s reproductive rights campaigns with population issues. They argue, very plausibly, why on earth should reproductive rights not be campaigned for on their own merits? Surely that is the context in which socialists and feminists are best able to extend the arguments, from reproductive rights to a whole host of other issues, such as health needs in general, education and jobs, but also ones connected with their own specific oppression: child and arranged marriage, dowry, property rights, sexual violence and domestic labour?
It should also be mentioned that anti‐feminists can latch onto any linking of reproductive rights to population issues as well. This was a particular problem in Africa1 in the early post‐colonial period, where the petty‐bourgeois nationalist movements and regimes instituted (or maintained the colonial) reactionary laws completely outlawing abortion, often under the pretext that any form of birth control was an “imperialist plot”. No doubt similar nationalist, anti‐feminist arguments are in circulation today.
This linkage is also likely to misinform those who do not have a direct interest in women’s reproductive rights in places where population growth rates are highest ‐ for example the working class and its allies in the Global North. Although those who link population and ecological problems may qualify their statement with caveats about needing other ecological, social and economic measures to deal with the ecological crisis, most people encountering this for the first time will only hear the refrain “population growth” and immediately jump on phrases like the “need to stabilise the population”. After all, this is what they are taught in school and see in the mass media every day: “unless population is brought under control, there will be not enough food for people, carbon emissions will get out of hand, we will run out of land”, and so on.
Class relations and the real economic and social issues facing women in the Global South (and indeed, all of us), become obscured by a fog of emotive and deracinated phrases about “population rising at an unsustainable rate”, “the resources of the planet are running out”, “habitat loss caused by human activity”, “the total impact of the human population on the ecology of the planet” and “unlimited population growth cannot be sustained by the ecosystem of the planet”.
This approach is in contrast to that of the Canadian Marxist Wally Seccombe who attempted an “integration of the socio‐economic, the political and the demographic” in his 1983 analysis of the changes in family structure, fertility and class relations during the transition to the modern capitalist economy in 19thC Europe. Seccombe criticised Marxists for “an unfortunate counterposition of the socio‐economic to the demographic, as if these two dimensions of social relations were materially separable under capitalism or elsewhere, and as if the lines of causality ran, undialectically, only one way from the socio‐economic and political to the demographic”. He might have added that it is equally undialectical to trace lines of causality only, or predominantly in the other direction. Note also that Seccombe was discussing demography, the study of population structures, not just numbers of people.
It seems clear that Seccombe hoped that his method would be followed by others. As well as making the arguments about method above, he also said that “there are compelling feminist reasons for paying close attention to the demographic regulators of women’s fertility and their change over time”, which sounds like an appeal for a socialist‐feminist study of modern demographic issues. This would be extremely useful, as it would then mean we would no longer have to rely on projections of previous trends, which seems to be the practice of demographers at present.
1 I discussed this in a document for the IMG Africa Commission in 1978, which is available as a .pdf to those interested.
Perhaps it is worth adding that there have been some attempts to make the integration that Seccombe desires. The earliest I know is by Ugandan Marxist Mahmood Mamdani in his famous book “The Myth of Population Control: Family Caste and Class in an Indian Village”.
Mamdani critiqued a failed Indian Government/Rockefeller Foundation birth control programme in a series of Punjabi villages – Khanna ‐ in the 1950s and early 1960s. His book is most famous for his excoriating put‐down of Paul Ehrlich, who expressed his fear of a New Delhi crowd. What caused this fear, said Mamdani, was not the crowd’s size – no greater than would be seen in New York – but its poverty. Ehrlich says “you are poor because you are too many”, while Mamdani’s claims the people in Khanna “have large families because they are poor”.
In fact, it is a pity that these sound bites have taken hold, as the book deserves more scrutiny. Mamdani showed that, in fact, birth rates did fall in Khanna, depending on caste and class position, but not because of the almost non‐existent take‐up of contraceptives (mainly a foam). People politely accepted the packages and then never used them, or, in one case made a sculpture. This decline he put down to changes in agricultural technology that coincided with the Khanna study, which actually increased the demand for labour in some occupations and reduced it in others.
Mamdani also notes some features of the Khanna study that would become familiar in future family planning programmes. This was despite the fact that the field workers seems to have spent much more time with the villagers than is usual. This was, in part, because after the failure of the birth control programme, the study subtly changed its aims, essentially becoming a survey: one which concluded that the populace was “not educated enough” to use contraceptives.
We’ve already mentioned the eliding of “accepting” and “using” contraceptives (one of the reasons why population control programmes prefer permanent or long term contraceptive methods). The Khanna study also claimed successes that were not borne out by its own statistics and one worker (out of 20) was sacked for not pushing contraceptives enough.
It needs to be noted, though, is that Mamdani does not appear to have noticed any conflict between men and women over birth control, or, if there was none, he did not remark on why that was the case. This was despite the fact that he was very conscious of the preference for boy children (although both boys and girls worked, undertaking different tasks). He also found that girls had higher mortality, due to an unwillingness to spend money on health care for them, and that female infanticide was common in Punjab villages in the past.
A second attempt to look at “demographic regulators of fertility” is in Betsy Hartmann’s book “Reproductive Rights and Wrongs” (1995 edition). She summarises the work of John Ratcliff, who argues that fertility falls when governments bring in reforms, like land and income re‐distribution, educational reforms, primary health care and improvements in women’s status. Hartmann surveys countries where it could be claimed that this has happened: Cuba (from 1959), South Korea (starting with a land reform under US occupation), Kerala (land reform in the 1950s and 60s, strong agricultural unions and high demand for labour, education, higher marriage age, less inequality and higher level of political consciousness) and Ceylon (a sort of social democratic programme up to 1977, but not so extensive in Tamil areas).
Demographic transition in Bangladesh?
