lomppt2.rtf

Strictly for personal use

LIFE ON A MODERN PLANET: A MANIFESTO FOR PROGRESS

by Richard D North

Published by Manchester University Press, 1995

(About 117,000 words)

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PROLOGUE: Mathare Valley, Nairobi

INTRODUCTION: The organisation of the book

PART ONE: TOO MANY HUMANS?

Chapter One: Snapshot of a Modern Planet: busy and largely successful.

Introduction

Section i The doom that never came

Section ii Sketching the success in food

Section iii The wider success

Section iv A very modern success

Chapter Two Defusing the Population Bomb: Fertility, famine and affluence

Introduction

Section i The global picture

Section ii Kenya: the good news

Section iii Exponential Growth

Section iv Shouting the odds

Section v Winning the changes

Chapter Three Feeding the Future Billions: some clues

Introduction

Section i Man the farmer

Section ii Constraints all around the world

Section iii Destructive myths: the anti-farming propaganda

Section iv The real agenda

Section v Breaking through the barriers

Section vi The bio-industrial revolution

Section vii The global good news

Chapter Four Fuelling the Future Billions: some clues

Introduction

Section i. From science to policy: clearing the air

Section ii. Energy crisis: what energy crisis?

Section iii. Beauty or beast: nuclear power

PART TWO: THE CONSUMER, THE CAMPAIGNERS AND CHEMOPHOBIA.

Chapter Five The Myth of Ecological Disaster: Apocalypse not yet?

Introduction

Section i. Oil slicks: the campaigners' classic "ecological disaster"

Section ii. Water contamination: the media's favourite disaster

Chapter Six Aesthetics Versus Ecology: Wind and water at war with the landscape.

Introduction

Section i. Ecology or aesthetics?

Section ii. Windmills: "alternative" energy or vandalism?

Section iii. Water power: huge potential for energy and "vandalism"

Chapter Seven Chlorine: Devil's element or useful member of society?

Introduction

Section i. The chemicals industry and Greenpeace on the Cote d'Azur

Section ii. The beginnings of the chlorine story

Section iii. Chlorine in disasters

Section iv. Organochlorines: dangerous and indestructible?

Section v. The nature of organochlorines

Section vi. So should we ban chlorine production?

Chapter Eight Oh For The Simple life: Right living, right technology.

Introduction

Section i. How shall recycling make a come-back?

Section ii. Exploring ecological costs

Section iii. The Green Consumer: spoiled for choice

Section iv. A long and healthy life

Section v A lighter footprint from industry

PART THREE: MAN, NATURE AND DEVELOPMENT

Chapter Nine: Paradise, Wilderness and the Nurseryworld [[i]]: The worlds we have lost

Introduction

Section i. Ecology, the not-so-romantic science

Section ii. Paradise and the Theme Park

Section iii. The wilderness, paradise and monks

Section iv Trouble in paradise

Section v. Paradise and the Nurseryworld

Section vi. "Original Affluence"?

Chapter Ten Wilderness and the Manscape:

What we can really expect from the primitive

Introduction

Section i. Making the Wilderness into a Manscape

Section ii. These small crowded islands

Section iii. The American Wilderness

Section iv. Tropical Wilderness: the scene of "ecolonialism".

Section v. Another Big Mammal, or How many whales do we need?

Section vi. The Rainforest

Section vii. Modernising the noble savage

Chapter Eleven Facing Facts in the Rich World

Introduction

Section i A new way of seeing the world

Section ii Regulatory fundamentalists: Greenpeace

Section iii Campaigners, politics and dissidence

Section iv Finding a balanced approach

Section v Assessing where the balance lies

Section vi Helping Governments gain trust

Section vii Uniting economics and ecology

Chapter Twelve Humanising Development, Developing Humanism

Introduction

Section i The Literature of Hope

Section ii The Good News That Dare Not Say Its name

Section iii The Market and Social Cohesion

Section iv Intervening to End Intervention

Section v Redefining Development

Section vi After Empire, International Governance in the Modern World

Epilogue: In Monterrey, Mexico

Further Reading

PROLOGUE

In Mathare Valley, Nairobi, Kenya, November 1989 and April 1992

I have spent a bit of time in Mathare Valley, an inner city shanty slum in Nairobi. [[ii]] It is a very particular part of this modern planet. Pop music, promiscuity, football, money-making, courage, exploitation, great kindness - these all have their part in its extraordinary bustle.

This book is written in the belief that the very large numbers of people now alive, and the prospect that they will shortly double in number, requires us to think carefully and boldly about the means we know we have, or can imagine and invent, by which decent life chances can be spread throughout our world. This is a poor moment in which to lose our nerve.

Mathare is a steep-sided gully with a river running through it. It is surrounded by some very prosperous suburbs. It is what you would expect a shanty to be. Tin shacks predominate. They often have no windows and are built on the earth (mud in winter) about the size of a kitchen in a cramped modern flat. Rubbish heaps are everywhere, and merge with the streets. There are communal lavatories scattered around, and quite a lot of the people use them. There is a good deal of brain malaria around, and it makes its victims into hopeless cases before it kills some of them.

There are grown men and fathers in the valley, but they rather seldom stay with the mothers of their numerous children and many spend as much time with mistresses as with their families. Most families are headed by women, many of whom are looking after the children of dead or absent sisters. No-one knows how many of the men, women and children have AIDS, but there are plenty and perhaps even a majority who do, which is not surprising granted that most of the men are very promiscuous and many of the women survive partly on something close to prostitution. There are plenty of kids nursing dying mothers and trying to look after younger siblings too.

