By Graham Matthews Well-known population theorist and author Dr Paul Ehrlich addressed a seminar sponsored by the Australian Museum in Sydney on November 16, titled "The Stork and the Plow". "This race between human fertility and human agriculture, is the most important that the world has seen", Ehrlich said. Ehrlich's speech outlined the arguments of his newest book, The Stork and the Plow: The Equity Answer to the Human Dilemma. In previous books (The Population Bomb and The Population Explosion), Ehrlich and his collaborators outline the populationist theory — that the global increase in population is the key social problem facing humanity today. In his most recent trip to Australia, Ehrlich was quoted in the November 11 Sydney Morning Herald as saying that Australia could sustain only 10 million people, rather than the current population of 18 million. Ehrlich has, in previous visits, commented favourably on Western governments' policies which reduce immigration. Ehrlich argues that the myriad of social and environmental problems facing humanity today are caused by overpopulation. In The Population Explosion, published in 1990, Paul and Anne Ehrlich argue that ecological problems as diverse as global warming, acid rain, desertification and ozone layer destruction, can all be directly traced back to the problem of overpopulation, using the formula I=PAT (environmental disturbance = population x affluence x technology). In addition, the Ehrlichs argue that human civilisation is rapidly outgrowing its ability to feed itself. They site starvation in the Third World today as evidence of this. The solution they propose is birth control. They argue that to contain environmental damage, and to have a chance of feeding the entire global population, average family sizes around the world must rapidly be brought to below two children.
Equity
In his Sydney lecture, Ehrlich emphasised the idea that "equity" should be given greater weight in the discussion about population control. Sensitive to criticisms that his populationist theory has ignored the problems of the poor, particularly in the Third World,
The Stork and The Plough attempts to address this. Exactly how Ehrlich defines equity, and how he foresees ensuring it in a very inequitable world, was not altogether clear. His main argument is correct; that is, women have to be "empowered" to increase their economic independence, thereby reducing their desire or need for larger numbers of children. Women must be offered decent health care, and access to safe contraception and abortion if the population problem is to be tackled effectively, Ehrlich said. But Ehrlich's view of
how this is achieved is more questionable. For example, Ehrlich cited the collapse of the sugar industry in the island nation of Barbados in the 1960s and its replacement by tourism as a great step forward in this regard. Since the new, (low-paid) tourist jobs went largely to women, the impact has been to reduce Barbados' fertility rate to approximately two. Ehrlich argued that this shift has been more equitable because the
average income of the people of Barbados increased to US$6000 per year. He ignores the question of the distribution of this new-found "wealth" assuming — naively — that everyone in Barbados has benefited. The fact that the majority continue to live in poverty, and that the wealth has gone to a small minority, doesn't seem to figure in Ehrlich's understanding of "equity". During his hour-long lecture, Ehrlich noted the very real problems faced by the people of the Third World. He referred to problems of land reform, to the fact that the larger part of international "aid" to Third World countries is spent developing markets for commodities from the industrialised world. Ehrlich went so far as to say that the whole system of international trade disadvantaged the poorer nations, likening the problem to a transfusion from a sick to a healthy person. On the question of how to solve these problems however, Ehrlich was largely silent. The only kind of "strategy" for change that Ehrlich offered for global environmental and social problems was population control. "Whatever your cause it's a lost cause without population control", he said. Ehrlich even went as far as tacitly endorsing the coercive population control strategies being carried out by governments in China, Bangladesh and elsewhere as models for other Third World nations to follow. Despite the well documented abuses associated with the Chinese government's one child strategy, Ehrlich said he had not heard Chinese women "complain" about the measure. Ignoring the most recent evidence aired at the Beijing women's conference earlier this year, Ehrlich insisted that the program remained relatively successful and equitable in its implications. Ehrlich offered very little new and convincing evidence that population pressures are the fundamental
cause of environmental degradation. He also failed to respond to other environmentalists' arguments that population growth is in fact a
symptom of the larger social crisis engendered by a dysfunctional production-for-profit system.
Poor not to blame
Rather than acknowledging that family size is directly related to economic pressures, Ehrlich effectively argued that the poor are largely to blame. Only by reducing birth rates as a first step, he said, can "equity" be achieved. The problem is not nearly so simple. As Francis Moore Lappé and Rachel Schurman argue in
Taking Population Seriously, "widespread hunger is no measure of overpopulation — when in a Brazil or a Zaire, plentiful resources per capita exist beside severe hunger". Ehrlich's narrow focus on family planning ignores the more fundamental problem — an inequitable distribution of wealth that favours the ruling elite of the world — that must be addressed before the population issue can be resolved. Ultimately, for there to be any real equity, the economic and social system would have to be fundamentally transformed in favour of the majority. These are the facts that Ehrlich does not want to canvass. Among the less developed countries, only China and Cuba have come close to halting population growth. In the former, this has been done in a bureaucratic and oppressive way. In the case of Cuba, it has been the result of a significant improvement in the standard of living of all people since the 1959 revolution. The elimination of some of the structural roots of insecurity has created more opportunities for women to play a role in society outside the home and "family life". In terms of equity, which of these two very different paths is advocated and taken to deal with the "population problem" is crucial. Further, lowering the birth rates will not by definition reduce hunger, poverty or environmental degradation as Ehrlich claims. Mexico, Thailand and India, which have successfully reduced fertility rates over the last 20 to 30 years, have not been able to significantly turn around the massive social and environmental problems. In none of these cases has social "equity" increased as a result of the drop in the birth rate. Evidence cited by Lappé, Schurman and others suggests that only strategies which liberate the majority of the world's population from economic insecurity will be successful in reducing the world's population and preserving the environment. More concretely, while Ehrlich points to China as the key model, the fact is that since the introduction in 1979 of economic "reforms" which have undercut China's extensive social security system, the population policy has been failing. As Lappé and Schurman write, "Thrown back on their own family's resources, many Chinese again see having many children — especially boys — as beneficial both as a substitute for lost public protection and as a means of taking maximum advantage of the new economic system". In an hour-long lecture designed to add "equity" to his over-simplistic theory about why the environment is being degraded at such a rate of knots, Ehrlich still missed the point. His focus on population as the
main cause of the problem lets governments, multinational corporations and the ruling elites of all nations, off the hook. No wonder he is so welcomed by the likes of NSW Premier Bob Carr who is now proposing a national population policy.