All-Party Parliamentary Group on Population

ALL-PARTY PARLIAMENTARY GROUP ON POPULATION

MINUTES OF PROCEEDINGS

at a

PARLIAMENTARY HEARING

held at

The Palace of Westminster

on

Monday 15 May 2006

Population, Development and Reproductive Health Inquiry

Before:

Richard Ottaway MP, in the Chair

Viscount Craigavon

Baroness Tonge

Sandra Gidley MP

Ms Catherine Budgett-Meakin

Ms Patricia Hindmarsh

Ms Jennifer Woodside

(From the Shorthand Notes of:

W B GURNEY & SONS LLP,

Hope House,

45 Great Peter Street,

London SW1P 3LT)

Witnesses: MR ROBERT ENGELMAN, Vice President for Research, Population Action International, and MR JOHN ROWLEY, Planet 21, examined.

CHAIRMAN: Ladies and gentlemen, this is our second hearing. Thank you all for coming. It is a great pleasure to welcome John Rowley from Planet 21 and Robert Engelman from PAI, both well-known in the field. I would be grateful if you could open up with a statement of about five minutes, or something like that, and then we will throw it open for questions. The room is booked for two hours but we do not necessarily run for the entire length. We have already identified quite a few key questions we want to ask you. I propose doing it in alphabetical order, so would you like to start, Robert.

MR ENGELMAN: Thank you very much. Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, thank you for inviting my organisation, Population Action International of Washington DC, to participate in these hearings. I am honoured to represent PAI as its Vice President for Research, and I am particularly grateful to speak as an American researcher here in the United Kingdom. I compliment this body for its consideration of this linkage, which may be more important today in some ways than ever before, despite being less often considered.

Several panels of international scientists have characterised today’s human impact on the environment as unprecedented in scope and risk. The Royal Society of London and the US National Academy of Sciences jointly stated in 1992: “If current predictions of population growth prove accurate and patterns of human activity on the planet remain unchanged, science and technology may not be able to prevent either irreversible degradation of the environment or continued poverty for much of the world”.

The scientists added, and this is really the point that I want to stress today: “Unlike many other steps that could be taken to reduce the rate of environmental changes, reductions in rates of population growth can be accomplished through voluntary measures. Surveys in the developing world repeatedly reveal large amounts of unwanted childbearing. By providing people with the means to control their own fertility, family planning programmes have major possibilities to reduce rates of population growth and hence to arrest environmental degradation. Also, unlike many other potential interventions that are typically specific to a particular problem, a reduction in the rate of population growth would affect many dimensions of environmental change. Its importance is easily underestimated if attention is focused on one problem at a time”.

The conference that produced this statement led two years later to a Science Summit on World Population in New Delhi. This was the same year that the International Conference on Population and Development took place in Cairo, 1994. No fewer than 58 of these societies, essentially the world’s national scientific societies, endorsed a statement that asserted: “Humanity’s ability to deal successfully with its social, economic and environmental problems will require the achievement of zero population growth within the lifetimes of our children”.

If we want to know what scientists have said about the linkage between population growth, environmental sustainability, and human health and prosperity, these statements remain the closest scientists have come to an international consensus today. I want to briefly review some of these connections, taking a broad view of environmental sustainability that includes soil, fresh water, living things and the climate that sustains human life and wellbeing. I want to stress, too, that when it comes to environmental sustainability, as other things, human population is a unified whole. The world is thoroughly globalised and closely connected. Human environmental impacts can be remote in time and place, as well as local and immediate. Neither my analysis nor my policy recommendations are fundamentally different for lower income populations – whether we call them developing countries or majority populations – than for wealthy ones. We are all in this together, and the same principles and values, I believe, apply to us all.

More than two-fifths of all the land on earth is now serving human ends – either food production or settlement or commercial and industrial purposes. Today’s farmland is almost all we are likely ever to have to produce food for humanity, yet an area of agricultural land the size of China and India is already significant degraded. Most of this is in Africa and Asia, where food insufficiency is already acute.

