Reading:

• Robbins, Ch. 5 "The Problem of Population Growth"
• Robbins, Ch. 6 "Hunger, Poverty, and Economic Development"
• *Engelman et.al., "Rethinking Population, Improving Lives"

1. Short of nuclear war itself, population growth is the gravest issue the world faces. If we do not act, the problem will be solved by famine, riots, insurrection and war." -Robert McNamara, Former President of the World Bank
2. Most of the problems faced by countries in the periphery, such as poverty, hunger, and environmental destruction, are the consequences of excessive population growth.
3. The specter of population growth is a device used in the culture of capitalism to shift the blame for global problems to their victims, and to obscure the real cause, perpetual and uneven economic growth.
4. Family structure and the status of women in society are the prime determinants of fertility and population growth.

Facts and projections about world population growth:

• Increased global population doubling time - Neolithic ‘revolution’ and Industrial ‘revolution’

• The rate of population increase, now approximately 1.7 percent per year, is expected to decline to a little less than 1 percent sometime during 2020––2025.

• Since the rate of population increase applies to an increasing population, the actual increase will be 88––97 million people per year in 1995––2000 before falling to 81 million per year in 2025.

• Developing countries will account for 95 percent of the world’s population increase during 2000––2025.

• Between 1950 and 2025 the core countries’ share of world population will have decreased from 33.1 percent to 15.9 percent; Europe’s share will decrease from 15.6 percent to 6.1 percent.

• Also during 1950––2025, Latin America’s share of the world’s population will increase from 6.6 percent to 8.9 percent, Asia from 54.7 percent to 57.8 percent, and Africa’s share from 8.9 percent to 18.8 percent.

[ http://faculty.plattsburgh.edu/richard.robbins/legacy/chap_5_intro.html ]

Rapid rise in the rate of population growth in periphery, related assumptions prompts concerns for core societies:

• world is poised on the brink of disaster,

• we are running out of enough food to sustain the growing population

• population growth is responsible for poverty, environmental destruction, and social unrest. economic development in poor countries is impossible as long as populations continue to rise,

• increase in economic output must be used to sustain the increased population instead of being invested to create new jobs and wealth.

• Leads to concerted efforts by international agencies and governments to control population growth, especially in peripheral countries where it is highest.

Is population growth a major problem?

- promoting modern contraception,

- promoting economic development,

- improving survival rate of infants and children,

- improving women’s status,

- educating men

- Assumptions about population growth not questioned:

1. Population growth contributes to economic decline and stagnation in the periphery and thus is responsible for global poverty, hunger, environmental devastation, and political unrest.
2. Population increase in the periphery historically resulted from decreased mortality (death) rates, especially of infants, attributable to medical advancements, better nutrition, and improved sanitation.
3. Population stability before the rapid population growth beginning in the eighteenth century was solely the result of a high mortality rate balanced by a high fertility rate.
4. Efforts to control population growth in the periphery are hampered by religious beliefs that promote large families and lack of education for women.
5. The only way to slow the birth rate is through birth control techniques and educational programs developed in Western countries.

- these assumptions part of the ideology of the culture of capitalism - assumes that the problem of population growth is a problem of the periphery.

- ideology drives public perception of issue, and policies of governments and international agencies such as the United Nations.

Explanatory Frameworks of Population Debate.

1. Malthusians - Thomas Malthus Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) - written in reference to growth in numbers of poor in England

- population increases faster than food supply

- constant population increase = depletion of resources

- preventative checks (decrease fertility) or positive checks (famine, disease, war) needed

- failed to foresee that agricultural intensification (new techniques, technology) could increase food supplies

- Neo-Malthusians (Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb) - view pop. growth on periphery as source of imminent disaster (NPR's "Living on Earth" interview with Paul Ehrlich - Neo-Malthusian position revised to take into account consumption as well as population growth)

- implications for development policy - pop. growth of 2%+ annually will negate economic development

- developing countries must lower birthrates - policy implications for family planning

Critique (China & India case studies):

- no positive link between population & economic development; historically, population growth correlates with economic prosperity / growth, pop. decline associated w/stagnation

- resources do not always become scarcer - increased efficiency, increased production

