State attempts to control overpopulation threaten to impinge on human rights, yet failure to address the issue could cause a global population crash. Gender empowerment holds the key
It's a question which now crops up with predictable frequency: what about population growth? It's the subject which everyone finds very hard to discuss, firstly because it leads quickly to polarised positions and finger-pointing blame. Population growth is an issue dominated by the question: who is having too many babies?
To many people across the world, this question is simply incomprehensible. Firstly, because babies are still the most effective welfare state for many people; they offer the best chance of agricultural labour, family security, sibling support and welfare in old age.
Furthermore, in many cultures, having plenty of babies is crucial to your identity and your status as a woman or a man. Add to that the inaccessibility of safe birth control in many parts of the world, and it becomes clear how little choice has got to do with having babies outside of a relatively small prosperous corner of the globe.
To see a clutch of children as 'too many' depends on a range of cultural assumptions that westerners take for granted – which means they can make some rather silly mistakes. When I was in Kampala a couple of years ago, a western NGO was trying to promote birth control in an advertising campaign, and they juxtaposed two images. In one, a couple had two children and a nice shiny car. In the other, the couple had several children but no car. The implication of the advert was obvious to me – you will be better off with fewer children. But in fact, Ugandans were taking an entirely different message from the advert: they much preferred the image of fecundity and big family and the car seemed a very poor exchange for a gaggle of lively kids.
There is a really profound point in this everyday story of cultural mistranslation. What underlay the incident is a real clash of value systems, and who are we to insist that preferring a car to more children constitutes progress? Yet, at the national level, Uganda's population is growing at one of the fastest rates in the world, third in this index. It makes attempts to reduce poverty and expand health and education services a much harder task, quite apart from the punishing impact of this population growth on the environment.
On Tuesday night, I chaired a debate, 'Crisis and recovery: ethics, economics and justice', with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the economist Robert Skidelsky, the Guardian's economics editor, Larry Elliot, and the new Conservative MP, Zac Goldsmith. During the audience's questions, population growth inevitably came up. Skidelsky was deeply worried and warned that while education does reduce fertility rates, it is having too slow an impact to prevent growth to the 9 billion predicted by the middle of the century.
The archbishop was equally concerned. He agreed population growth was 'a timebomb', but warned that state attempts to control it have been abhorrent to concepts of human rights; he admitted he was 'deeply perplexed' by the issue. Skidelsky warned that he feared the possibility of a Malthusian population crash, or series of crashes, brought about by catastrophic disasters, which could bring the world population down to 3-4 billion in a century.
I detected an intensifying pessimism, and even a sense of confusion, in these comments which left me feeling very gloomy for my grandchildren. But comments from a thinktank pundit on the way out of the event cheered me up; he'd been listening to someone give a paper on the dramatic drop in fertility rates in many parts of the world – and it was always linked to gender empowerment. Women will save the world.
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