So the place is a pretty good mess, in which randiness and thieving relieve the misery of some, and add to that of others, but pervade the whole place as much as the heavy stink. There is a good deal of exploitation of the extremely poor by the very poor, and of any sort of poor by the very recently ex-poor. The civic authorities are variously reported to be hopeless, helpless and helpful. Bit by bit, the tin shanty is being replaced by a multi-storey concrete one in which there is more profit for landlords and perhaps a slight chance of marginally improved hygiene along with even greater opportunity for overcrowding.

People who work in the valley say it shows how at some point in degradation many people lose much chance of hanging on to their dignity. It is also true that some very poor people, luckier by nature or granted extraordinary toughness, become more and not less noble in the face of this misery. Partly under local leadership, there was schooling going on it the valley, and a kids' football league.

And there was an extraordinary amount of coming and going. If people have the smallest chance of making something like a living, they will be out there trying to find it with tremendous vigour. Mathare Valley is a desperate place, but it heaves with the toing and froing of 150,000 people trying to better themselves, whatever the odds against their succeeding.

Indeed, that is why it exists. Many of the people in Mathare Valley came because they would rather be dirt poor in the city, where there is a chance that something may come up, than be dirt poor in the village where they are pretty sure nothing will. It is hard to see it at times, but to some extent Mathare Valley is a place where the most, not the least, adventurous of Kenya's many poor people live.

It will not serve the people of the valley to assume the game is lost, because many of them have not themselves given up.

I have been writing about green issues for twenty years. For much of that time, I was regarded as one of that small but growing body of people who were usefully promoting the green concern, and was probably thought of as a propagandist for the cause.

This book may be seen as a betrayal of that work and stance. I do not think it is. It is an attempt to reconcile my preoccupation, shared with many, about man's relations with nature with another obvious concern - the well-being of the human species.

The book is an account of what can reasonably said about the future of the human species and the planet on which it lives. I paint an outlook which is fairly optimistic.

We cannot be wholly confident. There is a sheer scale to Mathare Valley, and other big cities, which not only worries us, but feels distinctly modern. This century, which has seen compassion institutionalised, but also made widespread, has seen Mao, Hitler and Stalin institutionalise violence on a huge scale. It has also witnessed a new brand of social alienation which all the new institutions of welfare have proved powerless to halt and may even have caused. It has seen new communications technologies which have been hugely successful at delivering trivial, vulgar and violent images. More constructively, they have delivered a new awareness that mankind is one interdependent species amongst many others, all living on what we suddenly see as an improbable, lovely, spaceship.

The century has seemed to accelerate man's exploitation of nature, and predictably, a countervailing green thinking. The public is ambivalent about this new orthodoxy. It strikes a chord, and yet meets a reluctance at the point at which people are supposed to respond to the new ideas by overthrowing old habits and beliefs.

I think the greens' contribution is often spiritually deficient and usually practically redundant. The greens, like many feminists and socialists, belong to a blame culture which is dangerous and unhelpful because it is unnecessarily cheerless whilst not helping find solutions to real problems.

Greens, in particular, often characterise industrialists and scientists as mis-directed and even as enemies. In fact greens are a product, and a quite important flowering, of a science-based industrial society in which the majority has a fully-fledged place and should be profoundly grateful for it. Whether as consumers, school-children, employers, employees, shareholders, politicians, pensioners, or neighbours, we have an identity of interest in economic well-being. In particular, we are all deeply involved in, and require, a degree of scientific, technical and industrial success.

Argument - even high-toned dissent - will have a role in our progress. But the core message of many greens, that Western industrial civilisation is dangerous by its very nature, will, I think, be proved wrong. Indeed, I think purist green thinking is itself the greater danger. The Third World is crying out for much which is at the heart of Western civilisation. The poor of the world have, in particular, a greater need of Western industrialists than of Western green dissent.

Introduction: The organisation of the book

This book has three main messages. The first is that though human numbers have grown dramatically and will soon double, this species and planet have rather good prospects. Much of this picture is given in Part One. The second message is that the well-being of mankind and the planet on which he lives depend on technical sophistication rather than Ludditism. The rich world has spawned a good deal of doubt and fear about its own progress, and affects a dislike of its own technology. Many people fantasise that there is some sort of simple life which might be an improvement. This view is very flawed. Much of this message is in Part Two.

My third proposition is that the rich world indulges in a dangerous idealism about the relations between man and nature and would do well to attempt a sounder reconciliation between its dreams and the realities of life. In particular, the tradition of research, sound politics, commerce, and robust debate which characterise the Western world is much less flawed than is often supposed. Much of this message is in Part Three.

The problem which most besets green-minded people is that of human numbers. But there is very little that is easy or pleasant that we can quickly do to reduce population, or even much slow its expansion. One of the most important informing ideas of this book is that it is entirely wrong - as well ineffective - to regret the numbers of humans who will shortly live on this planet. Each new person is, after all, a person: not known to us personally, but as valuable as any other. Chapter One in particular attempts a sketch of the present condition of the large numbers of people on earth.

There is a body of sound opinion which suggests that the human population dynamic, so to speak its engine, is simply running in such a form that 10 billion is likely to be - bar sad accident - the sort of number of humans we can expect to see in a generation or so. This is because, as is discussed in Chapter Two, there are already so many young, fertile people on the earth today who live in societies where fertility is falling but still prized.

It is not likely that poor women could, let alone should, be bullied or coerced into having fewer babies than they want. Rather, they should be enabled and encouraged to have only as many babies as they would like: babies by choice rather than chance, as the British Overseas Development Agency [[iii]] slogan has it. We have good evidence that women who see a secure future for their children and themselves become keen on family limitation. In several chapters, but initially in Chapter Two, we will be talking about the conditions which produce a sense of security. They do not by any means add up to what the West thinks of as affluence. But they are crucially dependent on economic growth. It would be easy to imagine life in the third world becoming easier if there were fewer people. Instead we need, more practically, to remember that there will be fewer people only when life becomes easier.

