“President Obama has ended the ban on federal funds imposed by the Bush Administration on groups that promote or perform abortions abroad and on the United Nations Population Fund. He must take this opportunity to put pressure on the UNFPA to concentrate on the health of women and babies--and to stop wasting money assaulting the poor with wrongheaded population-control schemes.
"Continued rapid population growth poses a bigger threat to poverty reduction in most countries than HIV/AIDS," the UNFPA said in an hysterical statement on World Population Day, last July. This is plain wrong: it is not human numbers that cause poverty, but bad economic policies, laws and institutions.
The densely-populated Netherlands and Japan are prosperous but poor in resources, while much of impoverished Africa is thinly populated but rich in resources. The United States rose to affluence with one of the world's highest long-term population growth rates, while now-prosperous Ireland had negative long-term rates. Clearly, neither human numbers nor natural resources are keys to the modern story of global wealth and poverty.
It is clear that neither human numbers nor natural resources are keys to the modern story of global wealth and poverty.
The UNFPA talks of "women's empowerment and gender equality" and "universal access to reproductive health" but, despite this politically-correct discourse, it remains committed to its original purpose of reducing population growth: reproductive healthcare is "the most practicable option for slowing population growth," it says, equating this with poverty, food insecurity and environmental degradation.
These fallacies hark back to the 18th century economist Thomas Robert Malthus. Like many other pressure groups and NGOS, the UNFPA continues to commit elementary analytical errors: ignoring evidence staring us in the face.
The 20th century saw human numbers quadruple to more than six billion but food production widely outstripped population growth, average life expectancy doubled to well over 60 years, while global GDP per capita more than quintupled.
In the 1960s, alarmists such as Paul Ehrlich predicted imminent mass famine around the world. Indeed, in the last couple of years global food prices briefly shot up--maize, wheat and rice all doubled or tripled in a short time--but fell back again. In fact, the long-term trend in real grain prices over the past century has been heading steadily downward, at an average of seven to 10 percent per decade (depending on the product).To be sure, a horrifying number of people today still live in squalor, scourged by disease and hunger--but the correct name for this is poverty, not "overpopulation." In countries where people cannot securely own property, cannot sell their produce freely and get scant protection in law, government is poverty's handmaiden.”
Nicholas Eberstadt, “Curbing the Myth of Overpopulation to Fight Poverty”, China Post (Taiwan) (7 February 2009).
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.29350,filter.all/pub_detail.asp
Nicholas Eberstadt, one of the country’s foremost demographers, is the Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute.
Overpopulation is not now and never has been a problem before mankind. Levels of living have risen in the past as human numbers have increased, not the reverse, and as the level of living has risen fertility has declined. Under its medium-variant projection of world population growth, average world fertility is expected to decline steady from now to mid-century, and to fall below the replacement rate of an average of 2.1 children per woman by 2040. In the more economically developed areas of the world fertility is now significantly below replacement and some of these countries are already experiencing population decline.
Nor is running out of resources or a shortage of food at the global level a problem, although it is at the regional and country levels for reasons having to do with poor economic mananagement. Food, metals and petroleum prices on international markets, which had risen significantly during the global upturn of the middle of the decade, have fallen back since the summer and are likely to resume their longer-term downward trend. This long-term trend is not consistent with the hypothesis that population is pressing on the world’s available resources.
Finally, Eberstadt is right to emphasize that development depends on policies, not resources or population densities. The world does suffer from terrible poverty, far too much poverty, with almost three billion people subsisting on two dollars a day or less. Successful development to reduce that poverty requires a strong respect for the efficiency of markets and a supportive environment created by public institutions rooted in the rule of law, respect for private property, a stable financial system and an emphasis of education. An open orientation to the world economy also contributes markedly to the process of development, especially small countries.
If international agencies are to contribute to the acceleration of development in the world’s poorest countries, they should respect the lessons learned from the past and emphasize those policies that truly promote long-term development rather than a futile and unnecessary attempts to bring down population growth in the short-term.
Thanks to Professor Bom for the pointer to the Tdj.
No comments:
Post a Comment