Beyond the Numbers: A Reader on Population, Consumption and the Environment

By J. Boutwell, G. Rathjens, Judy Norsigian and 44 more

Beyond the Numbers presents a thought-provoking series of essays by leading authorities on issues of population and consumption. The essays both define the poles of debate and explore common ground beyond the polarized rhetoric.

Specific chapters consider each of the broad topics addressed at the International Conference on Population and Development held in September 1994 in Cairo, Egypt. The essays are supplemented by sidebars and short articles featuring more-impassioned voices that highlight issues of interest not fully explored in the overviews.

As well as providing a sense of the difficulties involved in dealing with these issues, the essays make clear that constructive action is possible.

Topics covered include:

• the interrelationships between population, economic growth, consumption, and development
• the history of population and family planning efforts
• gender equality and the empowerment of women
• reproductive rights, reproductive health, family planning, health and mortality

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Apr 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781597268790

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LAURIE ANN MAZUR

Beyond the Numbers: An Introduction and Overview

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The numbers are simply astounding. World population now totals 5.6 billion and is expected to double within the next century. Every year, the world gains another 91 million inhabitants — the equivalent of another New York City every month, another China every decade.¹ Nearly all of that growth will take place in the developing countries.

But, as the title of this volume suggests, numbers tell only part of the story. As John Muir once said, When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. So it is with population issues: Both the causes and the effects of population growth are hitched to a complex tangle of social, political, and economic factors. Moreover, population touches on many deeply divisive subjects, including human rights, the unequal distribution of resources, abortion, foreign aid, and the status of women. Not surprisingly, these issues have ignited conflict between the industrialized North and the developing South and among environmentalists, religious institutions, feminists, and family planning professionals. Complexity and conflict have helped cause a political and conceptual gridlock that confounds creative solutions.

The purpose of this reader is to illuminate the contours of these complex issues and to explore areas of debate beyond the polarized extremes — to look, in essence, beyond the numbers. To that end, we have solicited essays and reprinted articles by a broad array of activists, academics, and policymakers. The authors of Beyond the Numbers do not all speak the same language; they vary widely in their perspectives, interpretive approaches, and voice. Still, we have not represented every facet of the debate, nor have we included voices from every part of the world. In general, the perspectives collected here are clustered near the center of the spectrum of opinion. As State Department counselor Timothy E. Wirth observes in his foreword, the cutting edge of thought on population issues is not at the extremes, but in the consensus-building middle.

Laurie Ann Mazur is an independent writer and consultant to nonprofit organizations.

Our framework for examining these issues is population, consumption, and the environment. This orientation reflects the fact that we — the editor and publisher of this book — are American environmentalists. But we have come to realize that no single discipline is equal to the task of interpreting the complexities of population growth. Our environmentalism serves as a (green-tinted) lens through which we view these issues and not, we hope, as a set of blinders that obscures other points of view.

THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM IS WRONG

If there is one generalization to be made from the wealth of fact and opinion presented here, it is this: The conventional wisdom about population, consumption, and the environment is often wrong.

For example, the conventional wisdom holds that population growth is a result of high birth rates. But, as Carl Haub and Martha Farnsworth Riche point out in Population by the Numbers: Trends in Population Growth and Structure, (page 95) it is declining mortality, not rising fertility, that is causing the current population surge. Over the last 40 years, fertility rates have fallen in most parts of the world. But, because death rates have dropped even more steeply, the absolute number of births has gone up. The children born in the 1960s and 1970s survived in greater numbers than any previous generation, so there are now more people of reproductive age than ever. Although couples are choosing to have fewer children, the sheer number of men and women of childbearing age has caused the total number of births to soar. This population momentum means that even if births and deaths were brought into balance tomorrow, population would continue to grow for quite some time.

The conventional wisdom also holds population growth responsible for increasing migration from the impoverished countries of the South to the industrialized countries of the North. But as Hania Zlotnik notes in International Migration: Causes and Effects,(page 359) the poor countries with the highest rates of population growth are not the ones that send the most migrants to the developed world. Indeed, until the late 1980s, most of those migrants came from other developed countries. And the regions that currently send the most migrants to developed countries — Latin America and East and Southeast Asia — have relatively low rates of population growth, while the region with the highest rate of growth — sub-Saharan Africa — sends the fewest migrants to developed countries. Rapid population growth per se is not a cause of migration, although, as we’ll see, it is one of several interconnected factors that can degrade the quality of life and thus create an incentive to migrate.

