Factoid - The entire world’s population, organised in family units of four with a quarter-acre block each, would fit into Queensland with room to spare.
Food production and distribution is not governed by how many mouths there are to feed, but rather by market forces. Under capitalism food is often left to rot or dumped in the ocean if it cannot be sold at a profit. If food production and distribution was planned and distributed in the interests of people, rather than profit, the Planet Earth if need be could easily sustain a population of many billions more.
Join the dots marked out by the Malthusians and you draw an ugly picture of a world where those blamed for environmental problems are not those who do most to cause them, but those who suffer most from their consequences. The birth rate in Mali is 6.29 births per woman.
In the USA it is 2.1. So, if the problem is population, then Mali is where we should start to point our fingers.But let’s look at another statistic: the average person in Mali is responsible for 0.06 tonnes of CO2 per year. The average person in the USA is responsible for 17. So, the average person in the USA is responsible for about 283 times more carbon than the average person in Mali. To put it another way, the average Mailian family is responsible for 1/136th of the carbon of the average American family. In this context, complaining about another Malian baby seems foolish. if we aspire to a world where Malians have a better quality of life than they do now, then they will each use more resource. And so this will only be possible with a lower population. And largely, they are wrong. It is possible for a society to live well and use less of the world’s finite resources. It just isn’t possible under the current economic system (capitalism).
1. 10 percent of the world’s population, around 700 million people, are responsible for over half of the world’s consumption.
2. The poorest 40 percent consume less than 5 percent of resources.
3. The poorest 20 percent, around 1.4 billion people, consume less than 2 percent.
If the poorest billion people were magically removed there would be hardly any change to global resource consumption. If though the standard of living of the richest 700 million people was reduced to the global average, resource use and pollution would be cut in half.
Talking about population serves to shift blame from the the capitalist system and onto those who are least to blame And when we shift the blame onto poor black people, we are perpetuating white power and the racism in our society. And it shifts the blame on to women. You are not empowering women to have more control over their reproduction if you pre-define the outcome of their family planning. This is like telling people they have democracy so long as they vote for you. It may be that fewer children is what women would choose. But we should give them control over their fertility because they ought to have that control – if they want fewer children, or if they want more. This world props up its racism and its sexism by encouraging us to blame the victims of oppression for the problems they face. Once you point a finger, you can’t control the direction people look. The population question is a reminder of how concern about the environment does not automatically lead to socially progressive proposals.
The World Socialist Movement is all in favour of giving poor people contraception but our means of supporting women is to offer free access to all the resources they need to take control of their fertility.
Limiting population growth doesn’t solve any of the world’s environmental and human problems. China’s one-child policy has resulted in huge numbers of biologically female babies being abandoned, aborted or put up for adoption because their patriarchal society favours men. Their one-child policy has also done nothing to limit China’s environmental footprint, which has been growing rapidly even with a stable population. China’s greenhouse gas emissions are up nearly 200% since the year 2000 in spite of a controlled population. Limiting population growth is a complete red herring.
There might, we suppose, be a theoretical point at which it would be impossible to feed the people on Earth. But we aren’t anything like there. Hunger is an issue of distribution, and of inefficient usage (ie using crops as fodder for animals so people like me can eat meat). The problem is the economic system. Highlighting over-population as the main problem as opposed to those directly linked o those who own and control our economy perpetuates the power structures on which the system depends, and so ultimately do more harm than good – through both the direct harm of the victim blaming oppression, and by deflecting attention from the core issues. Current global problems such as poverty and shortages of food have nothing to do with population. They are caused by capitalism. The latter is due to speculation and distribution not actual shortage. In practice, no famine ever has been the result of a shortage of food, the problem is they can’t afford to, the problem is poverty – and therefore capitalism is the cause. We could easily feed the world – and many more – with current global food production. Capitalism works by maximising resource use. If there is a capitalist system, and half the population we have now, we would still have all of the problems we have now: resources would still be used to the maximum. For as long as this is true, why talk about population?
The point of combating climate change is to preserve a planet that is able to support high levels of evenly distributed human well-being. Any intended means to that end that do not explicitly challenge existing inequalities in wealth and power — or worse still, fortify those global inequalities by simply following a path of least resistance — are necessarily self defeating. Doing things about population in our current economic system will only perpetuate the problems we face.
Fred Magdoff in ‘Global Resource Depletion: Is Population the Problem?’ (Monthly Review, January 2013) makes the point that “we are forced to conclude that when considering global resource use and environmental degradation there really is a ‘population problem.’ But it is not too many people – and certainly not too many poor people – but rather too many rich people living too ‘high on the hog’ and consuming too much. Thus birth control programs in poor countries or other means to lower the population in these regions will do nothing to help with the greater problems of global resource use and environmental destruction.”
There are indications that sustaining nine billion people on the planet under capitalism may be problematic, but that tells you nothing about how many people could live sustainably under a different system such as socialism. The real issue is not about the numbers of people we want to see but what type of economic system we need.
Adapted from here
Food production and distribution is not governed by how many mouths there are to feed, but rather by market forces. Under capitalism food is often left to rot or dumped in the ocean if it cannot be sold at a profit. If food production and distribution was planned and distributed in the interests of people, rather than profit, the Planet Earth if need be could easily sustain a population of many billions more.
Join the dots marked out by the Malthusians and you draw an ugly picture of a world where those blamed for environmental problems are not those who do most to cause them, but those who suffer most from their consequences. The birth rate in Mali is 6.29 births per woman.
