MICHAEL BASSETT: ARE WE OUR BROTHERS' KEEPERS?

As I watched the latest stories on TV about malnourished children in Sudan, followed by similar accounts in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa, and then Afghanistan, I began wondering about our responsibilities for the gargantuan growth in the world’s population. I grew up in a family that was taught to worry about the world’s unfortunates. In the 1950s and 60s I helped with door-to-door collections of money for CORSO, a relief organisation at the time that also sponsored shipments of clothes to those less fortunate than ourselves. We also collected for UNICEF. This made me want to travel, and to see Africa. Sure, it wasn’t the only part of the world in need, but it seemed to be the place where there were the greatest problems.

As an MP I got to attend meetings of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, visiting Africa three times. I spent several weeks in Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, and South Africa looking around the countries, talking with people, especially politicians, as I tried to get a handle on their problems. Understanding South Africa wasn’t difficult: the small white minority had seemingly perfected a system for keeping themselves on top while the black and coloured majority was forced by the apartheid laws to accept a system of permanent poverty and inferiority. It couldn’t last, and finally the whites’ leadership released the African National Congress’ Nelson Mandela from captivity. An election involving all South Africans was held in 1994, and apartheid was officially abolished. 

In retrospect, that seems to have been the relatively easy part. South Africa’s population continues to rise rapidly and the ANC has gradually become a corrupt organisation desperately in need of new leadership. There is still plenty of poverty. But elsewhere in Africa the population accelerates much more rapidly. The continent had 481 million people in 1980. Today it has 1.36 billion, and that figure is projected almost to double by 2050. The fertility rate for women (the number of births per woman) in New Zealand is 1.7. For most African countries the fertility rate exceeds 4, and in parts it reaches 6 births per woman. While parts of Africa possess productive land and grow food in abundance, many other places lack the capacity to feed their burgeoning population and are reliant on aid from other parts of the world.

Why do so many agencies feel an obligation to support runaway birth rates? Starting well over a century ago, a majority in the western world worked out that controlling the number of children we produce made for much happier lives both for the children and for their parents. We know, too, that when parents are separated from a responsibility to look after the children they produce they tend to lose interest in their well-being, leading to educational problems and often to crime in later life. What makes anyone think that incentivising people anywhere else in the world to go on producing surplus children on an industrial scale will do other than produce these same outcomes? Crime and civil wars raged in Africa forty years ago; they plague the continent today.

We now know something that we didn’t half a century ago. Scientists tell us that climate warming is a man-made problem. If that is so, surely it makes sense to try to contain, preferably to reduce the number of people on earth? At the same time as international efforts are made to feed those who are starving, surely there ought also to be family planning schemes being promoted on a similar scale? It’s gone sixty years ago since the pill was first available. We endlessly debate the problems of methane produced by the animals we farm. What about the effects on climate produced by a couple of billion surplus people? Why does no international agency give this issue any publicity?

Surely, we owe it to our grandchildren to try seriously to reduce soaring temperatures which threaten their livelihoods, as well as those who live in currently over-populated parts of the world.