Today there is a frightening additional prospect: a long-term upward shift in the cost of petroleum and natural gas could significantly raise the price of food worldwide, regardless of how exporting nations resolve the tough question of subsidies. If we succeed in substituting biomass fuels for petrol, as some, including the President of the United States, have suggested we do, we will be putting energy production for vehicles in direct competition with food production for human beings, further coupling food prices to those of energy. Already the world is failing the population of the malnourished, 852 million people in the 2000-02 period, and rising by almost five million a year. Optimism about ever-cheaper food has always been based on the assumption of cheap energy. That optimism is less justified today more than ever.

More than half of the world’s accessible renewable fresh water is now withdrawn by humanity. In parts of Africa most surface water is diverted for farming and raising livestock. This is probably a good part of the reason why Lake Chad is disappearing today. Growing scarcities of fresh water are contributing to the bloody conflicts that have been occurring this year in northern Kenya and the Horn of Africa.

Last Wednesday, the Guardian featured a news story suggesting that some 20,000 people from Somalia and Ethiopia have attempted to emigrate, not to Europe, not to North America, but to Yemen across the Gulf of Aden. Several hundred have died in the attempt. All three of these countries rank quite low in their cultivated land and renewable fresh water per capita, and these values are shrinking rapidly as their populations continue to grow at 2.4 per cent a year in Ethiopia and more than three per cent a year in Somalia and in Yemen. This recently uncovered stream of international migrants has nothing to do with the lure of the developed world or strong economies. This movement of people is driven by desperation. Each year, the amount of cropland and fresh water available for the needs of the average population is declining by two to three per cent.

Within two decades, as many as 700 million people may live in countries with only a twelfth of a hectare of cultivated land per capita. This has been established by a number of soil scientists and agronomists as something of an absolute minimum for food self-sufficiency when you are not using what we often call in the United States Iowa-like techniques of food production, which I am sure is true of Great Britain as well. If you are not having high inputs of fertiliser and energy use, this is what you need as a minimum to keep you fed a vegetarian diet.

More than four times that many, that is more than four times 700 million people, may live in countries without enough renewable fresh water per capita to assure food self-sufficiency. The tendency today is to blame the problems of food insecurity and water scarcity on the weaknesses of institutions, and that is understandable. Governments are indeed notoriously prone to corruption and they are often incompetent. But to treat these issues as purely institutional would be to blur the important distinction between long-term systemic forcing mechanisms that cause these sorts of problems and failures of response in institutions that are incapable of coping. Population growth above certain thresholds tends to push human activities past critical natural tipping points - I would stress, in combination with other factors, always – in environments where farmland and fresh water are teetering on the brink of insufficiency for existing, let alone growing, populations. Under good circumstances, governments can effectively cope. Often, pressed by the spiralling demands that are being placed upon them, they cannot.

Population growth – again, above certain thresholds – also frustrates our efforts to maintain the biological and genetic richness of the earth, to save what amounts to our only known companions in the universe, especially in forests, coastal areas and the seas. In the Washington area, where I live, the Chesapeake Bay, which was written about by Capt. John Smith, an English explorer of the time, as literally an endemic natural paradise which is on the flyway where the birds migrate from Canada into the tropics of the Americas, is developing a vast dead zone of low to non-existent oxygen.Environmentalists and local governments are beginning to despair of returning it to anything resembling health while the watershed gains 110,000 people each year, all of whom need a place to live and like to drive cars. With this issue, differences in the kind of government policy, technology, and even per capita wealth, tend to create differences on the margins of plant and animal extinctions.

The loss of biodiversity is global and slow-acting, with genetic impoverishment in one generation often condemning a species to extinction several generations later. And this genetic impoverishment and species loss is occurring in every country regardless of its current level of population growth as well as its level of income and government, in response not just to the population growth that may or may not be occurring in that country today but that which has occurred in the past and that which is occurring in other countries that may trade with them and consume the products of that country. The most direct causes are the shifting of land from natural to human management. Mostly this is agriculture, but it is also housing and commercial and industrial development. A key driver of species loss is the growing segmentation of natural areas as roads divide them and patchworks of settlements slowly break up and fill in previously natural areas. This parcelisation inevitably increases the ratio of perimeter to the interior habitat. Predators tend to be favoured over prey, and whole ecosystems are thus disrupted. The introduction of alien species compounds the threat.