This book argues that we face immense challenges of an unprecedented but recognisably human kind to which with any luck we will find characteristically human solutions, solutions which are characteristic of our progress so far. Chapter Three discusses the prospect for man's food supplies and farming and Chapter Four discusses his energy prospects (and does so within the context of man's effects on the planet's climate).

Man does not, like other creatures, merely react to environmental circumstances. In some very real sense, he manipulates them. Our farming is of course a way of bending the productivity of environments towards our needs. Mankind was the first species to find ways to unlock stored energy without metabolising it from other life forms.

Our facility with technical advances allows our huge numbers, but it also frightens us. The middle section of the book takes several nuts-and-bolts cases which show how environmental issues are seldom quite what they seem. We examine some famous environmental "disasters", a very distrusted chemical (chlorine), and some favourite environmental panaceas. The chapters in this section are detailed because it is important to see that it is only when hard questions are asked about such issues that they reveal the extraordinary wrongness of some common perceptions about the environment.

Mankind is unique. Only of humans is it true that they often seem to want to dominate not merely large numbers of their fellows but also every habitat they see. We have boundless ambition, and a limitless list of whims to gratify. Few humans do not chafe against the constraints imposed by their social or physical environments.

But neither territorial nor social dominance is as often or cruelly sought by humans as some greens and doomsters like to suggest. [[iv], [v]] Humans are fascinating partly because we delight in each other and in other species in a way which is unimaginable in another animals. Man is also deeply romantic about his history and troubled by his present and his view of his prospects. Part Three begins by examining our thinking about the supposed nobility and purity of our past worlds. Our love of the primitive and the wild is discussed in Chapters Nine and Ten.

The process of looking after a huge number of humans will involve institution-building and many changes in the way we live. But it need not at all involve the Utopian spiritual transformation for which many purist greens call. Which is just as well granted that mankind has searched fitfully for spiritual transformation for all his time on earth and found it hard to come by. Chapter Eleven suggests that there may be much less of a real conflict between realistic green thinking and the workaday world than might be supposed.

Human thinking about survival is bedeviled by our need to plan, as best we may, not merely on their own behalf, or even merely with reference to our families, nations and continents. Humans have to strategise as though all humans mattered. We are not free to imitate nature in behaving as though the sufferings of individuals were a matter of indifference. The final chapter charts the way in which Western thinking has already become more helpful to the prospects of the very poor, whose treatment is always a civilisation's hardest measure.

In the prologue, we visit Mexico to see how there is really no such thing as the Third World. Countries around the world are leaping into industrialisation and it is fascinating to see the mistakes they are making - and avoiding.

A word about bias

John Maddox, the editor of the British science journal, Nature, opened his ground-breaking The Doomsday Syndrome by saying that the book was "not a scholarly work but a complaint". [[vi]] Over twenty years later, as I too suggest that much green campaigning is misguided, I know that people will say this is not a scholarly work and is biased.

I do not pretend to perfect balance in what I write. But I think I can claim a certain fundamental fairness of approach, and that - in any case - there are enough references in the book for a reader to be able to check its judgments for him or herself.

This book often refers to "despairists", "doomsters" and "Greens" and always with disapproval. I have adopted the convention of using "Green" with an upper case G to denote the purist thinking and thinkers of which I disapprove, and I keep "green", with a lower case g, for the more generalised ecological and environmental concern almost everyone now feels. All the individual despairists, doomsters and Greens I criticise are intelligent and have, most of them, contributed something to making green issues register, as they should. I criticise them for exaggerating the bad news and ignoring or underplaying the good news about this species and its prospects.

My scepticism about environmental campaigners has grown as I have increasingly found them blinkered by romantic dogmas, by political correctness or by the desire to excite their supporters or the media. I do not under-rate what campaigns have achieved, but I want to correct the widespread habit of over-rating it. In particular I am concerned that some of their successes have been achieved at the expense of honesty of debate, and that matters because the cultural environment is as important as the physical environment.

I admit to a personal bias, which has contributed at least somewhat to my thinking. I have met many environmental and conservation campaigners and very seldom have they been as engaging or as kindly, as the loggers, whalers, farmers, huntsmen, chemical engineers and others against whom they campaign.

My criticisms of the media have arisen because of long experience of an unholy alliance between journalists and environmental campaigners. Sometimes, the media get it right. The tabloid press is capable of suddenly biting back at the "environmental correctness" it sees around it, and the quality press always was a mixture of very good reporting and very bad. The tabloid media enjoys calamity, but the quality press has a more dangerous attachment to the idea that conspiracy and cover-up stalk our society. Often, the desire to paint society in these colours means that instead of political cover-up we have journalistic hype.

It is always a problem to know which scientists to trust. Some scientists may be intellectually blinkered by a desire to further their careers. Some others who work for campaign bodies (see Chapters Four and Seven on this) have a distinctly Green bias. I often criticise them.

I have come to respect the rigorousness of the process - mostly public - by which "conventional" scientific statements are assessed and honed by fellow scientists. Whenever I refer favourably to the opinions of scientists, it is because their work has been in the public scientific domain and been subject to powerful scrutiny. It is not so much the individual scientist I trust as the process in which he or she operates. That does not mean that scientific processes necessarily lead to well-run societies: scientists as much as anyone else, and perhaps more, need to operate within a social consensus.

It will surprise some readers, perhaps, that I am so keen on industry. This is simply because I have come to accept that whilst we need to regulate the entrepreneurial and innovative spirit in man, it has benefited society enormously. I am, I suppose, a post-socialist and post-Luddite. I hope no-one will think me a gung-ho Boomster on that account, but I am tolerably relaxed that Western industry does its work within democratic controls, which we can tighten if we want.

