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SEX, DEATH AND DESTINATION: SOME ASPECTS OF POPULATION POLICY.Piaras Mac Éinrí, Department of Geography, University College Cork, Ireland.1 DEFINITIONSPopulation, term referring to the total human inhabitants of a specified area, such as a city, country, or continent, at a given time. Population study as a discipline is known as demography. It is concerned with the size, composition, and distribution of populations; their patterns of change over time through births, deaths, and migration; and the determinants and consequences of such changes. Population studies yield knowledge important for planning, particularly by governments, in fields such as health, education, housing, social security, employment, and environmental preservation. Such studies also provide information needed to formulate government population policies, which seek to modify demographic trends in order to achieve economic and social objectives (Microsoft Encarta/Funk and Wagnall's Encyclopaedia, 1995). While population studies is a complex inter-disciplinary area, the questions which lie at the heart of its enquiry can be reduced to a number of fundamental elements, which may be paraphrased, somewhat glibly, as sex, death and migration. In other words, the three basic variables in population are fertility rates, death rates and the rates of inward and outward migration in any particular region. While the above definition from a popular encyclopaedia is as good as any, a more detailed one is offered by Woods:
2 HISTORICAL CONTEXTFor most of the history of humankind, the primordial demographic reality has been one of a struggle for survival in the face of chronic food shortages and a hostile and unhealthy environment. The significance of the Lenten period in the Christian tradition, when people made a virtue out of necessity by denying to themselves the food they did not have anyway (early Spring being the leanest time of the year, with the previous year's harvest fast running out), needs no emphasis here. To quote Hobbes, life was often nasty, brutish and short, and while fertility rates were probably not generally restricted by systematic forms of birth control - though there is some evidence that malnutrition may have a naturally depressing effect on fertility (McKeown, 1976, p.24) - large numbers of children did not survive beyond early infancy. In part this reflected the difficult conditions which people had to endure; in part it was because, faced with those very difficulties, infanticide or at least the deliberate abandonment (Boswell, 1988) of children would appear to have been a common option (McKeown, 1976, p. 25). Given these factors, it is not surprising that world population grew at a relatively slow rate until the very recent past (see chart one). As Heer says,
3 THE MODERN RISE OF POPULATIONGiven this background, the history of the last three hundred years has been less a history of the revolutionary impact of the control of fertility (in this century particularly) than the story of the achievement, for the first time in human history, of a dramatic fall in the mortality rate, especially for very young children. Improvements took place, in some parts of the world to a significant extent and in all parts to some extent, in food production and in human environmental conditions - better health, better housing, better nutrition, cleaner food, better sanitation and improved hygiene generally. These changes led by the 19th century to a steep fall in mortality (see chart two). At the same time, the very prospect of improvements in life expectations and living conditions which these changes held out led to the gradual abandonment of what may well have been a relatively widespread and systematic practice of infanticide. Families could now not only anticipate that they would be able to feed their children rather than see them as liabilities, but also, with the moves set in train by modernisation and urbanisation and eventually the technology of birth control, could begin gradually to control the number of children born to each individual family unit. In the developed world, the fall in mortality rates had reached its levelling off point by the 1950s; this was accompanied by substantial increases in longevity in all parts of the developed world in the fifty years following the Second World War. Meantime, the contraceptive revolution set in train by technological advances and by the achievement by women of a relatively higher degree of equality with men led to a dramatic fall in natality rates. While the modern drop in the birth-rate may be said to have begun in France in the early part of the nineteenth century, it was not until well after the Second World War that the truly dramatic changes took place, with the widespread use of contraception and major changes in social behaviour, attitudes towards sexuality and gender relations generally, and especially the impact of the feminist movement, whose revolution is ongoing and as yet unfinished. The inter-play of the twin movements of birth and death rates is extremely complex and has to be understood in terms of a range of social and economic variables. As far as the impact on population is concerned, it may be asserted with a degree of confidence