Abrupt as they may seem, recent changes to US aid policies are consistent with the neoliberal economic ideology long championed by many Republicans, and embraced by many Democrats, since the Reagan presidency. Family planning was one of its casualties, according to Colin Butler.

by Colin Butler

The re-election of US President Donald Trump appears to have ended the partial restraint of “tooth and claw” in international relations, evident since the end of World War II. But this is not the first time since 1945 that international relations have crossed a threshold, foreshadowing increasing disorder. In 1980, the election of US President Ronald Reagan was a triumph for neoliberalism, the movement to deregulate capitalism. It signified the end of the “warm decade for social justice”, which Halfdan Mahler (the longest-serving director the World Health Organization) had called the 1970s.¹ Mahler also noted that after the 1978 Alma-Ata conference (“Health for all by the year 2000”), when “everything seemed possible” there came “an abrupt reversal”. This reversal soon extended to global thinking on rapid population growth and its relationship with development and conflict.

According to one scholar,² the US government had incorporated Malthusian concerns ever since the Truman administration’s “Point Four” foreign aid program, which posited that population growth-induced resource scarcity bred Communism. In 1969, US President Richard Nixon called population growth “one of the most serious challenges to human destiny in the last third of this century”.³ In 1971 a committee of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) published a report concluding that “political and social conflicts” are “greatly worsened by rapid population growth”.⁴

Long after Nixon resigned, he wrote: “countries such as Mozambique, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Somalia will need to maintain real economic growth rates greater than 3% just to keep their per capita incomes from dropping. Unchecked population growth will put them on an ever-accelerating treadmill that will outpace any potential economic performance”.⁵

In a debate prior to the 1984 US presidential election, both President Reagan and his Democratic opponent Walter Mondale showed insight into these issues. Reagan signalled his government’s about-face on family planning by stating: “as a matter of fact the population explosion, if you look at the actual figures, has been vastly exaggerated – over-exaggerated.” Yet, he also noted “the problem of population growth is one here with regard to our immigration. And we have been the safety valve, whether we wanted to or not, with the illegal entry here; in Mexico, where their population is increasing and they don’t have an economy that can absorb them and provide the jobs.” Mondale argued: “One of the biggest problems today is that the countries to our south are so desperately poor that these people who will almost lose their lives if they don’t come north, come north despite all the risks.”⁶

During the Reagan administration a report was commissioned to update the 1971 NAS assessment. It was co-chaired by D. Gale Johnson and Ronald Lee. Published in 1986, this report⁷ is far more circumspect than the earlier one. However, while silent on the risk of conflict, it does note that “an increase in fertility will, at least in the short run, shift income from landless workers to owners of land and capital. This shift will tend to increase both the number of people who are poor (defined in absolute income terms) and the degree of income inequality in the society.” However, unlike the earlier NAS report, this report lacked statements unequivocally concluding that rapid population growth harms society. It implicitly characterises the 1971 report as “extreme”, asserting such views have “little support”.

Johnson was a “cornucopian”. For example, in 2000 he published an article which claimed that “the creation of knowledge” enabled “the world to escape from what could be called the Malthusian trap”.⁸ Interestingly, Johnson did not discuss the then recent (1994) genocide in Rwanda, which the economists Andre and Platteau called a “Malthusian trap”.⁹

Cornucopianism – the conceit that ingenuity will perpetually trump resource scarcity – was excessively influential in the 1986 report. For example, 12 of its 217 references were either to Julian Simon (a proselytiser of cornucopianism) or to chapters in his co-edited book The Resourceful Earth: A Response to Global 2000.^{10, 11} Simon made statements such as “supplies of natural resources are not limited in any economic sense. Nor does past experience give reason to expect natural resources to become more scarce. Rather, if history is any guide, natural resources will progressively become less costly, hence less scarce, and will constitute a smaller proportion of our expenses in future years.”¹²

During the Reagan administration, the official US position on population growth altered radically. Finkle and Crane noted that the US position at the United Nations’ 1984 Mexico City population conference “seemed to challenge some of the basic assumptions underlying national and international population programs. Replacing the previous emphasis on the need for vigorous government programs to reduce the rate of population growth, the new US position asserted in a formal policy statement that “population growth is, of itself, a neutral phenomenon.” The statement further contended that developing countries experiencing population pressures should reduce government interference in their economies in order to promote economic growth and thereby reduce fertility.”¹³ Finkle and Crane also noted that the Population Association of America, representing US demographers and population specialists, commented that the authors of the draft US report for this 1984 meeting were “either unaware of 50 years of demographic research, or deliberately ignored it”. In the US, 245 editorials were published about this, of which fewer than 40 supported the government position.¹³

What caused this shift? Perhaps the view that an indefinitely poor global South (kept poor in part by tabooing the topic of population growth and its relationship to development, and thus undermining family planning programs) would increase labour forces and depress wages in the South, maximising cheap resource extraction and material consumption by neoliberalism’s “winners”. The Marxist scholar Joan Robinson lends support to this view. In the preface to her book Essay on Marxian Economics she wrote: “In his anxiety to combat the reactionary views of Malthus he [i.e. Marx] refused to admit that a rapid growth of population is deleterious to the interests of the working class.”¹⁴ The late ecological economist Herman Daly cited Robinson and remarked that the literal Latin meaning of ‘proletariat’ is ‘those with many offspring’; “the lowest class of a people, whose members, poor and exempt from taxes, were useful to the republic only for the procreation of children”.¹⁵

Maurice King, the leading proponent in public health scholarship of the concept of “demographic entrapment,”¹⁶ identified the risk to capitalism as an especially important reason for suppressing the harm to human wellbeing from rapid population growth. He wrote that lifting the taboo on the discussion of population growth risked “the economic foundations of the global society, its materialist, consumerist, market economy, driven by the diabolical processes of advertising to promote ever more luxurious and unsustainable lifestyles.” ¹⁷

The US administration of Donald Trump is clearly uninterested in global development. It has slashed the budget for USAID. The tabooing and suppression of the relationship between rapid population growth and perpetuating poverty,¹⁸ which took hold in the 1980s, was a more subtle manifestation of this disinterest. The schism between those who advocate human rights-based family planning in the South¹⁹ and those on the Left who harshly criticize such advocacy²⁰ is a trap set by neoliberalism. Releasing this trap is long overdue.

Colin Butler is Honorary Professor at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health and the Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

References

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