Of course, one good test of a civilisation is its system and style of government. I largely enjoy ours. In its ecological thinking and regulation, it has a way to go. But then so has the electorate. One could no more approve a government which lost touch with what people want in the way of environmental control by being too adventurous than one could approve a government which abdicated all leadership in the area. Most Western governments are a little further ahead in the most important ecological matters than the bulk of their citizens, but have not left their voters hopelessly behind: good.

I often praise Western civilisation. I use the idea of the West to embrace liberal democracy, modern technology, and capitalism, which are the West's progeny but not, of course, its property. I also use the West as a shorthand for the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which includes Japan. Other cultures and non-OECD countries become honorary Westerners when they embrace any parts of this inheritance. I am unabashed in my praise of the West. I think it has achieved very much, but I do not imagine that its way of life or seeing the world is the only viable or valuable one. I do however believe that the West has made at least the first part of the adjustment to living within a constraining ecological envelope and to a degree of social equity which is admirable. I agree with those who sense that there is some sort of global culture emerging and that it is predominantly Western. The global culture will, with any luck, combine wealth creation with environmentally and equality of opportunity with quality of opportunity. The West has seen its economic domination subside somewhat, and probably will see it subside further. The global culture will look only partly Western by the time its centres of vigour are in Asia and elsewhere in the ex-Third World rather than New York or London. And yet the West invented so many different forms of progress (in commerce, the science that drives industry, and politics) that it is not absurd to use "Western" as a synonym for progressive.

I use the words "third world" often but with a little reluctance. The preface and epilogue show why I do not really believe that there is such a thing. On the other hand the term "developing countries" is barley accurate of places where often the problem is that they are not [[ital, not]] developing very much.

PART ONE: TOO MANY HUMANS?

Chapter One. Snapshot of a Modern Planet: busy and largely successful

Introduction

Section i The doom that never came

Section ii Sketching the success in food

Section iii The wider success

Section iv A very modern success

Introduction

At the end of the Second World War we barely knew how to feed two billion people; now we feed something like five billion. Mankind is doing much better than is commonly supposed.

Section i The doom that never came

At the time of Christ the human population of the earth was perhaps 200 million, about a twenty-fifth of what it is now. The Pyramids had stood for three thousand years. The human enterprise could already be reckoned as mature, and in some important ways it was recognisably modern. At least a few favoured places had made many cultural achievements: written language, mathematics, and government. If technology was crude by modern standards, in places there was a style of agriculture which many people on earth today can only aspire to. By the time of Christ, this species had already seen civilisations come and go, their decline partly a result of the failure of their farming methods, and partly the result of natural climate changes.

Developing in technology and understanding, accumulating skills, the species' numbers passed the 1000 million mark around the year 1800. In 1993, the species numbers are getting on for 5500 million souls. [[vii]] About 2000 years after Christ, we can expect to see something like 6300 million people. Within another half century, that number is likely nearly to have doubled. [[viii]] To put it another way: there is wide agreement (discussed in Chapter Two) that the human population will be 10 billion sometime in the next century. The world's population was somewhere around 3 billion around the end of the Second World War. So the last couple of generations of humans have already accomplished about half - perhaps a little less - of the extra feeding and providing which will have been required in the period from the mid-twentieth to the mid-twenty-first century.

This view contributes to the difficulty of believing the familiar story of rising numbers as an unfolding disaster. The idea of the "population explosion" is deeply-embedded in the way modern people see their world. It is normal now for people to believe that human numbers will create the world-shattering apocalypse which it was once believed nuclear warheads would create. We have substituted one bomb for another. Luckily, the facts are at variance with the fashionable view.

Environmental gloom is quite a young human perception, and yet it is old enough to have accumulated a history from which we can take some comfort. If the gloomy prognostications of the 1960s and 1970s had been right, the human predicament would be much worse than it has turned out to be.

One of the first environmental luminaries was Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Biology at Stanford University. His writing continued a theme made famous by a nineteenth century classic, The Essay on Population, by Edward Malthus. Both men argued that the rate of population growth was exponential and that of food production arithmetical. This is to say that populations grow very fast - snowballs - but food production only grows slowly and steadily. Result: starvation and famine. So far, malthusianism has not made its case.

Paul Ehrlich is important because he articulates so clearly the fallacious thinking of most casual observers. His most famous book, The Population Bomb, published in 1968, begins:

The fight to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines - hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death. [[ix]]

As John McCormick points out in his history of the emergence of green thinking and campaigning,

Ehrlich was an unashamed neo-Malthusian. Criticisms that he was alarmist did not upset him. 'I AM an alarmist', he told Playboy in 1970, 'because I'm very goddamned alarmed. I believe we're facing the BRINK because of population pressures.'.... Ehrlich warned that (1) hundreds of millions of people faced starvation in the 1970s and 1980s, (2) the limits of human capability to produce food by conventional means had nearly been reached, (3) attempts to increase food production would cause environmental deterioration and reduce the earth's capacity to produce food, (4) population growth could lead to plague and nuclear war and (5) the only solution lay in a change in human attitudes. [[x]]

As evidenced by their latest book, The Population Explosion [[xi]] the Ehrlichs (Paul Ehrlich is joined by his wife Anne for later books) do not seem to be much chastened by the way their earlier predictions of mass starvations and a world incapable of growing sufficient food were found to be off-beam. In this they seem to establish a pattern followed by the authors of the equally famous early text, Limits for Growth, published in the earthly 70s, and the follow-up to that book, Beyond the Limits (published in 1992). The mind-sets of both pairs of books will not let them respond to the evidence (for more on the Limits to Growth case, see Chapter Twelve). Writing in 1990, the Ehrlichs say that about 10 million people, mostly children, have annually perished needlessly of hunger and hunger-related disease over the past couple decades. This is sad enough, if true, but is a much lesser effect than they predicted two decades earlier. But the passing years have not brought the Ehrlichs to a happier interpretation of the data they very usefully draw to people's attention.