POPULATION AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Perhaps the most pervasive piece of misguided conventional wisdom holds that rapid population growth leads inevitably to environmental decline. Intuitively, this proposition makes sense: More humans consume more resources and generate more waste. A quick look at the data appears to support this equation. Carbon dioxide emissions, for example, follow a steep upward curve that closely matches population growth rates for the last quarter century. However, as Mark Sagoff points out in Population, Nature, and the Environment, (page 33) vast differences in consumption mean that some populations have a far greater environmental impact than others. With only 25 percent of the world’s people, the industrialized nations of the North generate nearly three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emissions, accounting for about half of the manmade greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.² So in terms of global climate change, consumption in the North poses a greater threat than population growth in the South.

When a community or nation is described as overpopulated, the implication is that its numbers have grown too large in relation to the stock of available resources. But resources are distributed so inequitably that it is often impossible to determine their capacity to sustain a given population. For example, one researcher writes of a Philippine village where poor farmers cultivate land on a sloping hillside. As the community’s population has grown, the farmers have placed greater demands on the land, degrading the quality of the soil. But the entire village could be amply sustained on a small portion of the huge sugar cane estate that surrounds the hill. While population growth has made the situation worse, poverty and inequitable resource distribution are at the heart of the problem.³ Thus, says Robert Repetto of the World Resources Institute, It is misleading to describe the resource degradation that results when marginal farmers misuse marginal lands as a consequence of population pressures, when, in reality, it is a consequence of the gross inequality in access to resources between the rich and poor.⁴

On a global level, inequity is even more striking. The 25 percent of the world’s population that lives in the developed countries lays claim to 85 percent of all forest products consumed, 72 percent of steel production, and 75 percent of energy use.⁵ Developed countries also generate about 75 percent of the global burden of pollutants and wastes.⁶ Of course, the current inequitable distribution of resources need not be a given. And as living standards rise in the developing world, per capita environmental impact will increase. This scenario could cause even greater environmental devastation, unless appropriate technologies and policies are in place to prevent it.

Technology can indeed help moderate the effects of population growth. It has been estimated that simply by employing energy efficiency measures, the North American economy could do everything it now does, with currently available technologies and at equivalent or lower costs, using half as much energy.⁷ Halving our energy consumption would ameliorate many environmental problems, from acid rain to climate change.

Technology should perhaps be understood to include not only the means of production, but also what has been called the technologies of distribution. These include economic, social, and political arrangements that assure people access to education, opportunity, and the shared powers and responsibilities of citizenship.⁸ Improved technologies of distribution could greatly enhance the planet’s capacity to support human life. As M.I.T. economist Lester Thurow has written:

If the world’s population had the productivity of the Swiss, the consumption habits of the Chinese, the egalitarian instincts of the Swedes, and the social discipline of the Japanese, then the planet could support many times its current population without privation for anyone. On the other hand, if the world’s population had the productivity of Chad, the consumption habits of the United States, the inegal-itarian instincts of India, and the social discipline of Argentina, then the planet could not support anywhere near its current numbers. ⁹

NO LIMITS?

Does this mean, then, that with the right technologies of production and distribution, there are no limits to the number of people the planet can sustain? That is the position taken by neoconservative economists, most notably Julian Simon. In The Ultimate Resource, Simon declared that There is no meaningful limit to our capacity to keep growing forever.¹⁰ When markets function well, economists say, human populations are unlikely to go crashing headlong into resource limits. Any sort of scarcity will trigger warning signals in the form of higher prices, which will set in motion a range of adaptive behaviors — substitution, recycling, conservation — that will prevent resource depletion. In Population, Living Standards and Sustainability: An Economic View, (page 76) David Horlacher and Landis MacKellar offer a more qualified, yet still optimistic, version of this hypothesis. Horlacher and MacKellar also note that as population grows and living standards rise, so does demand for environmental quality and resources to protect the environment.

