By Sheila Malone
World population has grown from 2.5bn in 1950 to 6.8bn in 2007. By 2050 it is predicted to reach 9.2bn, and then stabilise (UN figures). This estimate assumes rates in many countries in the North will continue to decrease, and that the South will gradually follow suit.
Are such numbers ecologically and socially sustainable? The huge problems posed by climate change have reignited this debate.
In Britain the Optimum Population Trust says a firm ‘No’, claiming that our planet is already beyond carrying capacity, and we would need yet another one to support 9.2bn people. They want governments in both North and South to address this issue with measures like the ‘Stop at Two’ family planning policy of the 60s and 70s in Britain. They also want controls on migration.
Capitalist states in general (both the rich North and the ‘catch-up’ South) look to advances in technology and market competition to take care of both sustainability and population growth. So switches to alternative energy, agribusiness (like the misnamed ‘green revolution’) and genetic engineering will heat, cool, feed and transport the world. There is no need for population policies. Actually it is increased life expectancy, rather than high birthrates, which currently accounts for large populations in the North. Hence all the talk going on now about retirement age and pensions.
Nevertheless, birth rates also remain a factor. Historically high fertility rates have been seen as a positive accompaniment to high economic growth – ensuring an expanding, flexible, mobile workforce and carers within the home. So now that rates are dropping in the North, governments in Europe are offering financial incentives to women to have more babies to bump it up again (£1,650 per child recently in Spain).
By contrast, many governments in the South, unable or unwilling to aid their huge and growing poor (resulting from inequitable, export-led development), are adopting population controls to reduce these numbers. These have sometimes been coercive, inhumane and damaging to women’s health. So, perversely, in the high carbon-emitting rich North, with its huge average carbon footprint, we have policies to increase the birthrates. But in the low-emitting poor South they are being restricted. Apart from economic issues, there are the morality, justice and rights aspects of population growth and control.
Many religious leaders oppose any restrictions on human numbers as interfering with divine purpose. They may oppose both government policies and women’s individual reproductive rights (the Vatican position). On the other hand liberals (and others) may oppose limits as going against natural law, human rights, migrants’ rights, women’s rights. In the 60s and 70s many greens did consider rates of population growth ecologically unsustainable, particularly after the publication of the UN Limits to Growth report. But they later dropped the issue.
Reds also tended not to talk about it. Both are now returning to the issue, especially as public opinion often links it to climate change. Reds and greens support the rights arguments and are against the top-down social control and engineering aspect of population policies. But they see the unfettered profit-driven growth models of both the rich North and dependent South as the problem. Alternative, sustainable growth models and the elimination of inequality and poverty are seen as the main issues. Concerns about population growth are seen largely as a diversion.