According to the Ehrlichs' most recent book , something pretty dreadful is already happening, with worse to come:

The alarm has been sounded repeatedly, but society has turned a deaf ear. Meanwhile, a largely prospective disaster has been turned into the real thing. A 1990s primer on population by necessity looks very different from our original work. The Population Explosion is being written as ominous changes in the life-support systems of civilisation become more evident daily. It is being written in a world where hunger is rife and the prospects of famine ever more imminent.

The truer picture is much more richly-textured than Ehrlich implied and he and his wife still imply. The World Bank, in one of the bold, flourishing sentences its annual World Development Report favours (this one was issued in June 1991) puts things very differently:

Famines disappeared from Western Europe in the mid-1800s, from Eastern Europe in the 1930s, and from Asia in the 1970s [[xii]] .

It is true that hundreds of millions of people are undernourished, and millions die of diseases against which better nourishment would have provided part of a defence. [[xiii]] A billion people are classified as poor and over half of them live in extreme poverty. Even allowing for the difficulty of assessing these things across profound cultural barriers, there clearly is widespread hunger and malnutrition in the world, and they contribute to an essentially avoidable death-toll. The World Health Organisation suggests, uncontroversially, as the Ehrlichs do, that these deaths arise because of hunger's power to weaken people's ability to fight commonplace disease:

Interactions between nutrition and infection to produce the 'malnutrition/infection complex' create the greatest public health problem in the world. [[xiv]]

All the same, the famines and mass starvations to death predicted by Paul Ehrlich are not happening in the 1990s, and did not happen in the 1970s or 1980s either. Such famines as we see, it is widely agreed, are the result of war, not ecological collapse. [[xv]] The evidence that mass starvation is avoidable and will probably stay avoided gets better, not worse, as we shall see in Chapter Three. Similarly, the evidence is that economic incompetence and political nastiness are far more likely contributors to present and most possible future sad outcomes than is the environmental failure predicted for so long by the Ehrlichs.

Section ii Sketching the success in food

The World Health Organisation gives a clear, blunt picture of the world's present human food supply:

Current and emerging food production and preservation capabilities are sufficient to ensure an adequate global supply of safe nutritious food. The food trade has increased markedly, resulting in an international market and creating a growing demand for the safe preservation of food during prolonged shipment. Improved food storage and processing considerably increase the availability of food for human consumption by limiting food spoilage and reducing food and crop wastes. Chronic hunger is due less to food shortage than to lack of purchasing power or of land on which food can be produced, or disruption of food distribution systems by civil unrest or violence. However, drastic changes in the agriculture, food and fishery sectors will be required to achieve an adequate food supply for the 7000 million or more people who will inhabit the world by the year 2010, if damage to the environment and risk of spreading infectious diseases are to be avoided. In particular, the problems of pre-harvest and post harvest losses will need to receive special attention.....Although agricultural supplies in most parts of the world appear to have kept up with the demand for food and, on the whole, per caput food supplies have shown some improvement over the last two decades except in some parts of Africa, FAO has estimated that by the end of the century the number of seriously malnourished people will reach 590 million. [[xvi]]

It is a common misconception that the entire developing world is suffering hunger. In fact, says the main UN development agency:

There has been a general global improvement in food production and calorie supplies. The daily supply of calories in the developing world improved from 90 per cent of total requirements in 1965 to 107 percent in 1985. Confirming this evidence, production data show a roughly 20 percent increase in average calories supplies per person between 1965 and 1985. [[xvii]]

Not only is there enough food in the world as a whole to feed everyone now on it, there is enough food in the developing world to feed every one of its citizens. However, the picture is uneven, both between countries and within them. UNDP continues:

Countries having the most urgent need for food show the slowest progress. For the poorest countries [as a group], the daily per caput calorie supply increased only from 87 percent of the total requirements to 89 percent between 1965 and 1985. [[xviii]]

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations' annual account of the condition of world farming and food put it in this way at the very beginning of this decade:

A wide gap of over 900 calories per caput per day currently separates average calorie supply in developed and developing countries. However, since calorie supply rose faster in developing regions, the gap has narrowed significantly since the early 1970s. Thus DES [dietary energy supply] in developing countries was equivalent to 65 per cent of that in developed countries in 1969-71 compared to 72 percent in 1986-88. [[xix]]

So far from the familiar, wrong view about food supply, we can say that whilst the developing world is probably overfed, as well as financially embarrassed by the amount of food its farmers produce, the third world is not, as a whole, hopelessly out of touch with the rich-world production and consumption record. It is true and a pity that the rate at which the third world is catching up with the rich world slowed in the eighties. The per caput supply of food rose less quickly in all the regions of the developing world in the 1980s than it had in the 1970s. [[xx]] All the same a situation which is improving less quickly than it used to is still an improving - not a deteriorating - situation.

Because so much suffering is involved, it is important to see the shadows in this fairly bright view. The numbers of undernourished people in the world have been rising for at least twenty years. According to the FAO, the hungry within the developing countries outside the Eastern Bloc and China rose by an estimated 15 million during the 1970s and by 37 million during the first few years of the 1980s. The hungry then numbered about 512 million. Even so, whilst the absolute numbers of undernourished people were rising,

their proportion in relation to total [developing world] population declined during the period to an estimated 21 percent in 1984-86. [[xxi]]

The proportion of hungry people seems continuously to fall, but fast-rising population numbers ensure that the absolute number of hungry people sadly increases slightly too.

The majority of the hungry are in the Far East, but that region also delivers great progress, so that whilst it held 61 percent of all the hungry in the developing market countries in 1969-71, fifteen years later it held 56 percent of them.