- people are not only consumers but producers - human culture causes variability in ‘carrying capacity’ by changing the rules of subsistence

- increased life expectancy = increased surplus production over consumption, leading to economic ‘take off’

- economies of scale - the benefits of a resource multiply by their use

- stimulates consumer demand for goods & services

- pop. growth stimulates agricultural & technological invention

- Malthus concerned w/ the ‘problem’ of the poor

- inequality results from ‘laws of nature’

- ‘blame the victim’ - reproductive behavior of the poor is at fault

- racist, sexist, classist agendas of controlling the poor - eugenics movement

- during colonial period, European powers stimulated population growth - increased labor supply, relatively low cost

- after WWII, western governments, NGOs became concerned w/ population growth:

- costly aid to developing countries

- concern over mass migration, unrest, instability

- Polgar - changing role of exploited countries - periphery less necessary as source of labor, markets, consumers (increasing poverty) - now seen as source of problems

2. Demographic Transition Theory.

- assumes that current population growth result of decreases in mortality associated with industrialization: this decrease is eventually offset by decreasing birth rates as a country ‘modernizes’ (contraception, ‘rational’ family planning and economic maximization of family welfare)

- assumes that lowered fertility will result from development

- assumes uniformly high fertility rates throughout human history among preindustrial peoples (ethnocentric assumption)

- assumes ‘irrationality’ of preindustrial worldviews

- ideological bias - serve as counter to Marxist ‘reserve army of labor’ theories

- Critique - humans can and have historically adjusted fertility rates to local economic & social conditions (case studies of Neolithic revolution, French Canadians, Irish)

Determinants of Population Growth & Decline.

a. Fertility - most variation due to birth spacing & use of birth control techniques:

- frequency of births

- period of infertility after birth

- time between ovulation & conception

- ave. length of pregnancy

- fetal mortality

- birth control

- length of breast-feeding

- postpartum sexual taboos

- biological & cultural fecundity

b. Death

- ave. life expectancy

- percentage of reproduction period realized in life expectancy range

- infant mortality

c. Migration

- can affect regional patterns of growth / decline

- can affect reproductive rates

Why is population growing in periphery?

- colonialism / expansion of capitalist world system stimulated population growth:

- colonial policies - landholding systems (Ireland)

- agricultural intensification / export production - increased demand for household labor -

- cash economy / wage labor - shift away from subsistence production

3. Wealth Flows Theory

1. rural areas, cost of children = net economic gain
2. security in old age
3. cultural preferences

John Caldwell - 2 types of reproductive strategies:

a. when children contribute to wealth of family, wealth flows from children to parents, parents maximize number of children (extended families)

b. when wealth flows from parents to children, parents minimize family size (nuclear families)

Social implications - relationship between family structure & fertility:

- fertility behavior will change only where there is a change in extended family structures to nuclear family structures (e.g. ‘Demographic innovators - Nigeria)

- withdrawal from emotional, material ties w/extended families

- requires a ‘nucleation’ of obligations, expenditures, emotions - precedence given to conjugal family

6 Billion Human Beings: An Interactive Game about Population
http://www-popexpo.ined.fr/english.html

Gender & Power:

- relations between husbands & wives may be equally influential in influencing fertility (Barbados case study)

- patterns of exploitation can create a family form in which women maximize number of children

Problems & Prospects:

- both extended & nuclear families have advantages & disadvantages

- nuclear families do confer benefits (health, economic)

- Western model of nuclear families also maximizes consumption patterns (cf. consumption adjusted population densities map - http://www.ecouncil.ac.cr/about/speech/secretar/consump.htm

 

Robbins, Ch. 6 Hunger, Poverty, and Economic Development

- postwar optimism (development, modernization theory, new technology) that hunger would be eradicated has given way to resignation at persistence of hunger and poverty:

- 1.2 billion live on less than $1 per day

- 3 billion live on less than $3 per day

- 800 mill. - 1 billion have insufficient food (1/5 global population)

- 250,000 children die per week from inadequate nutrition and related diseases

Common misunderstandings about hunger:

1. world hunger NOT result of insufficient food production (enough to feed 120% of global population on a vegetarian diet)

2. famine is not the most common reason for hunger, rather endemic hunger (daily insufficiencies)

3. famine rarely caused by food insufficiency (economic, social, political causes)

4. hunger is NOT caused by overpopulation

Why do people starve in the midst of plenty?

