Centrepiece
`Population' or people?
Colin Welch
The Ethiopian famine, with all its atten- dant and spreading side-horrors, pre- sents most of us with hideous dilemmas. To the extent that it is an act of God or nature, it is our simple duty to relieve it as best we may. To what extent, however, is it man- made? To what extent is it the fault of Ethiopia's cruel, callous, negligent, crimin- al or haif-mad government? To what ex- tent is it caused by the government's decision to squander money on tanks and aircraft? To what extent then will whatever aid we give tend to preserve a government which seems actively and malignantly hos- tile to its subjects, as the poor Emperor never was? To what extent will it be diverted to feed not the starving but Mengistu's brutal soldiery, not the oppres- sed but the oppressors, much as vehicles sent to move food in the Sahel famine ended up as taxis in Niger's capital?
The problem is rather like airlifting food to an unliberated Belsen. Who will grab and eat it? It is all very perplexing for most of us, if not for all. Some on the Left take perverse comfort from attributing all poverty and famine in some way to the machinations of Western imperialism. Others blame the Ethiopian famine on the supposed denial of aid to Ethiopia for ideological reasons. Yet the Marxist reg- ime there has received enormous quanti- ties of aid, a billion dollars between 1978 and 1982, and more since; it could get millions more still without any food neces- sarily reaching the starving. It has its own dark priorities. According to Martin Mere- dith (in The First Defence of Freedom, Hamish Hamilton, £12.95), 'President' Nguema of Equatorial Guinea reduced a thriving agricultural economy to destitu- tion by expelling planters, killing all his opponents, closing the schools, hoarding all the money so that the entire currency disappeared, some of it rotting buried in his garden. Of what use aid to him?
To other zealots, Ethiopian miseries present the text for a familiar sermon. I refer to the vast and influential population planning lobby, those inspired bagmen with their contraceptive millennium, who dominate international bodies like the World Bank, the United Nations and the recent population jamboree in Mexico, and national bodies like parliaments throughout the developed aid-giving world. They cry woe in the wake of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, consti- tuting in their well-meaning way a sort of fifth. MPs of all parties have risen to denounce over-population as the cause and contraception as the cure for all Ethiopia's ills. Charles Morrison, MP for my part of Wiltshire, an unregenerate Heathite and north-and-south man, thunders in the Times for population control in Ethiopia, in a letter headed 'Too many African mouths to feed?' Yet if half the starving in Ethiopia were killed off, as is alas not impossible, the survivors would still be starving. Easier, indeed, for charity to feed one million, or one person, than two millions. But it is a perverse charity which, on the presumed assumption that its bene- ficiaries could never in any circum- stances feed themselves, seeks to limit their number to what can be kept inde- finitely in hopeless dependency.
Against the monstrous regiment of the population planners has struggled one tire- less sceptic, Professor Lord Bauer, usually alone. His book Equality, the Third World and Economic Delusion (Weidenfeld, £15.00) contains an essay on 'the popula- tion explosion' in which more fashionable fantasies are demolished than would seem possible in only 23 pages. This spring- cleaning is achieved by a startling blend of knowledge, technical mastery, wit, sym- pathy and insight into how and why poor people behave as they do. Forgotten com- mon sense is polished and revealed to be gold; much of what modishly passes for common sense is revealed as dross.
For an example of modish common nonsense or half-sense, just knock the question mark off the Times headline: 'Too many African mouths to feed.' The half- sense resides in the fact that the unborn and dead cannot eat or starve and cannot engender either problems or solutions of a kind recognisable to planners. To regard the living only as a problem, however, is to ignore the elementary fact that with nearly every mouth there comes a pair of hands and a directing brain. In the West we tend to regard our children as a cherished burden, requiring to be fed, educated and looked after for years before they finally fend for themselves. In primitive, tradi- tional, less developed countries, LDCs for short, children are normally regarded as cherished assets, not a problem, still less a curse, but a blessing. They are wanted.
If contraceptives are not as popular as planners would wish, this is not usually because they are not available or known about. Traditional methods are nigh uni- versal; and it is absurd to suppose that mechanical contraceptives would not be as widespread as Coca-Cola if there were the same demand. In fact they are widely available, often free or subsidised, often spurned for reasons which baffle the con- traceptive West.
Children in LDCs usually help in the fields from the age of about six; in towns they are active in trade. The normal flow of money is from young to old. There are no old age pensions. The children look after their old parents; the more children, the lighter the burden on each one. They do not resent the system, from which they hope, if planners do not intervene, to benefit in their turn. Mrs Gandhi's forced sterilisation campaign, warmly admired by Mr McNamara of the World Bank, re- duced its victims to a destitute old age.
It is often said that children are 'ex- ploited' in LDCs. If they are, this makes nonsense of Mr McNamara's contention that LDC governments have to divert an enormous proportion of scarce resources away from productive investment to main- tain even a low level of existence for expanding populations. 'Capital that ought to have been invested was not available. It had been dissipated by the ever-rising tide of children.' As Lord Bauer drily points out, this is to ignore the children's con- tribution, to exaggerate the cost of, say, primary education, and to overlook the fatuity of much of the 'investment' fore- gone. LDC governments normally waste far more resources than their luckless subjects, and create most of the problems for which over-population is blamed.
By using terms 'tide', 'explosion', `threat', 'catastrophe' and 'unmanageable population pressures' (all McNamara)', we dehumanise what we talk about, reducing to mindless tendencies what is in fact the result of numberless human choices, many of them quite rational in circumstances alien to us. 'Population' is an abstraction. Do we need reminding that it actually consists of people and their children, of people who mostly love their children and are glad that more of them are alive (which is what the fuss is all about), who view barrenness with pity and large families with favour (eight sons are wished for Indian brides), but who certainly may be expected voluntarily to modify their reproductive habits wherever Western ideas prevail or catastrophe actually threatens?
Yes, they may surprise us. We extrapo- late too much. An imminent decline of population was widely expected in the Thirties and Forties: prominent academics predicted the extinction of the species in books like The Suicide of the Race. How wrong they were, how absurd -policies based on their errors! How wrong the World Bank may be to predict 10,300 million people by 2050 AD, as against the present 4,000 million! How absurd policies based on such predictions may look by then!
In their different ways, both Mengistu and the population planners agree there are too many Ethiopians. This seems to me extremely presumptuous. Are not those governments, organisations and charities best which humbly regard people, however numerous, as given and precious, and which make it their duty not to cull but to cherish and succour all those whom God has sent?
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