Africa was, as we shall often see, a hard case. During the 80s the calories per caput decreased very slightly across the Continent. Unlike other regions, the proportion of Africans who were hungry rose as did the absolute numbers. About a third of Africans are hungry, as was the case in the early 1970s. [[xxii]]

Part of the present human miracle is that so much - a clear and large majority - of the world's population is adequately fed, whilst a sizeable proportion of the world seems to suffer damage to its health because it eats too much (Chapter Eight looks at this issue). About a quarter of the human race is positively spoiled and much of the rest flourishes in ways which were unimaginable to the nineteenth century mind and certainly were not expected by the grandparents of children now alive.

Section iii The wider success

During the past twenty-five years, the world's population has risen by about 1500 million. During this time of unparalleled increase in numbers of human beings, there have been great advances, not merely in the absolute amount of wealth the world's people generate, but the degree to which it is available in places we think of as poor.

As the World Bank reports:

During the past three decades the developing world has made enormous economic progress. This can been seen most clearly in the rising trend for incomes and consumption: between 1965 and 1985 consumption per caput in the developing world went up by almost 70 percent. [[xxiii]]

Most of Asia, for instance, has done extraordinarily well. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) noted in 1990:

....the giant economies of China and India and the populous nations of Bangladesh, Pakistan and Thailand have also experienced ten years of rising per caput incomes and slow falls in the proportions of their populations living below the poverty line. [[xxiv]]

This is not to forget the poverty to be found in the self-same countries. As UNICEF continues:

approximately 40 percent of all the young children who die in the world each year, 45 percent of the children who are malnourished, 35 percent of those who are not in school, and over 50 percent of those who live in absolute poverty are to be found in just three countries - India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. [[xxv]]

Much of the new wealth in the world goes into armies and Mercedes Benzes and services for the tiny minority of very rich, and does so in much more marked degree in poor countries than in rich and Western nations. It is a paradox that the greatest inequality is to be found in the poorest countries. This is not a trivial inequality. It is not merely that the many are poor and that there are a tiny minority who are rich in huge disproportion to them. Far more important is the fact that the rich minority apportion to themselves not merely huge wealth, but a large proportion of the wealth of their society. Moreover, the rich minority often feel little obligation to share their well-being. For a sense of this, consider how a two percent rise in taxation of the richest fifth of the population in Latin America would raise all the poor of the region above official poverty levels. [[xxvi]]

All the same, economic growth in poor countries seems usually to translate - albeit with painful imperfection in places - into human well-being. In the words of the United Nations Population Fund:

Life expectancy in developing countries increased from 51 [years] for men and 53 for women in 1965-1970, to 59 and 61 in 1985-1990. In 1965, for every 1,000 children born world-wide, 103 died before their first birthday. By 1985-1990 the yearly toll had been cut to 71. Average daily calorie intakes jumped from 2,116 in 1965 to 2,509 two decades later. [[xxvii]]

In a country such as the Republic of Korea, the transformations can be extreme and very heartening. Food, health and education services are being delivered in a society in which until recently they were very scarce. In Mexico, the successes are as marked. According to the Mexican government:

The average rate of illiteracy from 1941 to 1950 was 42.2 percent, dropping to 23.7 percent in 1970, 17 percent in 1980 and 8 percent in 1989. The goal set by President Salinas de Gortari's administration is to reduce illiteracy to 5 percent by 1994.

The country is aiming at universal vaccination of children against the major killer diseases and has a long-running if limited social security programme. In Brazil, to cite another example of very rapid progress, under the leadership of a young governor, one of the country's poorest states, Ceara, cut infant mortality by a third in four years. The infant mortality of that state is now headed for Mexican levels (30 deaths before age one per 1,000 live births rather than the 55 deaths which occur on average in Brazil). The country's infant mortality remains at least twice that of China, though the latter country has a per capita income one eighth that of Brazil. But the progress in Ceara shows what a very small shift in resources can achieve. Seven thousand-odd workers, a network of community-run clinics and basic medicines have worked the miracle. [[xxviii]]

Success is more general than might be supposed:

The developing countries have made significant progress toward human development in the last three decades. They ... immunised two-thirds of all one year olds against major childhood diseases. The developing countries also made primary health care accessible to 61 percent of their people and safe water to 55 percent (80 percent in urban areas). In addition, they increased the per caput calories supply by about 20 percent between 1965 and 1985.

Their progress in education was equally impressive. Adult literacy rates rose from 43 percent in 1970 to 60 percent in 1985 - male literacy from 53 percent to 71 percent and female literacy from 33 percent to 50 percent. The South's primary education output in 1985 was almost six times greater than that in 1950, its secondary education output more than 18 times greater. The results were 1.4 billion literate people in the South in 1985, compared with nearly a billion in the North. [[xxix]]

To take two of these examples, and flesh them out a little. A higher percentage of people in the developing world had access to safe water at the end of the eighties than in 1975. More than half the people in developing countries had access to safe water in 1986, up from 35 percent in 1975, and even the least developed countries showed some advance. The performance varies. Some developing countries managed to get clean water to nearly everyone, whilst in the least-developed countries only a third of people are within reach of drinkable water. Asia and Latin America in general can report good progress, though Bangladesh's people saw a deterioration in access. In Africa eight countries were able to deliver water to only a fifth of their people. [[xxx]] Turning to education: most developing countries have showed remarkable progress in enrolling children in school. By 1987 well over 80 percent of children of primary age were enrolled in primary schools, and even in Africa half the children of primary and secondary age attended school. In East and Southeast Asia, the newly industrialised countries manage secondary enrollment rates of 90 percent, with considerable increases in tertiary education. There are now four times as many children from the South in primary schools, and about twice as many secondary students, as there are children from the North . [[xxxi]]

There is another way of looking at the situation. Against a picture of generally but slowly rising enrollment percentages, there is a quickly increasing number of children available for schooling and of those who are left behind. Between 1960 and 1986 there was a steady reduction in the number of children of primary school age who were not in school. But 1987 saw a rise for the first time in four decades. [[xxxii]]

But surely the rich countries are getting richer and the poor countries are getting richer much more slowly? Was this not the message of the greedy 1980's, whether we look at nations or income groups within them?