Evolution of Food Production.

1. Neolithic Revolution (swidden agriculture more efficient [land-intensive] than intensive agriculture [labor-, energy-intensive, higher productivity] - most farmers were swidden farmers into 20^th century

2. Capitalist agricultural ‘revolution’ - expansion of trade, growth of non-farming, urban populations

a) food became a commodity

b) competition for labor between agriculture and trade/industry

c) greater food vulnerability of nonagricultural (urban) populations

d) food as commodity brought increased state intervention into agriculture (territorial expansion, food prices, tariffs, subsidies)

e) continual reduction of human energy / labor involved in food production, increased amounts of non-human energy (animal, steam, fossil fuels)

i. Reduced labor demands (technology for human labor) increases profitability of agriculture

ii. concentration of agricultural wealth determined by access to capital; new opportunities for investors

iii. wealth concentration / profits keep food prices low, therefore keeping industrial wages low

iv. frees labor to work in industry

v. states must subsidize agriculture - keep labor costs down, increase amount of technology to maintain productivity

U.S. style agriculture exported to developing countries - until 1950s, technological intensification did not substantially increase yields - reduced labor costs, but not productivity per acre

neocaloric revolution (Schusky) - vast increase in nonhuman energy devoted to food production (crops & livestock) in form of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, machinery

Pimentel - measure efficiency of agriculture in terms of kilocalories produced per crop per hectare compared to kilocalories of energy inputs

- swidden farming input-output ratio is 1:11

- intensive agriculture " " " 1:4.3

- technological intensive " " 1:3.5

- livestock production - additional energy inputs for processing, packaging, delivery, refrigeration

Green Revolution - HYVs (high-yielding varieties) - higher productivity based on higher capacity to utilize increased amounts of water, fertilizers, pesticides, energy inputs

- only makes sense if cheap energy (oil) is subsidized by nation-states

- export of this system of energy-intensive agriculture to developing countries has numerous unintended consequences:

- rural displacement of subsistence farmers

- urban migration / overcrowding

- increased concentration of wealth

4. Green Revolution II - genetically-engineered crops

- seen as ‘next wave’ of Green Revolution

- profit potential for TNCs such as Monsanto Corp.

- large backlash / resistance movement in core (Europe) and some periphery areas

- concerns over ‘intellectual property rights’ to plant genomes, indigenous knowledge bases

Politics of Hunger - what are the power issues and the values issues regarding food and hunger? What are the economic, political, social relations related to food production, distribution, consumption?

- wage labor / cash economies make people more vulnerable when food is a commodity for those who can afford it

- global food production determined by market demand rather than human needs:

- world food production rarely at maximum

- ‘overproduction’ would hurt producers by lowering prices

- competition over land for non-edible/low nutrition commodity production

- Amartya Sen - food / adequate nutrition should be regarded as a human entitlement (analogous to human rights):

- hunger best understood as a failure of entitlement

- comes from a variety of sources

- focus on failures of food distribution

- solutions require recognition of different types of hunger:

1. famine
2. food poverty - household level / poverty
3. food deprivation - dietary insufficiency

James C. Scott - critique of dominant development model (Seeing Like a State: How Human Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998) - identifies key elements of failed development projects:

1. Development projects often engage in economic reductionism - social reality reduced to economic elements, narrowly-defined criteria of ave. income & GDP

- reductionism is attractive to nation-states - environments & populations made ‘legible’ (amenable to quantification & state control)

- language of capitalism encourages such reductionism / classificatory schemes determined by commodity logic: natural ‘resources,’ crops v. weeds, timber v. brush, game v. predators, etc.

2. "High Modern Ideology"

- "supreme version of self-confidence in scientific and technical progress in satisfying human needs, mastering the environment, and designing the social order to realize these objectives"

- by-product of ‘progress’ of core - scientific & technological innovation

- use of state power to achieve objectives (cuts across left-right ideological spectrum)

3. Authoritarian States - use of coercive power to implement high modernist development projects regardless of local knowledge, input, context or consensus