Ratcliffe’s analysis could be claimed to have been contradicted by the example of Bangladesh, where fertility rates have declined from 7 immediately after independence in 1971, to 3.4 in 1993 and 2.5‐2.8
now, without the sorts of reforms outlined above. As one academic study (hereafter SMJ) put it in 1995 “a ‘reproductive revolution’ is occurring, in the absence of significant improvements in economic indicators”. This country has been held up as an example for feminists and socialists in the current debate, for instance, in the words of Sheila Malone:
“[In Bangladesh] the government decided to back family planning provision in the 1980s, despite
conservative traditions of early marriage and large families. A new generation of young women has taken
advantage of the services and gotten themselves education and jobs, instead of a lifetime of childbearing
and rearing. Furthermore, the resultant rapid drop in average fertility rates from 5 to 3 children per woman
looks set to be permanent. In fact, it is predicted to continue downwards, as many young women are saying
they will never go back to the old ways. This is easing pressure in a very densely populated and ecologically
stressed country.”
This article has already addressed the last point, the relative (in)effectiveness of cuts in population growth in easing “ecological stresses”.
Some of the other points could do with examination. Firstly, is the implication that this was a benign family planning programme, different from those usually backed by military dictatorships (of which there were 5 in Bangladesh in 1975‐19902), with the support of USAID, the World bank and UNFPA. Hartmann scotches this idea: in 1983, these agencies “circulated a position paper calling for a ‘drastic’ reduction in population growth, the creation of an autonomous National Population Control Board with ‘emergency powers’ and frequent visits by ‘high ranking government and Army personnel’ to promote family planning in the villages. It also recommended increasing sterilization incentives”.
The government responded with the increased incentives (to the clients), plus punishments for FP personnel who failed to meet sterilisation quotas. The incentives were financed by USAID and often FP personnel took “motivation fees” out of the client’s money. After the US government banned payments for involuntary sterilisations, the government changed this to compensation for travel, food and lost wages, with free clothes as “surgical apparel”, even when given after the operation.
Sterilisation rates increased markedly in the lean autumn months and a survey found that in more than 40% of cases clients were not adequately informed about the permanent nature of the operation. A 1987 study found the rate of sterilisation much higher amongst the poor (for obvious reasons) and a little industry of self‐employed agents had grown up, recruiting sterilisation candidates for profit. The study recommended that payments continue, in order to prevent “discrimination against the poor”.
The SMJ paper, dated 1995, discusses developments after Hartmann’s survey. The emphasis on sterilisation declined and the 28,000 family planning workers (all women, it seems) were mainly occupied with persuading women to use the pill. They conducted a survey and found a strong demand for contraception (from women: the men seemed indifferent), but generally very poor delivery, with little follow up.
SMJ strongly criticised this home‐based and entirely women‐based approach, which, although effective, was “working within the patriarchal system”. “Contraception cannot solve the larger problem of women’s subordination, which we believe should be addressed more directly”. They thought men should use contraceptives more and help their wives, rather than hinder them. In the mid‐90s, condom use was
2 Ershad, the longest‐lasting dictator, was, according to Wikipedia, twice made a UN laureate for his services to population control
about 3%. They also pointed to the growth of the garment industry and micro‐finance schemes as increasing women’s independence and spurring greater demand for contraception.
It should be added that the contraceptive rate (women in union aged 15‐49) is 61%, not much higher than India’s 55%.
So what has happened since 1995? In 1997, the ministry of health endorsed a report which repeated many of the observations of the SMJ survey and said that to meet the national goal of replacement fertility (2.1 births per women) by 2005, major changes in orientation were required, particularly reading home visits and patchy supply of family planning in urban areas.
By the time of this last report, fertility rates had stalled at about 3.3 births per woman, since when a “negligible reduction” to about 2.7 has taken place. By 2010, there was still official concern about the unreliability of home visits (so the SMJ suggestion of “draw[ing] women out of their own homes” was never implemented) and the lack of provision in urban areas, now about 30% of the population. One of the two reports (both from 2010) linked to above recommends more “empowerment” approach – more education for girls, after suggesting various measure to strengthen the FP programme itself. The second, more official one, from the population council of Bangladesh, centres attention on newly‐weds and on preventing marriage at a very young age. Both suggest that public‐private partnerships are the way forward for providing family planning for “long‐acting and permanent methods”, IUD’s, injectables and sterilisation.
Another report, also from a member of a government agency, dated April 2013, calls for 8‐9 million more of these methods, in order to reach replacement fertility levels by 2016. The authors point out that there is still an unmet need for contraceptives in the country (12% of couples, by their reckoning) and a big difference in contraceptive use between the west and the east (lower in the latter), but it doesn’t explain this, merely calling for more effort in the latter. It is also at a loss to explain the stalling in decline of fertility rate.
It seems likely that the proposed renewed emphasis on sterilising women will lead to a recurrence of the kinds of practices discussed by Betsy Hartmann.
The initial “success” of a birth control campaign that does not improve the status of women – something all the official reports admit is what has happened ‐ is something that requires some explanation from a Marxist point of view. Part of it must be due to a the latent demand for family planning services, particularly by women, so Bangladesh is significant in showing a phenomenon that must exist in many countries of the Global South. But it can hardly serve as a glowing example of “empowerment” of women.
Conclusion
This article has attempted to show that population is an issue of secondary importance, in comparison to capitalist waste and growth, in the ecological crisis. Factoring population concerns into or political programme, under the mistaken apprehension that the resulting declines in population growth could have a significant effect, would be to carry out an exercise in mis‐education. It would weaken the struggle for women’s reproductive rights, when this struggle already has to contend with major obstacles introduced by the population bureaucracy, as the example of Bangladesh shows.
Philip Ward – 11/12/13
