Page 1March 2, 2006
Population growth, migration and four Millennium Development Goals
Colin Butler
Summary
This submission discusses the relationship between human population growth, migration and four Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – (i) Poverty and Hunger, (ii) Child Mortality, (iii) HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other diseases, and (iv) Environmental Sustainability.
In the last few decades many scientists, governments and development workers – especially those based in the First World – have greatly underestimated the benefit likely to accrue from slowing population growth. These benefits are likely to include reductions in poverty, hunger, child mortality and catastrophic infectious diseases, as well as an improved chance of global environmental sustainability. Many such workers appear to have misinterpreted the complexity of these links as evidence of a lack of a causal relationship between population growth rates and development.
These relationships are bi-directional. There is no “first” cause for poverty, nor for rapid population growth. While rapid population growth generally worsens poverty, poverty often influences population growth rates (generally by keeping them high). In turn, poverty in many developing countries is intimately associated with hunger, child mortality and epidemic malaria and HIV/AIDS. Global population growth also undermines environmental sustainability, even though the “environmental footprint” (the consumption of resources – including of environmental “sinks”) of wealthy populations greatly exceeds that of poor populations.
High birth rates among poor populations also erode environmental sustainability, including by providing source of cheap labour which multiply the ability of high income populations to damage environmental resources. Increased numbers of poor people also increase the size of the potential global environmental shadow, should this large poor population ever become affluent.
The term “Malthusianism” is used here to describe the harmful relationship between high rates of population growth and poverty (and poverty’s associates including hunger, child mortality, and catastrophic epidemics of infectious disease). In recent decades the pendulum has swung too far away from the Malthusian position. A more balanced view is urgently required. Without it, humanity faces the inevitability of continuing malignant Malthusian checks. While these checks are most likely to affect materially poor populations, their repercussions will harm materially wealthy populations, including by unwanted and illegal migration.
Introduction - disclosure
1. I believe that achievement of the MDGs is highly desirable, as is environmental sustainability. I believe that the lives of all human beings have value, and that the quality of life of the poorest quarter (at least) of the global population should and can be substantially improved, even if this reduces the relative and even the absolute living standards of populations who are currently better off. This motivation is not entirely altruistic, because I believe that a fairer and more sustainable world is also likely to support a global civilisation which will endure for much longer. I believe current trends, unless substantially altered, place civilisation at substantial risk, within this century.
2. A more spirited discussion of population issues is needed to facilitate attainment of the MDGs and environmental sustainability. I hope that readers will be interested in this review of how population issues have come to be so under-valued in the context of the MDGs and sustainability, and why this issue should be brought to the foreground.
The rise and fall of Malthusianism
3. The view that a harmful relationship exists between high rates of population growth and poverty (and the associates of poverty including hunger, child mortality, and catastrophic epidemics of infectious disease) is often called “Malthusianism.”[1] This term is Eurocentric, and this relationship was understood by many scholars apart from Thomas Malthus, including by some who lived long before[2] Malthus published the first edition of his work “Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society” in 1798.
4. Malthusianism often provokes a strongly polarised reaction. In recent decades, much elite academic and government opinion has shifted away from the Malthusian position. Malthusianism is now unpopular on both sides of the political spectrum.
5. The relationship between population growth and poverty is highly complex. Many contributory factors affect this relationship, operating through interacting, interlinked pathways which are difficult (and somewhat artificial) to disentangle. These co-factors include technology, human capability, access to energy, and the ability and failure of human populations to behave co-operatively. In many cases these co-factors obscure the Malthusian causal element underlying poverty, epidemics and conflict.
6. For example, skeptics of the explanatory power of Malthusianism may instead claim that Third World poverty arises primarily from crime, corruption, poor governance and “state failure”. However, greed, ethnic division and low levels of education, which themselves provide a fertile ground for crime, corruption and poor governance, are all likely to be worsened under conditions of extreme resource scarcity and competition. Rapid population growth harms the social capacity to provide resources to overcome poverty, except in those rare cases where ample resources from afar can be obtained (such as was the case in Europe for much of the 19th century). Thus, in many cases in the Third World, rapid population growth is a factor in crime, corruption and poor governance.
7. If thresholds of scarcity are exceeded, whether because the population is excessive, or whether the population of poor people is excessive, then affluence, total population size, or both must decline. The real debate should concern the identification of what is “excessive”, rather than whether or not limits exist.
