Editor's Choice: January 15, 1999

The Debate About Population Growth

In our opening Editor's Choice column, we promised that we would devote some time to illustrating how cultural anthropology relates to contemporary concerns. The1998 meeting of the American Anthropological Association offers a good opportunity. At the meeting there was a session devoted to the so-called population problem, a session reported in the December 9, 1998 issue of the New York Times under the headline "Will Humans Overwhelm the Earth? The Debate Goes on," by Malcolm W. Browne.  I won't dwell on my largely negative reaction to the article (it focused on comments by a microbiologist and an epidemiologist, and is available for $2.50 at the New York Times Archives), but it clearly emphasized a perspective that views population growth as a major threat to global well-being. But is it? Or does the population scare represent a way of diverting attention from the real roots of such global problems as hunger, poverty, environmental destruction, disease, and social unrest? Let's see what anthropology and the Internet can tell us.

There is one thing that people do agree about; population has soared over the past 50 years. in 1950 the global population stood at just over 2,530,000,000. You can find out what it is right now by clicking here or here. However, the questions of why it has grown and what affects it has had on the world has been the subject of bitter debate for two hundred years.

On the one hand there are the Malthusians or neo-Malthusians who feel that population growth is the most severe problem facing the world; for them population growth is the root cause of hunger, poverty, environmental destruction, disease and social unrest. Furthermore, it is population growth in the poor nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America that is the greatest threat. If you're looking on the Internet, you can find examples of this viewpoint at The International Society of Malthus (see e.g. the pages on Principals of Malthusian and Neo-Malthusian Theory) and at the Population Institute (e.g. see their report 1998 World Population Overview and Outlook 1999).

On the other hand, there are those (revisionists is one term used to describe them, Marxists another) who claim that the Malthusians, by blaming or scapegoating the victims of global problems, are masking their real causes, among which is increasing industrialization and the spread of global capitalism. You can find a good expression of this perspective and a critique of Malthusian theory in an entertaining article by Steve Weissman, Marx and Engels on the Population Bomb.  Others claim there is a racist and imperialist motivation behind Malthusian alarms, an argument you can find expressed at the X-Files.

The position one takes on population is critical for virtually everything else one thinks about global issues. If by reducing population growth we can solve the world's problems, then, obviously we must work at it. However, if population growth is not the major problem, then we must put our energies to finding out their real sources.

There is little doubt, as the New York Times report on the American Anthropological Association session on population indicates, that the Malthusian position dominates the public debate about global population growth. In his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population,  Reverend Thomas Malthus outlined his now famous argument that while population "increases in a geometrical ratio," the resources for survival, primarily food, "increases only in an arithmetical ratio." Consequently, unless "population checks" (war, famine, etc.) kept population growth down, he argued, the world would soon run out of food.   Malthus of course was wrong; new agricultural techniques have continued to allow us to produce more food. But, some claim that we are rapidly running out of time and space, and that the "population explosion," as Paul and Ann Erlich called it, has already resulted in hunger, poverty, environmental devastation, and violent conflict. Others, however, claim that Malthusians have still got it wrong; that the causes of these problems have little to do with population growth and everything to do with industrialization and the global expansion of capitalism. How can we resolve this debate?

A question that anthropologists ask about beliefs, even scientific theories, is what social interest or purpose do they serve? In the case of population arguments, we can ask whether Malthusian arguments mask other concerns or social interests? After all, population growth was not for Thomas Malthus the primary issue; he was concerned with the rising number of poor and destitute in England in the eighteenth century assuming that if people were poor, it was because there were too many of them. It was the poor who were at fault for their condition, and if the poor stopped reproducing, there would be fewer of them. Malthus's logic remains at the heart of Malthusian concerns.  For example, last year the Sierra Club, one of the foremost environmental groups in the world, voted on a resolution that the group would oppose immigration to the United States, because the increased population that migrants represented would result in increased damage to the environment. On the surface the argument is ludicrous; poor migrants do not buy $30,000 utility vehicles that presently represent almost half the automobiles purchased in the U.S. and that are not subject to the environmental restrictions of other automobiles, and that are the prime reason for the recent increase in hydrocarbon gases in the U.S. The resolution was defeated, but it almost split the organization. Anouk Ride provides a good summary of how and why immigrants have been demonized in her article, Maps Myths and Migrants.  

Malthusians trend to ignore overconsumption as a cause of global problems, particularly environmental devastation.  Yet it should be obvious that the consumption habits of the wealthy countries are the prime cause of environmental problems.  Because of our level of consumption, the average American child will do twice the environmental damage of a Swedish child, three times that of an Italian child, thirteen times that of a Brazilian child, thirty-five times that of an Indian child, and 280 times that of a Chadian or Haitian child. Francisco J. Mata and Larry J. Onisto in their paper, Consumption: the other side of population for development, suggest that population figures must be adjusted according to the consumption rate of the population.  Thus a country with a relatively low population, but with high consumption rates, may have a greater negative impact on the environment than a country with high population, but low consumption rates.  They find, for example, that Canada, with only four percent of the actual population of India, has the same consumption-adjusted population.  And the consumption-adjusted population of the United States is more than twice that of China.

Then there is the classic Malthusian argument that population growth is responsible for world hunger. This argument tends to be accepted even by reputable scientists. Yet in making this argument, we forget that food is a commodity, and, like any other commodity, will be produced only if there are people to buy it. Furthermore, what is produced will depend on what people with money want to buy. Thus ranchers in poor countries devote millions of acres to pasture to grow beef--an incredibly inefficient use of land, water, and energy--that people in wealthy countries want to buy, but which people in their own country can't afford. People go hungry, as Nobel Prizing winning economist Amarya Sen argues, not because of a lack of food, but because they don't have the means to pay for it. Sen summarizes the book written with Jean Druze, Hunger and Public Action, in his Arturo Tanco Memorial Lecture, Public Action to Remedy Hunger. You can find also an excellent summary of the food and population issue in a brief article by John Gillott, Too Many People?

Does this mean that we should not be concerned with population issues? Not necessarily; there are some benefits for people, particularly women, in smaller families. Increasing the space between births has health benefits for both women and children, and research suggests that women in smaller families have greater access to education. But we have to be very careful about accepting at face value arguments that population growth among the poor is endangering the planet when that argument diverts attention from the destructive habits of the rich. This caution is not new; anthropologist Steven Polgar made it in the 1970s. But as the session at the American Anthropological Associations meetings and the New York Times account of it   indicates, it is a caution that is too frequently ignored.

You can find more Internet resources on population growth at my Website, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism at the population resources page.

I'd appreciate your comments; you can reach me at robbinrh@splava.cc.plattsburgh.edu