BECOMING ISLANDS OF CHILDREN

“Yes, we will do anything for the poor man, anything but get off his back.” — Tolstoy.

There is nothing uplifting about not knowing from where the next meal is coming to fill the stomachs of children, bloated and crying out from hunger, children who did not ask to be born. Unplanned population growth in Southern Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa has seen growth rates that are not only among the highest in the world, but tied in with frightening levels of “poverty and malnutrition”. Africa, according to an FAO study done in 1995, “World Agriculture: Towards 2010” (Page 750), was expected to have a population growth rate of 2.9 percent, Latin America 2.1 percent, and Asia 1.9 percent. Asia’s growth rate position, below that of Africa and Latin America, is due to China’s sensible family planning policy. In sharp contrast, developed countries in Europe and elsewhere are expected to have a population growth rate by 2010 of 0.4 percent! It is estimated that a country or region with a growth rate of 2.4 percent increases its population 11 times within a century.

Between 1960 and 1990, all the Latin American countries, save for Argentina, Chile, Cuba and Uruguay, more than doubled their populations, Forrest D Colburn pointed out in his “Exceptions to Urban Bias in Latin America: Cuba and Costa Rica”, published in the Journal of Development Studies in July of 1993. And while in the same period Africa’s population jumped from 281 million to 647 million, in Kenya, for example, the population quadrupled, rising sharply from 6.3 million to 25.1 million. The Ivory Coast’s tripled plus from 3.8 million to 12.6 million. (Paul Kennedy: “Preparing for the Twenty-First Century”, published in London in 1994. Kennedy would point out in the same publication that while in 1950 Africa’s population was half that of Europe’s, a mere 35 years later, by 1985, both Europe and Africa had the same level of population — some 480 million. By 2025, the population of Africa is expected to be three times Europe’s population.

Another writer, Sylvie Brunel, in a study published in France in 1997, (Page 66), warned that the population ratio between developed and developing countries — 1 to 3 in 1950, was expected to be in the order of 1 to 9 by 2010. The answer to the disparity in levels of population growth in the developed world, comprising largely European and European descent populated countries, and that of the developing world of non-European and mixed descent peoples, must lie in their belief in and application of family planning, including the termination of unwanted pregnancies. As I pointed out earlier with respect to Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, there are frightening levels of “poverty and malnutrition”. It may be argued that agricultural production in Africa has neither surpassed nor even kept pace with its population growth rate, as Paul Kennedy has pointed out. Indeed Kennedy has noted on Page 214 of his book, “Preparing for the Twenty-First Century”, that while in the 1960s agricultural output grew by some three percent, and kept pace with the population growth, from 1970 agricultural production grew at approximately half of the 1960s level.

Would it not have been better for Governments of countries in Africa, South Asia and Latin America to have advocated birth control rather than have hundreds of millions of their children condemned to be born into, and live and die in poverty and hunger? Surely, what is demonstrated to be good for Europe and nations of mainly European descent, family planning wise, should also be good for the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia and Latin America. The people of these areas are victims of a terrible historical injustice — the callousness and brutality of slavery and indentured labour, and the cynical arrogance of accursed Imperialism.

It is as plain as the proverbial pikestaff that Europeans and people of European descent, charting the ascendancy of the developed world, have not allowed themselves to be held back by anti-abortion groups’ lack of the realistic. And if physical Imperialism was a principal contributing factor, along with that of population growth, in keeping back the economic advance of advantaged States and peoples, a new factor has entered into the equation, that of globalisation, promoted by the developed nations, which control the World Trade Organisation. But I have strayed. Paul Bairoch pointed out in “Le Tiers Monde dans L’Impasse” (Page 484), published in France in 1992, that a marked population growth rate, where this was noted as well in the number of persons actively involved in agriculture, tends to reduce the area of cultivated land per person. In turn, if there was no increase in productivity, the food supply was effectively reduced.

I will quote Bairoch, directly, for the benefit of students, who may be interested: “Twice the number of hands on the same plot of land does not generally produce twice the amount of rice but always requires twice the amount of food.” Excessive population growth presents another problem, as Guy Sorman tells us in “La Nouvelle Richesse des Nations”, that of the slide in the proportion of the population of working age. In Africa this fell from 44.2 percent in 1950 to 37.6 percent 40 years later. This introduced a new problem, the ratio of adults in 1950 to dependents — 1 to 1.3 persons — became 1 to 1.7 by 1990. “The great problem for Africa”, Sorman would say, “is not that it is experiencing rapid population growth, but that it is, at the present stage, a continent of children : 45 percent of the population is under 18 years of age.” In the Caribbean, all too many Island States are, figuratively speaking, becoming islands of children.