8. Malthus, in the main, underestimated the capacity of human ingenuity to keep ahead of the demands placed upon the environment by additional people, at least until the present. The global capacity to produce food is obviously far greater today than it was during his lifetime. The expanding European population of the 19th century was resourced (including for food and fertilizer) by the global reach of the European empires, as well as by technological innovation. But this does not mean that Malthusianism has been disproved. Although technology continues to improve, there is no equivalent spare empire to lift the Third World from poverty. The expansion of cultivated areas continues, but at the cost of areas like the Amazon forest and the deep ocean. This process is not infinite, though with luck and population stabilization the plow will outrun the stork (McMichael, 2005).
9. Numerous famines (some contemporary, such as in Kenya, Malawi, and the Horn of Africa), conquests, genocides and cases of “ethnic cleansing” in the last two centuries show the limits of environmental and other, and the collective capacity of humans to harm as well as to help other groups, in the face of competition over limited resources. Yet explicit discussion of the Malthusian elements in these issues is rare. For example, Samantha Power’s otherwise excellent book "A Problem From Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide meticulously documents the proximal causes of numerous genocides and cases of “ethnic cleansing”, without once discussing population pressure as an underlying contributory cause. (Power, 2002). A few authors have recently argued that Malthusianism remains valid, at least in some cases (King, 1990; Kahl, 2002, Butler, 2004, Ware 2005). Some hint that it might be (Cleland and Sinding, 2005). And a few argue that it is irrelevant, but at least discuss the issue (Urdal, 2004). However, most follow Power’s theme, focusing completely on other factors (Schwab, 2001, Commission for Africa, 2005).
Malthusianism is about far more than food supply
10. Malthusian theory is sometimes presented as being restricted to the issue of food supply. Malthus famously warned that human population, if unchecked, would increase geometrically, outpacing the growth in food supply. It is unlikely that Malthus intended this simplification, but in any case this argument has long since been generalised. For example, in the 1950s, several economic theorists argued that if population growth rates were excessive[3] then feedbacks would develop which weakened the societal capacity to improve the “quality” of successive generations, leading to entrapment. During the 1960s, prior to the Green Revolution, when global population growth reached its zenith, there was widespread concern that many populations in developing countries were entering such traps.[4]
Malthusian checks
11. Malignant Malthusian checks can be conceptualized as brakes to population growth rates that involve enormous human suffering. These are contrasted to benign checks which slow population growth through reduced fertility, contraception and delayed marriage. Malignant Malthusian checks manifest through a myriad of co-operative causes. These factors (e.g. poor governance, corruption, conflict, ethnic rivalry, poor health services and limited human capability) often serve to obscure the relationship between high birth rates[5] and malignant Malthusian checks. The minimising (or in some quarters even the ridiculing[6]) of these effects has eroded much of the urgency for accelerating the global demographic transition.
Four population summits
12. Malthusian thinking influenced the first of three decadal conferences held to discuss population and development, held in Bucharest in 1974. However, as the Green Revolution progressed, greatly increasing per capita food production, and as global fertility rates declined, concerns about an imminent quasi-global Malthusian catastrophe eased. A backlash developed against Malthusianism, including claims that it was overly simplified and “environmentally deterministic”. Much of the First World drive to slow population growth in the 1960s and 1970s was also motivated by fear that the chaotic, dysfunctional and overpopulated societies which Malthusian theory predicts would turn to Communism. Hodgson (1988) argues that the increasingly clear failure of state economies to deliver prosperity (except in China, which at this stage was aggressively slowing population momentum) made Communism seem less viable, and that this undermined much of the state motivation of the US to slow population growth. President Reagan, unlike his immediate predecessors (including the Republican Richard Nixon) considered population growth to have been “vastly exaggerated” (Finkle and Crane, 1985).
13. In this period Ester Boserup (1980) and some others (eg Leach and Fairhead, 2002) argued that, in some circumstances, population growth could lead to improved environmental, economic and social conditions. While Boserup never claimed that high population growth rates could either be sustained indefinitely, or would always be beneficial,[7] her thesis has sometimes been over-interpreted, to suggest that Malthusian limits are irrelevant for practical purposes.[8]
14. The second of the three great population conferences was held in 1984 in Mexico City. It endorsed the main conclusions of the earlier conference. However, the US, the most vigorous advocate of the over-riding importance of family planning programs at Bucharest (when fears of the lure of Communism were high) announced a cutback to its support for family planning in Mexico City, including by blocking the channeling of US government funds to support any organisation which used or promoted abortion. According to Finkle and Crane (1985) many delegates at this meeting expressed disappointment at the lack of knowledge and expertise concerning population and development problems of the Third World among members of the US delegation, and the political process by which its members were selected. The same authors assert that the Population Association of America (then an organisation whose members largely supported a Malthusian world view) questioned the basis of the White House policy.
