Population control: The real culprits and
victims
Walden Bello
Sahelian famines
revisited
The foregoing comments are meant to place the
environmental impact of population growth in the
South in proper perspective, not to dismiss it as a
factor in environmental decline. But in examining
this relationship, one must avoid simplistic
analyses and solutions like having contraceptives
and vasectomies 'go with the groceries'.
The famines in the Sahel, for instance, are
attributed by Hardin and Fletcher to population
pressure on resources and the environment.
According to proponents of this view, this took the
form of smallholder grazing and farming practices
that were baring the soils and causing persistent
drought. More recent research, however, has cast
doubt on the centrality of the role of smallholder
farming and tumed investigators 'towards the likely
role of global climatic influences on African
rainfall, given our growing understanding of the
interconnections between regional weather
systems.'
Moreover, a greater appreciation has been shown
for the crucial role of factors aside from
population pressure or global climate change. The
Brundtland Commission perhaps best sums up the
current consensus on the complex causes of the
African famines:
'Triggered by drought, (their) real causes lie
deeper. They are found in part in national policies
that gave too little attention, too late, to the
needs of smallholder agriculture and to the threats
posed by rapidly rising populations. Their roots
extend to a global economic system that takes more
out of a poor continent than it puts in. Debts that
they cannot pay force African nations relying on
commodity sales to overuse their fragile soils,
thus tuming good land to desert. Trade barriers in
the wealthy nations - and in many developing ones -
make it hard for Africans to sell their goods for a
reasonable return, putting yet more pressure on
ecological systems.'
One must add to this complex of cause the
widespread wars and civil conflicts triggered by
the region's becoming an arena of conflict between
the superpowers, the emergence and consolidation of
dictatorships that used foreign support to repress
their enemies and maintain highly unequal economic
structures, and the spread of export agriculture at
the expense of smallholder subsistence
agriculture.
The contribution to the famines of the spread of
large-scale export agriculture, which has been
promoted as a strategy of development by the World
Bank and other Western agencies, cannot be
underestimated. As John Prendergast has written,
'This pattem of agriculture has contributed to
chronic food shortages. It has also been associated
with environmental degradation deforestation,
declining soil fertility, and increasingly
irregular pattems of precipitation.'
Moreover, most foreign exchange earnings from
export agriculture have been used, not to purchase
food or promote sustainable agriculture, but to buy
weapons and service debt.
The emphasis on export agriculture created
surreal scenarios: During the famine of 1984-85,
which killed one million people, Ethiopia was
exporting green beans to England. In 1989, despite
the continuing threat of famine in certain parts of
the country, the government of Sudan sold 400,000
tons of sorghum to the European Community, in
exchange for animal feed.
It is irresponsible to address such complex
situations as the Sahelian famines with demagogical
slogans like 'With the groceries must go
vasectomies,' which are not only simplistic, but
appeal to racist images of the coloured peoples of
the South breeding like rabbits.
The complex causes of famine demand
sophisticated, cooperative approaches:
- For instance, the likely role of global
warrning makes people in the North both part of
the problem and part of the solution to African
famine.
- Curbing the export to Africa by Northern
agencies of wrongheaded development strategies
like a focus on export agriculture is a
responsibility not only of people in Africa but
also people in the North.
- Ending the debt crisis in Africa by
forgiving Africa's debt to both official
international agencies and private banks and
overhauling the intemational trading system to
make it more equitable for Africa can only be
brought about by an intemational partnership of
people in the North and in Africa.
- And the tragedy of Somalia, where a massive
supply of US and Soviet arms has played a
central role in creating hunger, underlines the
critical role of Northem citizen pressure in
eliminating the massive arms transfers to
repressive governments that have blocked the
Sahelian peoples' efforts to prevent famine and
ecological degradation by eliminating the
poverty and social inequality that breed
them.
Walden Bello, executive director of the San
Francisco-based Institute for Food and Development
Policy (Food First), is the author of the recently
published People and Power in the Pacific: The
Struggle for the Post-Cold War Order (London:Pluto
Press, 1992) and Brave New Third World: Strategies
for Suvival in the Global Economy (London:
Earthscan, 1990).
Source: Walden Bello, 'Population control: The
real culprits and victims', Third World
Resurgence, No. 33, May 1993, pp. 11-14.
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