cyu
22nd February 2010, 20:07
Excerpts from http://popdev.hampshire.edu/sites/popdev/files/uploads/dt/DifferenTakes_40.pdf
Placing the blame on population obscures the powerful economic and political forces that threaten the well-being of both people and the planet... It reinforces racism, promoting harmful stereotypes of poor people of color.
2. The focus on population masks the complex causes of poverty and inequality.
A narrow focus on human numbers obscures the way different economic and political systems operate to perpetuate poverty and inequality... It says nothing about the concentration of much wealth in a few hands. In the late 1990s, the 225 people who comprise the ‘ultra-rich’ had a combined wealth of over US $1 trillion, equivalent to the annual income of the poorest 47% of the world’s people.
3. Hunger is not the result of ‘too many mouths’ to feed.
Global food production has consistently kept pace with population growth, and today world agriculture produces 17% more calories per person than it did 30 years ago. There is enough food for every man, woman and child to have more than the recommended daily calorie intake. People go hungry because they do not have the land on which to grow food or the money with which to buy it. In Brazil, one percent of the land owners control almost half of the country’s arable land, and more land is owned by multinational corporations than all the peasants combined.
4. Population growth is not the driving force behind environmental degradation.
Blaming environmental degradation on overpopulation lets the real culprits off the hook. In terms of resource consumption alone, the richest fifth of the world’s people consume 66 times as much as the poorest fifth.
5. Population pressure is not a root cause of political insecurity and conflict.
Especially since 9/11, conflict in the Middle East has been linked to a ‘youth bulge’ of too many young men whose numbers supposedly make them prone to violence. Missing from this simple picture is how oil politics, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Bush administration’s war on Iraq are causing unrest in the region. Ideas like the ‘youth bulge’ can have very real and lethal consequences. A case in point is Chechnya, where the International Helsinki Federation has charged the Russian army of abducting and murdering young males in a deliberate process of “thinning out a population of young men.”
6. Population control targets women’s fertility and restricts reproductive rights.
Population control programs view women as ‘breeders’ of too many babies without considering the complex circumstances of their lives and their reasons for having children... In contrast, population control programs try to drive down birth rates as fast and cheaply as possible through the aggressive promotion of sterilization or long-acting, provider-controlled contraceptives like Norplant and Depo-Provera.
Today, in India, a number of states punish poor parents who have more than two children by denying them access to government assistance, employment and election to public office. In China, the one-child policy is still enforced through forced sterilizations and abortions. In both countries, the strong preference for bearing at least one son, coupled with restrictive population control policies, has led to sex-selective abortions of female fetuses and skewed sex ratios.
8. Population alarmism encourages apocalyptic thinking that legitimizes human rights abuses.
It convinces many otherwise well-meaning people that it is morally justified to curtail the basic human and reproductive rights of poor people in order to save ourselves and the planet from doom. This sense of emergency leads to an elitist moral relativism, in which ‘we’ know best and ‘our’ rights are more worthy than ‘theirs.’ Politically, it legitimizes authoritarianism.
9. Threatening images of overpopulation reinforce racial and ethnic stereotypes and scapegoat immigrants and other vulnerable communities.
Fear of overpopulation in the Third World often translates into fear of increasing immigration to the West, and thereby people of color becoming the majority... Anti-immigrant groups tied to white supremacists strategically deploy population fears to appeal to liberal environmentalists.
In the U.S. there is a strong link between negative images of Third World overpopulation and racist views of African Americans as burdens on society. Eugenics programs and punitive welfare policies have subjected African Americans and other marginalized communities to sterilization and contraceptive abuse because of racist assumptions that their fertility is out of control. Even though women on welfare have on average fewer than two children, the image of the overbreeding ‘welfare queen’ remains firmly fixed in the white imagination.
Placing the blame on population obscures the powerful economic and political forces that threaten the well-being of both people and the planet... It reinforces racism, promoting harmful stereotypes of poor people of color.
2. The focus on population masks the complex causes of poverty and inequality.
A narrow focus on human numbers obscures the way different economic and political systems operate to perpetuate poverty and inequality... It says nothing about the concentration of much wealth in a few hands. In the late 1990s, the 225 people who comprise the ‘ultra-rich’ had a combined wealth of over US $1 trillion, equivalent to the annual income of the poorest 47% of the world’s people.
3. Hunger is not the result of ‘too many mouths’ to feed.
Global food production has consistently kept pace with population growth, and today world agriculture produces 17% more calories per person than it did 30 years ago. There is enough food for every man, woman and child to have more than the recommended daily calorie intake. People go hungry because they do not have the land on which to grow food or the money with which to buy it. In Brazil, one percent of the land owners control almost half of the country’s arable land, and more land is owned by multinational corporations than all the peasants combined.
4. Population growth is not the driving force behind environmental degradation.
Blaming environmental degradation on overpopulation lets the real culprits off the hook. In terms of resource consumption alone, the richest fifth of the world’s people consume 66 times as much as the poorest fifth.
5. Population pressure is not a root cause of political insecurity and conflict.
Especially since 9/11, conflict in the Middle East has been linked to a ‘youth bulge’ of too many young men whose numbers supposedly make them prone to violence. Missing from this simple picture is how oil politics, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Bush administration’s war on Iraq are causing unrest in the region. Ideas like the ‘youth bulge’ can have very real and lethal consequences. A case in point is Chechnya, where the International Helsinki Federation has charged the Russian army of abducting and murdering young males in a deliberate process of “thinning out a population of young men.”
6. Population control targets women’s fertility and restricts reproductive rights.
Population control programs view women as ‘breeders’ of too many babies without considering the complex circumstances of their lives and their reasons for having children... In contrast, population control programs try to drive down birth rates as fast and cheaply as possible through the aggressive promotion of sterilization or long-acting, provider-controlled contraceptives like Norplant and Depo-Provera.
Today, in India, a number of states punish poor parents who have more than two children by denying them access to government assistance, employment and election to public office. In China, the one-child policy is still enforced through forced sterilizations and abortions. In both countries, the strong preference for bearing at least one son, coupled with restrictive population control policies, has led to sex-selective abortions of female fetuses and skewed sex ratios.
8. Population alarmism encourages apocalyptic thinking that legitimizes human rights abuses.
It convinces many otherwise well-meaning people that it is morally justified to curtail the basic human and reproductive rights of poor people in order to save ourselves and the planet from doom. This sense of emergency leads to an elitist moral relativism, in which ‘we’ know best and ‘our’ rights are more worthy than ‘theirs.’ Politically, it legitimizes authoritarianism.
9. Threatening images of overpopulation reinforce racial and ethnic stereotypes and scapegoat immigrants and other vulnerable communities.
Fear of overpopulation in the Third World often translates into fear of increasing immigration to the West, and thereby people of color becoming the majority... Anti-immigrant groups tied to white supremacists strategically deploy population fears to appeal to liberal environmentalists.
In the U.S. there is a strong link between negative images of Third World overpopulation and racist views of African Americans as burdens on society. Eugenics programs and punitive welfare policies have subjected African Americans and other marginalized communities to sterilization and contraceptive abuse because of racist assumptions that their fertility is out of control. Even though women on welfare have on average fewer than two children, the image of the overbreeding ‘welfare queen’ remains firmly fixed in the white imagination.