Economists find plenty of evidence to support these views. They are particularly fond of reminding doomsayers that, in the two centuries since Thomas Malthus predicted that human numbers would soon outstrip the food supply, global food production has generally kept well ahead of population growth. Between 1950 and 1984, the Green Revolution helped expand world grain production 2.6-fold, raising the per capita grain harvest by 40 percent.¹¹ Economists can also summon innumerable cases of markets responding to scarcity. For example, after the oil crisis of the 1970s, automakers designed a new generation of fuel-efficient cars and gasoline consumption per mile fell by 29 percent between 1973 and 1988.¹²

Needless to say, environmentalists are less sanguine about the Earth’s infinite bounty. Because the scale of current resource consumption and population growth is unprecedented, they argue, we are in effect playing a high-stakes game of chance with the limits of sustainability. Since the outcome of the game cannot be known, and since the stakes are so high, environmentalists invoke the precautionary principle as a reason to slow population growth and curb consumption.

Environmentalists have seen population growth and consumption overwhelm their hard-won gains in pollution control. As environmental writer Paul Harrison reports, emissions reductions from automotive fuel-efficiency in the U.S. have been completely offset by a doubling of the number of cars on the road since 1970. Thus, says Harrison, Population and consumption will go on raising the hurdles that technology must leap.¹³

While environmentalists acknowledge that properly functioning markets can prevent resource depletion, they observe that markets are often dysfunctional or nonexistent. For example, government subsidies to logging, grazing, and mining in the American West have kept prices artificially low, effectively muting any warning signals that resource limits are dangerously near. Moreover, there are no markets for many commonly held resources, such as the global atmosphere and biological diversity. There is now an international effort to protect those assets, but the process moves slowly and is hindered by a lack of understanding of the complex systems it seeks to protect.

At the heart of the environmentalists’ perspective on population growth is the concept of carrying capacity. The planet’s carrying capacity is, in essence, its ability to sustain life. Carrying capacity cannot simply be measured in terms of grain output, fish harvests, or timber production. It refers to the health of the ecological systems and processes that filter wastes, regenerate soils, and replenish aquifers. Those systems, which we have belatedly begun to understand and respect, form the very basis of life on Earth.

If we evaluate environmental quality from the perspective of ecosystem health rather than by production of crops and renewable resources, there are many causes for alarm. Climate change, the ozone hole, and species loss are all red-alerts that ecological systems are under severe strain. Even this century’s spectacular increases in food production are less impressive when viewed in this light. The Green Revolution boosted food output but left a legacy of poisoned groundwater, degraded and sali-nated soil, and lost biodiversity. That legacy can now be quantified even by conventional indicators. As Sandra Postel reports in Carrying Capacity: The Earth’s Bottom Line (page 48), many measures of the planet’s ability to support human life — availability of fresh water, acreage of irrigated farmland, grain production, and world fish catch — have stagnated or declined in recent years.

Human ingenuity may yet devise the technologies of production and distribution needed to sustain the expanding human population. But, as Mark Sagoff suggests, we may salvage the environment — the systems and resources that sustain life — without saving nature — those parts of the biosphere that have not been modified by human intervention or shaped to meet human needs. It is this concern that gives mainstream environmentalists their (sometimes deserved) reputation for caring more about trees and owls than about people.¹⁴ But reverence for nature is deeply embedded in the human tradition. Nature is our Garden of Eden, a well of spiritual sustenance, an irreplaceable source of perspective and humility. It is also being destroyed at a breathtaking pace. Environmentalists feel an obligation to act as stewards of nature to insure that it survives for future generations.

THE CHICKEN AND EGG OF DEMOGRAPHY

Just as population growth can offset improvements in environmental quality, it can stall social and economic development — or so the conventional wisdom goes. But here, too, the relationship is more complex than it appears.