that the changes have by now "bottomed out" in many parts of the developed world, in terms of a situation of relative stability at or below the level of reproduction needed to sustain the particular regional population at that which had been reached by the latter part of the current century. The precise regional trends are notoriously difficult to predict and one should avoid, in particular, any attempt at simple extrapolation from existing statistics. Thus, for instance, birth rates are currently actually rising in some of the most developed countries, a phenomenon which directly contradicts traditional demographic transition theory. According to this theory demographic changes take place in a number of stages of which the last occurs with the impact of industrialisation, urbanisation and economic development, when an initial decline in mortality is followed by a secondary decline in fertility. The decline in mortality has certainly happened but the socio-economic and behavioural factors associated with fertility are evidently far more complex and specific, so that generalisations can only be made with the greatest of care (Heer, 1975, pp 14-15). It may be blindingly obvious in retrospect, but the positivist emphasis on the apparent inevitability of decline in mortality and fertility rather missed the point that we are in fact dealing with fundamentally different phenomena. Thus people will tend, in general, to want to live as long as possible and governments will seek to adopt policies which lower child mortality rates and promote good health and longevity, although the debate about the use of resources to provide long-term treatment for the very old will inevitably become far more problematic if, say, we achieve the technological means to allow some people to live well beyond the current maximum life expectancy. In that sense, the trend so far towards lower mortality rates may, at least in general terms, be described as non-reversible. The same is not true, however, of fertility rates. The decision to have or not to have children will normally based on a very complex set of interacting social, cultural, economic, religious and sexual factors. These factors are not stable for the individual or for society. Certainly, some generalisations may be possible - thus, in developed societies very large families are rare. It is a far more difficult task, however, to determine which are the factors which lead to a couple's decision, in the developed world, to have a third child. In other cases - for instance, teenage single motherhood in disadvantaged socio-economic circumstances, these factors are part of a broader social and cultural backdrop, so that shifts and trends are really the indirect by-product of other major forces. In the developing world, by contrast, the mortality rate has also been falling but remains, as chart three illustrates, far higher than the "western" norm. At the same time, the situation of socio-economic disadvantage is such that many couples choose to maintain high fertility rates as a kind of insurance policy for their own old age. The result has been an exponential growth in world population. High- and low- growth projections of world population in the next 30 years are necessarily speculative, but estimates suggest a figure of at least 8.5 billion by 2025 (chart one refers). 4 MALTHUSIAN AND ANTI-MALTHUSIAN VIEWPOINTSThe current situation in the world, therefore, is highly unstable. Those parts of the world which are wealthiest have reached a kind of "steady state" condition, with native-born populations which are either stable or in gentle decline. Numbers in all other parts of the world - where more than five sixths of the population actually lives - are growing at a rate which far outstrips the economic potential of those regions, a situation greatly aggravated by the exploitation of their limited resources by the developed world. In that sense, it has been argued that Malthus, the father of population studies, was not so much wrong as premature. Thus the Malthusian prediction that ever-increasing population growth would be limited by an ever-increasing inability to provide food and other resources was based on the idea that population would expand at a geometrical rate whereas resources could only grow arithmetically. Inevitably, according to this viewpoint, population growth would outstrip growth in resources, so that the only way in which the demographic balance could be restored would be via the intervention of some natural disaster - famine or disease - or some other cataclysmic event such as war. In fact, as Paul Kennedy has argued, a number of mitigating factors arose from the early 19th century on, including the industrial revolution, major changes in food production, the development of America as a place to "drain off" surplus Europeans etc. However, he argues that the ultimate effect of these factors was to postpone, not to disprove, Malthus' gloomy predictions. According to this viewpoint, we are only now witnessing the coming home to roost of Malthus' chickens, hatched nearly 200 years ago (Kennedy, 1994, p. 11ff). In the meantime, moreover, other factors have also intervened to distort the situation further. Thus, one may note the policy of the Roman Catholic Church, the religion of close to one-sixth of the world's population. Under current Papal policy, artificial means of contraception are regarded as sinful and Church doctrine holds that sexual activity can only take place within marriage and must always be open to the possibility of procreation. The notion that there are too many people in the world is not accepted. The blind refusal of these policies to recognise the realities of human sexual behaviour and of excessive population growth has led directly to lives of untold misery and squalor for hundreds of millions on the planet. Bishop Lucey of Cork once famously put it to the Commission for the Study of Emigration and Other Population Problems, "There is, of course, no Christian population policy as such...