There is hope even here. The gap in monetary growth between rich countries and poor countries is widening, even as most poor countries get richer. But that is not true of what one might call the well-being gap, which is the measure that matters. The United Nations Development Programme, in a very important new line of thinking, has invented the Human Development Index (the HDI, see also Chapter Twelve) as a way of assessing nations' progress toward providing the framework within which their citizens are able to live decent lives. The HDI is distinguished from Gross National Product or other monetary measures of overall affluence or poverty. It takes into account the health, education and social security of citizens, especially those citizens not able to fend for themselves, as well as their wealth or lack of it. UNDP has recently tried to build in ideas about political freedom. The HDI picture is rather encouraging:

North-South gaps in human development narrowed considerably during this period [the 60s-90s] even while income gaps tended to widen. The South's average per caput income in 1987 was still only 6 percent of the North's, but its average life expectancy was 80 percent and its average literacy rate 66 percent of the North's. The North-South gap in life expectancy narrowed from 23 years in 1960 to 12 years in 1987, and the literacy gap from 54 percentage points in 1970 to less than 40 percent in 1985. The developing countries also reduced their average infant mortality from 200 deaths per 1000 live births to 79 between 1950 and 1985, a feat that took nearly a century in the industrial countries. [[xxxiii]]

This implies that the development of the third world may mirror that of the rich world, but happen more quickly. It also suggests that quick third world development does not depend on Western levels of affluence being developed everywhere.

People we now count as very poor indeed can expect to benefit from conditions of medicine, mobility, education and hygiene available only to the very rich of previous generations, and in some respects not available to anyone of any station in life until the past couple of generations.

Part One

Chapter Two: Defusing the population bomb: Fertility, famine and affluence

Introduction

Section i The global picture

Section ii Kenya: the good news

Section iii Exponential Growth

Section iv Shouting the odds

Section v Winning the changes

Introduction

In 1992 I met a small-scale farmer and conservationist in Nairobi. This man was one of those many African men who have broken free of their village and rural traditions very recently, but are married to women who remain more firmly rooted in theirs. "I always thought that Africa was really a hopeless case", he said. "Its population growth was so enormous, and I could see nothing that would change it. But I have begun to think that things might change very quickly. My own wife has said to me that she thinks she should have no more children. Mind you, we have four already and that is too many".

The human population of the world is likely to be 10 billion sometime next century. This chapter tells why, and suggests some reasons to suppose that kindly means, and not disaster, may well stabilise the human population at about that figure, before what will probably be a long slow decline in numbers.

Section i The global picture

The human population will rise, unless tragedy intervenes, and there is nothing we can do about it. Broadly speaking, the Western world has achieved a situation in which its population is stable. The Western population is expected to grow little if at all (the possibility of immigration, and the high fertility of immigrants, complicates this picture a little). But the third world's population will grow fast: at an overall rate of about 2.1 percent.

The third world has a death rate close to the West's. But it has double the West's birth rate. To bring the two scenarios into something like line, and that will take time, the average third world woman would need to have as few babies as her average Western sister. That is, less than two, rather than her present something-like-four.

In the meantime, expect lots of babies. As the UNFPA (the United Nations Population Fund) says in its 1992 annual report:

World population in mid-1992 will be 5.48 billion. It will reach 6 billion in 1998. Annual additions to world population in the next decade will average 97 million, the highest in history. Nearly all of this population growth will be in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Over half will be in Africa and south Asia. The medium, or most likely, projection of population growth implies a near doubling of world population to 10 billion in 2050. Growth will probably continue for another century after that, to 11.6 billion in 2150. [[xxxiv]]

These are fairly optimistic figures, and constitute UNFPA's "medium" projection. Within the range of possibilities UNFPA discusses is a more worrying view, the "high" projection, which would put numbers at "12.5 billion in 2050 and heading towards 20.7 billion a century later". Even the medium view depends on success in helping developing countries to reach by 2000 the position in which mothers have around 3.3 children each. This would require a lot of good luck, but is not out of sight, according to UNFPA:

In family planning alone, reaching the medium projection means increasing the numbers of couples practising contraception [in developing countries] from 381 million in 1990 to at least 567 million by the year 2000. The cost of doing so will involve a doubling of resources devoted to population activities, from 4.5 billion US dollars to 9 billion US dollars. This is a relatively modest sum, just four days' military expenditure by the industrialised countries. If efforts are not maintained and it takes an extra 10 years to get down to 3.2 children per woman, then we would be on course for the high projection. The cost of a ten year delay would be an additional 2.5 billion people on earth by the year 2050, equivalent to the whole world population in 1950.

However if all governments, North and South, devote adequate resources to a broad strategy centred on all aspects of human resource development in developing countries, it might just be possible to come closer to [our] low projection.....we could achieve a global population in 2050 of perhaps 8 to 8.5 billion, 1.5-2 billion less than the medium projection. This is why the 1990s are so decisive. [[xxxv]]

Section ii Kenya: the good news

Kenya provides an example of a country where these global scenarios can be seen in more comprehensible detail. It is an extremely prolific country. As the World Population Conference heard in Bucharest in 1974:

The recorded total population of Kenya at the time of the first national census in 1948 was 5.4 million. In the censuses of 1962 and 1969, the total population had risen to 8.6 and 10.9 million respectively. The total population had therefore approximately doubled in 21 years. [[xxxvi]]

By 1990, Kenya's population was 24 million, growing at 3.7 percent a year. Its total population by 2025 was projected to be 79 million. [[xxxvii]]

In Kenya's case, we see a classic, but extreme, modern picture. The country is able to keep more and more people, and especially babies and children, alive. But families are still locked into having large numbers of babies.