Clearly, there is a link of some kind between development and slower population growth. As Haub and Riche explain, most preindustrial societies are characterized by stable populations and high rates of fertility and mortality. Then, in the early stages of development, improvements in public health reduce mortality and a population explosion follows as births outnumber deaths. Some time later, fertility falls to replacement level of roughly two children per couple, and population size stabilizes. This is known as the demographic transition, which demographer Nathan Keyfitz calls the most universally observed and least readily explained phenomena of modern times.¹⁵

Does development precede or follow population stabilization? This question remains the chicken and egg of demography, and evidence has been rallied to support both points of view. Many contend that birth rates remain high where children are needed for social and economic security; where parents rely on children for support in old age, for example, or where childbearing is a woman’s only means of attaining status and security. Moreover, where infant and child mortality rates are high, parents tend to have many children in order to insure that some survive. In policy terms, this is known as the demand argument, because it suggests that social and economic development are necessary preconditions to create demand for family planning. In contrast, supply-siders believe that if family planning services are made available, fertility will decline and development will follow. The supply versus demand debate has at times raged with great intensity, because different answers drive different policy approaches and funding priorities.

Demand-siders usually cite the successful demographic transition in Europe, where populations stabilized and prospered without interventions to reduce fertility — in fact, without the aid of modern contraceptives. But others believe the European experience has limited relevance for the impoverished nations of the developing world. They note that both the scale and pace of current population growth dwarfs the earlier increase, and that Europeans managed their transition by emigrating and colonizing the new world.

Certainly, the developing countries today are in a very different situation than their European predecessors. As Haub and Riche explain, mortality rates have fallen steeply due to advances in public health, implemented mostly by multilateral agencies. But fertility remains high because neither supply of nor demand for family planning is firmly in place. In Seeking Common Ground: Unmet Need and Demographic Goals, (page 158) Steven Sinding, John Ross, and Allan Rosenfield calculate that at least 100 million women in the developing world wish to have no more children but lack access to modern contraception. And, as many authors in this volume report, social and economic factors — especially the low status of women — still serve as powerful inducements to have large families.

Some economists have argued that population growth can serve as an engine of development, by improving economies of scale for infrastructure construction, for example. But this is not currently the case in the developing countries of the South, where governments are struggling to provide services and employment for ever-expanding populations. The United Nations Population Fund estimates that there are now a half-billion people in developing countries who are unemployed or underemployed — a number that is equivalent to the entire workforce of the industrialized countries. To accommodate their growing populations, developing countries must create some 30 million new jobs every year just to maintain current employment levels.¹⁶ Few consider it likely that the debt-ridden (and sometimes corrupt) regimes of the South can generate increases of that magnitude. Thus, population growth and underdevelopment create a downward cycle in which population growth prevents the development that would slow population growth, says Nathan Keyfitz.¹⁷ A report by the National Research Council concluded that slower population growth would be beneficial to economic development for most developing countries.¹⁸

The downward cycle of population growth and underdevelopment joins with environmental stress to create what James Grant, executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund, terms the Poverty-Population-Environment (PPE) spiral. As we have seen, poverty contributes to population growth by maintaining the demand for high fertility. Population growth, in turn, can perpetuate poverty by impeding development. Environmental stress is both a cause and effect of poverty and population growth. As in the case of the Philippine villagers cited above, the poor are forced to mine their resources unsustainably through overgrazing, farming steep slopes, and denuding forests for fuel. The result, writes Grant, has been the drawing of the poorest into a cycle by which poverty forces growing numbers of people into environmentally vulnerable areas and the resulting environmental stress becomes yet another cause of their continued poverty....¹⁹

Ominously, PPE problems can also contribute to war and social instability. As Thomas Homer-Dixon, Jeffrey Boutwell, and George Rathjens report in Environmental Change and Violent Conflict,(page 391) PPE problems are already a significant cause of violent conflict, insurgencies, and refugee movements in many parts of the world. These conflagrations, and their attendant toll in human misery, are expected to intensify as more people are drawn into the PPE spiral’s downward vortex.

DEVELOPMENT CAN MAKE MATTERS WORSE

Ironically, some development strategies may actually make PPE problems worse by failing to account for fundamental inequities between rich and poor. Again, the example of world food production is instructive. The Green Revolution, as noted earlier, produced enormous increases in per capita food production. But that bounty was not evenly distributed to each capita. Global food markets are plagued by surpluses, yet more than one billion of the world’s people are malnourished. Why?