(Lucey, Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems, 1956, p.335). By this he meant, of course, that there could be no Christian policy to limit "God's plan", i.e., no policy designed "artificially" to control the growth in population. The speech on 7 September 1994 by the representative of the Holy See to the Cairo Conference on Population and Development, Archbishop Beato R. Martino, said in reference to mandatory population policies that "subtle forms of coercion and pressure have also resulted from a misrepresentation of demographic data which induces fear and anxiety about the future" (my italics) (Cairo Conference Papers, UN Development Programme, 1994). Within the Islamic world, the disadvantaged position of women in a number of Islamic countries has also led to continuing high birth rates. Thus, some of the highest birth-rates in the world are to be found in certain Islamic countries, where women have few rights and those rights do not include the refusal of his "conjugal rights" to a husband. However, it would be grossly simplistic and untrue to portray either Roman Catholic or Islamic practice as either wholly uniform or uniformly repressive: there are wide variations in practice. Mention should also be made of the orthodox Marxist viewpoint about population, which was the official doctrine in centrally planned economies for a large part of the current century. For Marxists, Malthusianism is a "bourgeois population theory" which blames the workers who have too many children rather than the capitalist system which deprives them of a fair share of resources. As the Soviet academician Smulevich notes
For Marxists, therefore, the Malthusian approach is both irrelevant and misleading, as it directs attention away from the real cause of the problem - capitalism - and assigns responsibility instead to an iron law of population, a law which, as Malthus himself wrote, operates "in every age and in every state in which man has existed or does now exist" (quoted in Smulevitch, in Valentey (ed.), 1978, p 385). It is of course undeniable that the causes of world poverty are largely structural in nature and that the workings of the world capitalist system play a major role. Clearly, however, the debate between Marxist and traditionalist perspectives, on the one hand, and Malthusian and neo-Malthusian perspectives, on the other, is somewhat arid if it is seen in purely binary terms. A matrix of factors can be identified, all of which are relevant to the current world demographic situation. It is not surprising, therefore, that debate about population matters in recent years has been complex and has also thrown up some unlikely alliances, such as that seen at the UN Cairo Conference on Population and Development (September 1994) between Vatican and Islamic representatives and some spokespersons representing a Marxist perspective on Third World development problems. Malthus (although himself a clergyman by calling) himself put it all in typically blunt and unsympathetic fashion:
Activists in developing countries have been quick to seize upon the neo-Malthusian flavour of much of the patronising proposals which have come from rich countries in connection with birth control programmes. These programmes have often been grossly insensitive in their implementation, but, more seriously, have been based on fundamentally inadequate premises. Thus, choosing to have large families is not necessarily an illogical choice for an impoverished couple in a developing country: quite the contrary. Current evidence indicates that the most effective way to lower population growth is to promote the social and economic well-being of peoples. The education, social standing and civil rights of women would appear to be the most important factors. Critics of conventional population control programmes argue that to say that a decline in births will lead to an improvement in living standards is actually to put the cart before the horse, from the standpoint of those most affected. 5 DEMOGRAPHY, SOCIAL UNREST AND MIGRATIONPartly as a result of these processes of change as well as the religious and ideological disputes just noted, we have recently seen the emergence of many violent flashpoints, with social and economic conditions deteriorating as population expands at exponential rates. Situations such as the current civil war in Algeria (for this is what it is) are at least in part the result of sharper competition for scarce resources. Kennedy notes:
Often, the simplest and most understandable response to these bewildering changes is a return to the reassuring comfort of old, rigid values rooted in an idealised past or in a millenarian, utopian future. This must go some way towards explaining the attraction of Islamic "fundamentalism" (there are of course many Christian and Jewish "fundamentalists" as well) for people who see themselves as marginalised and deprived, the laissés-pour-comptes of the modern world, who cannot partake of the benefits and see, with some justification, an unfeeling capitalist West as being largely to blame. In spite of this downward spiral, it has still been possible for propagandists on the Roman Catholic and Islamic right (not necessarily reflecting the views of the majority of either of these faiths) to argue, as was done at the 1994 Cairo Conference, that there is no world population problem. Meantime, one of the fundamentals of the situation - the continuing ruthless exploitation of the resources of the developing world by the more developed regions of the world - continues apace, with an ever-increasing level of indebtedness on the part of the poorer countries. The fraught demographic situation in which the world now finds itself is where the third component of population - migration - comes in. Essentially, migration is the remorseless and inexorable logic, expressed in terms of aggregate human spatial displacement, of a situation of intolerable socio-economic imbalance. If one takes the Mediterranean Basin alone, it has been calculated that for the decade 1990-2000 more than 90% of all births in countries in countries in this region will occur in the "less developed" parts, i.e., excluding France, Italy, Spain and Greece, to which these new citizens may in due course be expected to flock (source: European Commission, 1994). Just as water will try to reach the same level in communicating vases, the inequality described above inevitably leads to a tendency towards massive migratory movements between disadvantaged and advantaged parts of the planet. Charts four and five illustrate some of these trends in the case of the Mediterranean region. The methodologies deployed by academics in an attempt to understand these problems and flows are mostly variations, in one way or another, on the concept of core-periphery movements (or push-pull factors, using Ravenstein's original terminology of migration) with which geographers, economists and others are already familiar. Indeed, in that sense, we may see the world systems perspective developed by Wallerstein and others as merely the latest and most sophisticated variant of this perspective. It is no less helpful and relevant for all that, as it seeks to explain these ever larger movements in terms of global, structural phenomena. 6 THE GLOBAL NATURE OF DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGES AND THE INADEQUACY OF NATION-STATE PLANNINGThe migrants who are thus attracted into the core regions may be regarded within those regions (at least initially) merely as "workers" and not as social persons; they may therefore be deprived of the legal, political and cultural rights of full human beings. Frequently they will be allocated the dirtiest, most dangerous and badly paid jobs. The over-riding factor, however, is the creation of an almost irresistible push-pull process on an ever vaster scale. The state which moves against such migrants by refusing to admit them may well succeed in keeping some of them at bay and in rendering the conditions of those who do come as well-nigh intolerable as they can, but contemporary events are teaching us that any suggestion that a kind of world apartheid can succeed is ultimately doomed to failure. Thus, the USA amnestied illegal immigrants on a massive scale in the 1980s - more than 3 million - but now finds that the numbers of illegals are projected to reach to pre-amnesty level again within five years (Migration News, August 1994). It is worthwhile quoting, in this context, the words of Marceau Long, chairperson of the official French High Council for Integration (established after l'affaire des foulards - a controversy about the wearing of scarves in state schools by Muslim women students), who stated in an interview in 1991, "Differences in wealth and in the level of population will provoke, whatever the precautions we take at our borders, new migratory flows" (Long, in Libération, 19/2/91). The phenomenon of south-north migration is thus one of the major international crises of our times. In terms of response, we face a paradox. In our century, as has just been hinted, phenomena on this scale, even though global, have inevitably entailed a primary policy response at the level of the nation state. Only the modern nation-state has developed the ideology, the will and the technology to be interventionist in the manner required. It is the nation-state which purports to have the right to determine who has the right to belong and who has not, how big the population should be and where they should live - all core elements in population policy. In privileging the nation state as the vehicle whereby individual identities and freedoms could best be expressed, 20th century humankind has probably created as many, if not more, losers as winners.
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