An even larger threat to biodiversity than these may be human-induced climate change. Both climate change and the rising cost of energy – both of these much on our minds today – relate to the long-term growth in human demand for energy. That demand is always a function of population coupled with levels of personal consumption and prevailing technological and energy-source options. These linkages are among the most difficult and sensitive for us to tease out today. High-consuming, more slowly growing industrialised countries, especially my own, I might say, have historically consumed the lion’s share of the world’s annual fossil fuel production. Of course, our own population growth since the Industrial Revolution began has been a dominant feature in the size of our total emissions of greenhouse gases, which we should not forget. Now developing countries, as is their right and in a sense their duty for development, are beginning to catch up to our consumption levels, as the meteoric growth of automobile ownership in China and India illustrates. The rapid population growth that occurred 40 years ago in these countries, when peak oil and global warming were not on anyone’s minds, provide the base on which today’s rapid increases in consumption in some of these developing countries is now occurring.

That offers an important lesson. The population growth that occurs from today forward will be strongly determinative of how much of a cushion we will have for the rest of the century to continue enjoying the use of fossil fuels. We will need that cushion. Somewhere between six and 14 billion people are likely to be consuming energy in this century at per capita rates that may be, and should be in some ways, much higher than today’s world average. Everyone in the world has the right to drive the way Americans do. Indeed, many economists would say that this is what economic development is about, freedom to have that right and the wealth to have that right to drive a sports utility vehicle if you want to. It is extremely difficult to imagine a plausible shift to non-carbon energy sources sufficient to meet these needs soon enough to head off a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. I find it hopeful that according to the United Nations’ lowest projection of future population, the number of human beings rises for another 25 years and then levels off and then begins a gradual decline to the end of the century. That is somewhat parallel to – hopefully parallel to – and thus, I believe, can help support the curve of annual greenhouse gas emissions that we will need in order to stabilise those gases’ concentrations in the atmosphere in this century of roughly double their industrial concentrations and not much more. In other words, for both greenhouse gas emissions and population, at the lowest most positive scenario for both, you have a curve that looks something like this going off into the future (indicating downward trend), as opposed to with high population growth a curve that goes like this(indicating upward trend)and medium emissions growth going like that(indicating downward trend) choking everybody’s per capita ability to emit greenhouse gases.

Let me return briefly to Ethiopia as a closing illustration of the complex but, I believe, close relation of human population dynamics to environmental sustainability. Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Bristol and University College London reported on a development project that provided needed tap water in a group of remote communities in southern Ethiopia. Women who had once walked up to six hours in a day to obtain water could suddenly get it in 15 minutes – by any measure successful water intervention, clean water, which is something we all want to work on – but one side of this new access to safe water was that these women were healthier, had more energy, and as a result apparently, so the researchers believed, ended up having more children and their birth rates rose, which eventually contributed to the local population growth in these areas, at least of kids – it is a fairly recent project so it has not gone through the age structure yet – and, thus, ironically a more rapid depletion of water supplies, all of which were coming from surface and some underground water, the same basic water supply for these communities no matter where women went to get it. As a result of that, there was poorer child health than the communities had experienced in the past. The researchers also found, however, and unfortunately they did not write this up in their paper but it was covered in the local press at the time, that women in these communities were quite interested in obtaining access to family planning services, although so far as I have been able to determine access today is still pretty much lacking in that part of Ethiopia. The researchers wrote: “Development intended to improve human welfare that does not include a family planning component”, and I would add assuming one is desired by the local population, although I think that is frequently or almost always the case, “can actually undermine the long-term wellbeing of the target population”. I could not say it better.

We live in a world facing higher energy costs, human-induced climate change, and real risks of increasing food insecurity, poverty and civil conflict. The slowdown in population growth humanity is now experiencing – due to smaller desire families, later desired pregnancies, and increased use of contraception – is the most positive global trend we can point to today. But it is a fragile trend, with support for international family planning and sexual and reproductive health and rights only a fraction of what is needed. I and Population Action International urge the Government of the United Kingdom to step further into your leadership in helping to assure that all people who seek to plan their families in good health, with full rights to direct their own sexuality and reproduction, can do so. Their wellbeing alone will be sufficient reward for these efforts. But we also stand a chance of gaining a more peaceful and less economically divided world, one that can support thriving human and non-human populations for millennia to come.

Thank you very much, I look forward to your questions.