Some analysts place part of the blame on the Green Revolution’s emphasis on cash crops and capital-intensive inputs, such as fertilizer and pesticides. Capital-intensive agriculture means that wealthier farmers are more able to benefit from the new technologies, exacerbating the gap between rich and poor. As Mark Sagoff observes, The vast increases in yields-per-acre of recent decades depend on technologies that do nothing for subsistence farmers who cannot afford to purchase them. And, because Green Revolution techniques make agriculture more profitable, rich farmers and corporations buy up the best, flattest land, while poor peasants are forced onto environmentally fragile marginal lands. In India, the Philippines, and Indonesia — all major clients of the Green Revolution — half of the rural population lives below the poverty line.²⁰ Thus, argues Fatima Vianna Mello in Sustainable Development - For and By Whom? (page 71), any discussion of population and sustainable development must confront the destructive character of the reigning development model, which aims at gaining profits and satisfying market forces, and not at meeting the basic human needs of the population.

Structural adjustment policies are perhaps the most widely criticized elements of the reigning development model. These policies, which are imposed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund as conditions for receiving financial assistance, typically include a shift from domestic food production to production for export, wage controls, and cuts in social spending. Although structural adjustment policies are intended to foster economic growth, they have often had the opposite effect. In most countries where they have been implemented, structural adjustment policies have intensified poverty, hastened the plundering of natural resources, and exacerbated environmental problems. The 33 African countries that received structural adjustment loans in the 1980s experienced a steady decline in gross domestic product, food production, and social spending, and a 17 percent increase in people living in poverty. Government spending on education declined from $11 billion to $7 billion during that period, and primary school enrollment fell from 80 percent in 1980 to 69 percent in 1990.²¹ Structural adjustment in Africa, in the words of the British charity Oxfam, has had the effect of forcing the region to struggle up a downward escalator.²²

Some current development strategies harm women and children by reinforcing patterns of gender bias. According to Jodi Jacobson, director of the Health and Development Policy Project, gender bias boils down to [the] grossly unequal allocation of resources — whether of food, credit, education, jobs, information, or training.²³ In Investing in Women: The Focus of the ‘90s, (page 209) Nafis Sadik recounts the tragic consequences of gender bias. In most parts of the world, she observes, women are more likely than men to be malnourished, poor, and illiterate; they have fewer opportunities to earn income, own little real property, and have less access to education.

Development programs can perpetuate gender bias. As Jacobson points out, women perform the lion’s share of work in the subsistence economies of the developing world. In those cultures, women are the primary breadwinners, growing crops to feed their children and contributing a greater proportion of their earnings to family welfare. However, in the eyes of government statisticians and development experts, subsistence agriculture is not considered productive labor. Therefore, cash crops, which are generally controlled by men, receive the bulk of credit and other resources that improve productivity. Because men contribute a proportionally smaller share of their earnings to the family budget, development programs that favor male-controlled cash crops can drive women and children deeper into poverty. In Africa, a World Bank report found that it is not uncommon for children’s nutrition to deteriorate while wrist watches, radios, and bicycles are acquired by the adult male household members.²⁴

Gender bias impacts on the population and environment components of the PPE spiral as well. Jacobson writes, Gender bias is also the single most important cause of rapid population growth. Where women have little access to productive resources and little control over family income, they depend on children for social status and economic security.²⁵ And, because they are often responsible for securing food, fuel, and fresh water, women tend to have a greater interest in preserving croplands, forests, and other resources for perpetual use. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to regard natural resources as commodities that can be converted into cash.²⁶ Sustainable development initiatives thus invite failure when they ignore the role of women.

A HISTORY OF CONFLICT

What can we conclude about population growth, the environment, and development? Certainly, population growth is one of several interrelated factors that can cause environmental degradation and hinder development. It is reasonable, then, to ask how we might slow the rate of population growth, while addressing the other elements of the PPE spiral. This question has generated many different answers, and much bitter debate, over the last several decades. Newcomers to these issues are often mystified by the vehemence of that debate, which is undoubtedly incomprehensible without an understanding of its history. Here, then, is a very abbreviated version of that history and the conflicts it engendered.

As Peter J. Donaldson and Amy Ong Tsui explain in The International Family Planning Movement (page 111), some of the earliest advocates of family planning were turn-of-the-century social reformers, feminists, and — for very different reasons — eugenicists. Reformers and feminists saw family planning as a means of improving the lot of the working class and increasing women’s self-determination. Eugenicists promoted family planning as a means of increasing fertility among those with allegedly superior genetic stock, and diminishing the population of undesirables — the physically and mentally handicapped and criminals.