In the USA it is 2.1. So, if the problem is population, then Mali is where we should start to point our fingers.But let’s look at another statistic: the average person in Mali is responsible for 0.06 tonnes of CO2 per year. The average person in the USA is responsible for 17. So, the average person in the USA is responsible for about 283 times more carbon than the average person in Mali. To put it another way, the average Mailian family is responsible for 1/136th of the carbon of the average American family. In this context, complaining about another Malian baby seems foolish. if we aspire to a world where Malians have a better quality of life than they do now, then they will each use more resource. And so this will only be possible with a lower population. And largely, they are wrong. It is possible for a society to live well and use less of the world’s finite resources. It just isn’t possible under the current economic system (capitalism).
1. 10 percent of the world’s population, around 700 million people, are responsible for over half of the world’s consumption.
2. The poorest 40 percent consume less than 5 percent of resources.
3. The poorest 20 percent, around 1.4 billion people, consume less than 2 percent.
If the poorest billion people were magically removed there would be hardly any change to global resource consumption. If though the standard of living of the richest 700 million people was reduced to the global average, resource use and pollution would be cut in half.
Talking about population serves to shift blame from the the capitalist system and onto those who are least to blame And when we shift the blame onto poor black people, we are perpetuating white power and the racism in our society. And it shifts the blame on to women. You are not empowering women to have more control over their reproduction if you pre-define the outcome of their family planning. This is like telling people they have democracy so long as they vote for you. It may be that fewer children is what women would choose. But we should give them control over their fertility because they ought to have that control – if they want fewer children, or if they want more. This world props up its racism and its sexism by encouraging us to blame the victims of oppression for the problems they face. Once you point a finger, you can’t control the direction people look. The population question is a reminder of how concern about the environment does not automatically lead to socially progressive proposals.
The World Socialist Movement is all in favour of giving poor people contraception but our means of supporting women is to offer free access to all the resources they need to take control of their fertility.
Limiting population growth doesn’t solve any of the world’s environmental and human problems. China’s one-child policy has resulted in huge numbers of biologically female babies being abandoned, aborted or put up for adoption because their patriarchal society favours men. Their one-child policy has also done nothing to limit China’s environmental footprint, which has been growing rapidly even with a stable population. China’s greenhouse gas emissions are up nearly 200% since the year 2000 in spite of a controlled population. Limiting population growth is a complete red herring.
There might, we suppose, be a theoretical point at which it would be impossible to feed the people on Earth. But we aren’t anything like there. Hunger is an issue of distribution, and of inefficient usage (ie using crops as fodder for animals so people like me can eat meat). The problem is the economic system. Highlighting over-population as the main problem as opposed to those directly linked o those who own and control our economy perpetuates the power structures on which the system depends, and so ultimately do more harm than good – through both the direct harm of the victim blaming oppression, and by deflecting attention from the core issues. Current global problems such as poverty and shortages of food have nothing to do with population. They are caused by capitalism. The latter is due to speculation and distribution not actual shortage. In practice, no famine ever has been the result of a shortage of food, the problem is they can’t afford to, the problem is poverty – and therefore capitalism is the cause. We could easily feed the world – and many more – with current global food production. Capitalism works by maximising resource use. If there is a capitalist system, and half the population we have now, we would still have all of the problems we have now: resources would still be used to the maximum. For as long as this is true, why talk about population?
The point of combating climate change is to preserve a planet that is able to support high levels of evenly distributed human well-being. Any intended means to that end that do not explicitly challenge existing inequalities in wealth and power — or worse still, fortify those global inequalities by simply following a path of least resistance — are necessarily self defeating. Doing things about population in our current economic system will only perpetuate the problems we face.
Fred Magdoff in ‘Global Resource Depletion: Is Population the Problem?’ (Monthly Review, January 2013) makes the point that “we are forced to conclude that when considering global resource use and environmental degradation there really is a ‘population problem.’ But it is not too many people – and certainly not too many poor people – but rather too many rich people living too ‘high on the hog’ and consuming too much. Thus birth control programs in poor countries or other means to lower the population in these regions will do nothing to help with the greater problems of global resource use and environmental destruction.”
There are indications that sustaining nine billion people on the planet under capitalism may be problematic, but that tells you nothing about how many people could live sustainably under a different system such as socialism. The real issue is not about the numbers of people we want to see but what type of economic system we need.
Adapted from here
"To be sure, “over-population” seems to exist in large parts of the world where people are subjected to famines, floods and backward methods o production. While this condition may not be man-made, it is at any rate maintained by men, so as to secure privileged positions within existing social relations, or international power relations, or both simultaneously. “Over-population” is not the cause but the result of these attempts to arrest social development, as may be seen by the fact that wherever hunger is eliminated population tends to decline. But even if it would not do so, there exist for a very long time ample opportunities for an increased production able to feed a world population many times its present size.
ReplyDeleteIt is not really “over-population” which worries the ruling classes. Rather the opposite is true; as is made clear by frantic efforts to increase population at the first sign of its tendential decline, by the fact that birth-control is made a crime, and by the maintenance of conditions that foster a vast increase of the impoverished masses. Conditions of misery for the masses are a prerequisite to the wealth and special social position of the ruling classes." - Paul Mattick, 1956
In India we have just seen the consequence of birth control campaign with deaths of ten women from botched operations. Unlike in Kerala that has a long experience of sterilisation of women after their second birth, some Indian states have rushed programmes where women are not consulted but bribed to submit and simply treated as a statistic.
ReplyDelete