This process implies the need for very dramatic changes in habit for Kenyan women, who on average had over eight babies thirty and less years ago and still have over six (well above the third world average of something-like-four). Africa's high growth rates have seemed obstinate but may well change dramatically.

Total fertility rates (measured as births per woman) in Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole have remained unchanged at about 6.5 for the past twenty-five years - a level much higher than in other parts of the world that have similar levels of income, life expectancy, and female education.

Recent statistics provide encouraging indications that a number of African countries are at or near a critical turning point. Total fertility rates have already fallen in Botswana (6.9 in 1965 to 4.7 in 1990), Zimbabwe (8.0 in 1965 to 4.9 in 1990), and Kenya (8.0 in 1965 to 6.5 in 1990) and are beginning to decline in Ghana, Sudan and Togo. [[xxxviii]]

These figures lie behind a World Bank assumption that Sub-Saharan Africa's population will rise from 500 million at present to about 1.5 billion by 2030 and almost 3 billion by 2100 (with the AIDS epidemic possibly reducing growth by 0.5-1 percent by the early decades of the next century).

Section iii Exponential Growth

We need a lot of good luck here because of the exponential effect of population growth in societies in which high birth rates are not matched by high death-rates. For exponential, read snowballing. A cohort of young people who breed more young people who breed yet more young people sets in train big increases in total numbers. There is some evidence that even after steep declines in fertility many third world countries seem to be stuck at the point where women have about twice as many babies as would be needed for fertility to reach replacement levels (families replacing themselves generation upon generation, but not increasing their number), as they have in the West.

So we see very stubborn qualities to population growth. They imply that whilst we can hope that the growth in human numbers is eventually by kindly means brought as low as possible, we must in the meantime assume human numbers will continue to rise quite dramatically.

But even though there is an inevitability to large human numbers, we need not exaggerate the power of the trap we are in. Though we are seeing a record number of births, rate of growth of increase in human numbers is now less than has until very recently been the case. This fact is not at odds with the inevitability of huge and record new numbers of births. Though the world's fertility is now much lower than it was in the 1960s (the world's population is growing at about 2 percent as against about 4 per cent then), even a low percentage growth of a big snowball makes for a very big snowball.

On the other hand, the tendency to lower population growth rates is happening even quicker in the third world than it did in the rich, as The Economist pointed out:

The transition that took a century to achieve in the West has come about in a generation in some developing countries. Third world fertility has dropped further and faster than anybody foresaw 20 years ago. [[xxxix]]

Section iv Shouting the odds

What are the chances of the third world following Europe and much of the rest of the rich world into a low death-rate, low birth rate, low population growth rate scenario?

One can easily enough see the way in which an endless round of childbirth was unavoidable and not entirely undesirable in even quite recent history. In non-technological societies, children can be useful quite young and can with luck grow old enough to be useful when their parents are infirm. They are cheap labour when they are young and an insurance policy when they grow up. The chances of death amongst a mother's children have historically been so great that it made sense to have plenty whilst one was fertile (otherwise, in the nature of things, a mother might discover the need to replace dead children only when she had ceased to be able to bear more).

In technological, developed societies, much of this picture changes. Where a family's income comes from a job and a wage rather than from working the land on one's own account, it is less obvious how young children can contribute to bringing home the bacon. For urban families, and these constitute a rapidly increasing proportion of the developing world's people, there are, for instance, no animals to be watched over, no stones to be picked from the fields, no birds to be scared away from young seeds. Conversely, children in cities are likely to need jobs in the industrial or service sectors of the economy and so need to be formally educated. So the expense of schooling becomes even more necessary than it is increasingly perceived to be in the country. In short, children are increasingly perceived as costing, not earning, money. Besides, the likelihood of a baby's growing into adulthood is fast improving. There is less and less need for families to produce "surplus" babies.

So the world is changing into a place in which families feel less need to have large families. It is the degree to which choice in the matter has come into play which also marks this century out. The moral and social climate in which families are formed has changed in many parts of the world, and conspires with new technology to put real power into the hands of families. Here is the good news of the Kenyan case in more detail:

A 1989 survey found that the proportion of women using any method of contraception had risen to 27 percent, from 17 percent only five years earlier. Two-thirds of these were using a modern method. The fertility rate [numbers of babies per woman of child-bearing age] had dropped from 7.7 to 6.7 over the same period, a level not expected before 1995 even on the United Nations' low projection.

And there was good reason to expect further improvement if services could be extended and improved. Half of all women with four living children wanted no more. The mean ideal number of children was only 4.4. For 15 to 19 year olds it was only 3.7.[[xl]]

The younger generation of Kenyan girls are expressing a desire to bear and raise the number of children which coincidentally is the number which would bring the medium, quite optimistic, population growth rates of human numbers. Not that mothers or families wanting fewer children necessarily turns into low numbers. Mothers may not be able to fulfill their wishes. Whilst many third world women want many children, many others want fewer than they have:

A survey of married women found 46 percent in Peru had not wanted their latest child; 37 percent in South Korea; 34 percent in Sri Lanka. [[xli]]

In other words, mothers are not getting their own way.

There is good evidence for a considerable level of existing unmet demand [for contraception]. Many women in developing countries have more children then they want; in 23 out of 38 countries in the World Fertility Survey, more than a quarter of women had larger families than they would have desired, and up to half of the women aged 40 to 49 did not want their last birth. The proportion o