In the 1950s, when the surge in population catalyzed widespread concern, an organized multilateral effort was launched to reduce fertility. In the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, donor-funded population programs were implemented in most developing countries. The U.S. took the lead in funding these programs, for a variety of strategic and humanitarian reasons. These early programs operated on the assumption that there was a great latent demand for family planning in the developing countries, and that modern contraceptives — notably the birth control pill and intrauterine device (IUD) — would serve as magic bullets to bring down growth rates. That assumption was at least partly correct; since the early 1960s, the percentage of women in the developing countries using contraceptives has risen from 18 to 50 percent, according to Donaldson and Ong Tsui.

But there are some grim chapters in the history of population programs. As Mahmoud Fathalla explains in From Family Planning to Reproductive Health, (page 143) some programs have employed abusive or coercive tactics. Perhaps the most notorious case was in India, where several million forced sterilizations were performed following a national emergency period in 1976. This is an extreme example, but, as Ruth Macklin shows in Ethical Issues in Reproductive Health, (page 191) many programs use less heavy-handed inducements which can also violate the fundamental right to reproductive autonomy.

Since the 1970s, population programs have drawn fire from feminists and women’s health advocates. Women’s groups charged that many programs focused too narrowly on the demographic bottom line, without proper regard for human welfare and especially women’s needs. As Adrienne Germain and Jane Ordway write in Population Control and Women’s Health: Balancing the Scales, (page 135) population programs have viewed women as producers of too many babies, and measured their accomplishments in numbers of contraceptive or sterilization ‘acceptors’ and statistical estimates of ‘births averted.’ And family planning programs in developing countries generally offer poor quality of care. Clients are given little or no choice among contraceptive methods and are rarely warned about side effects. (See Quantifying Quality, by Barbara Mensch, page 174.) Not surprisingly, low-quality care is a major impediment to contraceptive usage and continuation, report Anrudh Jain and Judith Bruce in Quality: The Key to Success (page 171).

But not even high-quality reproductive health care would enable all women to control their fertility in cultures where women lack fundamental rights. In many societies, writes Nafis Sadik, a young woman is still trapped within a web of traditional values which assign a very high value to childbearing and almost none to anything else she can do. Nor do women always have the final say about whether to use contraception. In Family and Gender Issues for Population Policy, (page 242) Cynthia Lloyd notes that in patriarchal cultures, when husbands and wives disagree about family planning, it is usually the husband who prevails.

Women of color in the U.S. have rallied against abuses closer to home. In Reflections on African-American Resistance to Population Policies and Birth Control, (page 281) Denese Shervington analyzes the legacy of distrust left by racially motivated population policies in the U.S. Shervington notes that eugenics laws and other programs have often been used to justify attacks on the reproductive autonomy of women of color. For example, in the 1960s, 65 percent of the women sterilized in North Carolina were African American, though they constituted a much smaller percentage of the population.

The 1970s saw a backlash against population programs from other quarters as well. Just as feminists analyzed fertility in the broader context of women’s lives, thinkers from the South analyzed population programs in the larger economic and political context. Some came to view donor-funded population programs as a substitute for meaningful economic assistance and as a means of preserving the inequitable global regime of haves and have nots. Population programs were also accused of cultural imperialism — exporting western values along with birth control devices.

These concerns erupted at the U.N.-sponsored World Conference on Population, held in Bucharest in 1974. Developing country delegates strongly objected to the conference’s plan of action, which set population control targets without addressing economic development. The then newly formed Group of 77 non-aligned nations called instead for a New International Economic Order to counteract the inequities of the world economy. The supply versus demand debate flared in Bucharest: Developed countries favored supply-side family planning programs, while the G-77 expressed the demand-side view that development is the best contraceptive.²⁷

By the 1980s, the political winds had shifted, and the harshest criticism of population programs blew from the political right. As Sharon Camp relates in The Politics of U.S. Population Assistance, (page 122) the election of Ronald Reagan galvanized the anti-abortion movement in the U.S. Abortion opponents lobbied successfully to curtail both public and private support for abortion and contraception, both in the U.S. and overseas. At the same time, neoconservative economic doctrine took hold in policymaking circles. The Reagan administration echoed Julian Simon’s conviction that population growth can spur development, and that technological innovations can extend natural resources indefinitely.