15. The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo relied mainly on human and women’s rights arguments to justify a further lowering of global fertility rates. While such arguments are valid and necessary, they carry far less weight among politician than arguments that rely primarily on economic and demographic factors. These latter arguments could have been used to predict further declines in living standards and the eventual operation of malignant Malthusian checks of poverty, hunger, famine, high infant and child mortality, conflict and catastrophic infectious disease epidemics. If they had, then more progress may have been made.
16. The pendulum continued to swing away from Malthusianism during the rest of the 20th century, except in China, which persisted in its one child policy, introduced in 1979. Population issues had a very low priority at the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and at its follow up in 2002. Further evidence for the loss of political will regarding global population growth is provided by the failure to hold a major follow up conference to the Cairo population conference in 2004. Even though such mega-conferences can be criticized as extravagant, they have an important value in inspiring the global agenda. The absence of the 2004 conference instead issued a very misleading global signal – that the “population bomb” has been defused, and that, in the main, laissez faire patterns of population growth are sufficient to maximise sustainable global human well-being.
17. No reputable study has ever refuted the core Malthusian arguments. The response by Boserup and others provides, at best, a partial and incomplete counter-example to Malthusianism. These cannot be generalized to the global level.[9] The National Academy of Sciences report of 1986 (National Research Council, 1986) is probably the best know “revisionist” document, interpreted by some as refuting Malthus. However, this report, which relied extensively on the work of the cornucopian economist Julian Simon,[10] weakened rather than overturned the (strongly Malthusian) conclusions of the earlier enquiry, published by the same Academy in 1971.
18. The 1986 report examined eight main questions. Each answer was that high rates of population growth harmed to human development. Stephen Sinding, then head of the US Agency for International Development (US AID)[11] was reported as feeling enormous “relief” at the committee’s conclusions (Holden, 1988). Nevertheless, the report was couched in such tortured, heavily qualified language that a contrary interpretation – that population growth was neutral for human development – was possible. Indeed, this had been the official US position at the Mexico City meeting (Finkle and Crane, 1985), held soon before the National Academy Report was published. Paul Demeny, editor of the Population and Development Review called the report “thoroughly revisionist” (Demeny, 1988, p 237). However, the main “revision” which occurred between the two reports is of tone. The latter report lacks the urgency of the earlier report, yet still concludes that rapid population growth is harmful for development.
19. The Malthusian position has continued to be understated and even denied in recent decades, and most demographers have turned to other issues, including the implication of falling populations in many developed countries. The unpopularity of explicitly Malthusian arguments has weakened the scope and wording of the MDGs. These give too little emphasis to the desirability of reducing birth rates. However, progress towards the MDGs will clearly reduce birth rates, because many of the MDGs (such as increased literacy and female empowerment) are associated with lower birth rates.
Malthus: unpopular among the Left
20. Malthusian thinking influenced Charles Darwin, and social Darwinism invoked Malthusian principles (survival of the “fittest”[12]) to justify practices now considered as unjust, racist and even barbaric. Examples of social Darwinist thinking from the 19th and early 20th centuries include economic and racial discrimination against the Caucasian Irish during the 1840s and numerous non-Caucasian peoples elsewhere. Eugenics, a form of social Darwinism, was part of neo-Malthusianism in the early 20th century (Hodgson, 1991). Many on the Left have consequently inherited a distaste for Malthusian views. This is probably a reason that liberals underestimate the harmful effects that high birth rates can have upon human welfare.
21. Analysts who dismiss Malthusian thinking using rights-based arguments[13] have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Liberals are correct to assert that social Darwinism is inhumane and unacceptable. But this does not mean that the essential Malthusian arguments are false. Humanity must find ways to reduce the cost of competition over limited resources. Slowing and in many cases stopping population growth rates – through development and leadership, rather than coercion[14] – provides a humane way to help overcome the Malthusian dilemma, and is also likely to strengthen human rights.
Malthus: increasingly unpopular among the Right
22. The understating of Malthusian concerns has coincided with a shift of global policies to the right. This is not coincidental, and has partially discussed above, in relation to the diminishing attraction of Communism. President Reagan was the first US leader in twenty years to reject the Malthusian position.[15] The Reagan administration not only sanctioned the “revisionist” position (which marginalised Malthusianism) but used this new thinking to justify the steering of funds away from family planning, and Malthusian scholars (Hodgson, 1988). The National Academy Report of 1986, discussed above, was well received by the American Enterprise Institute, described as a “protagonist for the (US) Administration’s free-market population policy” (Holden, 1986).