The 1984 World Population Conference in Mexico City was a mirror image of the Bucharest debate. By that time, most developing countries acknowledged the need to slow population growth. But in a stunning policy reversal, Reagan’s U.S. delegation declared population a neutral factor in development. The U.S. announced its so-called Mexico City policy, which denied U.S. funding to any organization that provided abortion services, counseling, or referral — even with money from other sources. The Mexico City policy dealt a serious blow to the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which was forced to scale back its programs worldwide.

According to Sharon Camp, the U.S. government’s retreat from leadership of world population efforts bears at least part of the blame for the slower progress made toward population stabilization in the last decade. During the 1970s, she notes, world contraceptive use grew by 53 percent and average family size declined 22 percent. But during the 1980s, contraceptive use grew by less than 20 percent and family size declined less than eight percent.

There may be other explanations for the slackening pace of fertility change. In some countries, it may reflect a backlash against coercive family planning programs. In India, for example, the forced sterilization program brought down Indira Gandhi’s government and is blamed for setting back the progress of fertility decline by about a decade.²⁸

And there may be limits to what family planning programs can achieve until social changes boost demand. It is true that such programs can have a significant impact even without socioeconomic development. In Bangladesh, for example, aggressive family planning initiatives helped reduce fertility rates by 21 percent between 1970 and 1991, although Bangladesh remains an impoverished agrarian nation with a traditional culture. Contraceptive use among married Bangladeshi women rose from three to 40 percent during that time.²⁹ However, the total fertility rate is still a long way from replacement level, at 4.9 children per woman.³⁰ In a recent study of a family planning program in the Matlab region of Bangladesh, the Population Reference Bureau questioned whether fertility can decline to replacement level in the absence of significant improvements in living conditions.³¹

THE 1990S: FROM CONFLICT TO CONSENSUS?

The 1990s have witnessed a resurgence of interest in population issues. In the U.S., much of the renewed interest comes from environmentalists worried about the planet’s carrying capacity. But environmentalists have not been warmly received by many participants in the debate. Developing country governments resent the emphasis given to population growth as a cause of environmental degradation, when consumption in the North clearly deserves much of the blame. Feminists and women’s health advocates fear that environmental concerns could reinvigorate numbers-driven population programs that ignore human rights and women’s health. And the Catholic Church, a leading opponent of abortion and artificial contraception, has also expressed concern about coercive population programs. (The role of the Catholic Church is explored in Section VI in essays by Frances Kissling and Maura Anne Ryan.) At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, developing country delegates, feminists, and the Vatican all launched separate efforts to downplay the role of population growth in environmental problems.

At the same time, there are many hopeful signs that gridlock is yielding to consensus. The controversies of the 1970s offered many valuable lessons, both about the causes of PPE problems and about how best to remedy them. Criticism from the South, for example, has kindled a deeper understanding of the economic and personal contexts in which decisions about childbearing are made. The supply versus demand debate has lost some of its fervor, as studies have confirmed the benefits of fostering development and providing family planning simultaneously. As demographers John Bongaarts, W. Parker Mauldin, and James Phillips have written, Investments in socioeconomic development and family planning programs have much more than simply additive effects on fertility. Instead, they operate synergistically, with one reinforcing the other.³²

In recent years, there has been increased dialogue between feminists and women’s health advocates and the population establishment which they have criticized. Many in the population community have come to see the ways in which gender bias harms women and impedes population stabilization. Among feminists, there are some who believe that all population policies are antithetical to women’s well being. But there are many more who support policies that incorporate voluntary family planning, high-quality reproductive health care, and improved opportunities for girls and women. As Ruth Dixon-Mueller writes in Women’s Rights and Reproductive Choice: Rethinking the Connections, (page 227) family planning gives women the means to shape their lives in ways undreamed of by those who have never questioned the inevitability of frequent childbearing.... But Dixon-Mueller stresses that the full benefits of reproductive autonomy are made manifest only when opportunity structures, such as education and employment, are in place for women. Thus, she writes, "it makes little sense to promote policies encouraging contraceptive use and smaller families without simultaneously addressing other legal, social, and economic constraints on women’s