The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (40 page)

W
hich brings us back to where we started. Almost a half century after the great cold war population panic, the ghost of Thomas Robert Malthus once again hovers over the planet. For years, talk of too rapid population growth has been politically incorrect both on the feminist left and on the socially conservative right, but the issue is poised to reappear.

The year 2008 saw food riots in at least a dozen countries, including Egypt, Mexico, Haiti, Indonesia, and Senegal. The price of rice had doubled within four months, even as the costs of other kinds of foods continued a steady climb. In the previous five years world prices for corn and wheat had doubled, as did prices for chicken, while the cost of butter and milk had tripled.
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Experts warned of widespread hunger and political instability. It was as if all the disasters the Malthusians predicted in the 1960s and 1970s were on the horizon, only a few decades behind schedule. After many years in which caloric abundance seemed the new norm, food was becoming a bit like other coveted energy resources, an ever scarcer commodity in an insatiable global marketplace. The future of food prices, said John Bongaarts, vice president of the Population Council, are “on a long-term upward curve with an occasional spike.”

Water shortages loomed as well. At the World Economic Forum the chairman of Dow Chemical called H
₂
O “the oil of this century.”
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The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that by 2020 between 75 and 250 million people would be “exposed to increased water stress.”
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And decreased supplies of fresh water would further threaten food production.

The world’s resources appeared overtaxed. Suddenly, people in the big international institutions and aid agencies started talking about population with more urgency than they had in years. Steven Sinding, the former head of both the International Planned Parenthood Federation and of the population division at USAID, saw a real possibility that family planning and reproductive health would soon see a higher priority in aid budgets. “Even in Europe there’s more of a discussion about these issues today than there was two or three years ago,” he said.

Meanwhile, there’s been renewed interest in the national security implications of population growth. In April 2008, CIA director Michael V. Hayden gave a lecture at Kansas State University in which he spoke of the profound geopolitical significance of demographics. “Today, there are 6.7 billion people sharing the planet,” he said. “By midcentury, the best estimates point to a world population of more than 9 billion. That’s a 40 to 45 percent increase—striking enough—but most of that growth is almost certain to occur in countries least able to sustain it, and that will create a situation that will likely fuel instability and extremism—not just in those areas, but beyond them as well.”
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As concern about escalating human numbers moves back into the mainstream, it could be that the entire cycle of the population movement is about to replay itself. “We’re going to see all the same debates as we saw before,” Sinding said. “But can we proceed more intelligently this time around, on the basis of what we have learned about those debates?”

For global women’s rights activists, the reemergence of the population question might seem like a defeat, a return to a discourse in which women’s welfare is seen as merely instrumental. But it can also be an opportunity, if it’s used to force the world to pay attention to reproductive justice. An unhappy lesson of the last few decades is that men in power will rarely work to advance women’s rights for their own sake, but they will do so in the service of some other grand objective, be it demographic or economic. One can decry this reality and try to change it, while also taking advantage of it.

We met Sara Seims in chapter 2, when she was working for USAID in Africa and was troubled by population programs that neglected other aspects of women’s health. Now she’s the director of the population program at the Hewlett Foundation, overseeing a $60 million budget. Her primary concern has always been to use population initiatives to help improve women’s lives. With anxiety about population on the upswing, she sees a renewed opportunity to get development economists and government ministers to take reproductive rights seriously. “If we can help them with a framework where they can better understand how the status and role of women is so fundamentally connected with issues like food security, like education, like breaking through the poverty trap, then I’m more optimistic that we can get the resources to help women,” she said.

There’s a danger, in talking about demographics, of appearing to blame the world’s problems on the fecundity of poor women. The escalating food shortages of 2008, for example, were attributable more to overconsumption in the rich world than to overpopulation in developing countries. High energy prices both drove up agricultural production costs and encouraged the diversion of crops into biofuels—in the United States, as much as a third of the corn harvest went to ethanol production.
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Meat consumption remained high in the United States, while it grew in Asia, which meant that more grain was being used for livestock feed. Global warming, a phenomenon that is largely the fault of industrialized countries, disrupted ecosystems.

To say that poor countries aren’t responsible for resource scarcity, though, doesn’t change the fact that it is going to make it even more difficult for them to absorb millions of new people. Despite falling fertility rates in many parts of the world, the global population is still increasing by seventy-eight million people a year, and will probably keep growing by seventy or seventy-five million a year through 2020.
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Almost all of that growth will be in third world cities—or, rather, in the slums of third world cities.
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To feed all these new people will require some combination of major lifestyle changes in the developed world, a new green revolution to increase global agricultural productivity, and the transformation of some of the world’s remaining forests into farmland. The first will be excruciatingly difficult but can be done with enough political will; the second, no one can guarantee; and the third will have harmful environmental impacts that could, among other things, eventually negatively affect the food supply.

Nor is food the only problem. “You can’t escape when you go and you look at schools and you see these masses of little kids just desperate for an education, and there’s even larger numbers waiting at the door to get in,” said Seims. “You just can’t help but make that connection. I’m seeing more statements come out from African finance ministers that are connecting their efforts on poverty alleviation and economic growth to population growth.”

Malthusian pessimists, of course, have in the past been humiliated by history, and perhaps new innovations will come and, once again, erase any memory of scarcity, at least in the first world. Still, the future of humanity should not be staked on hope alone.

We face a range of possible demographic futures, and global policies will help determine which one comes to pass. The United Nations has created several forecasts of what the world’s population is going to look like in 2050. In the medium variant, which assumes that fertility rates decline to just over 2 children per woman by 2050, the population will reach 9.2 billion. If fertility remains half a child higher, there will be 10.8 billion people in the world by 2050. Half a child lower, and there will be 7.8 billion.
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A massive investment in women’s education, birth control access, and income generation would lessen the danger that the world’s population would outstrip the planet’s resources. Efforts to simply help women have the number of children that they want would make a huge difference. In some very poor areas women desire large families—in Niger, for example, surveys show that they want an average of seven children.
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But data from others show a wish to limit fertility, coupled with an inability to do so.

In developing countries overall, 15 percent of married women and 7 percent of unmarried women have what researchers call an unmet need for contraception, meaning that they are sexually active, do not want to become pregnant, and yet are not using birth control. In sub-Saharan Africa, the number of married women with an unmet need for contraception is 24 percent.
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Women in a great many places are having more children than they say they want. According to a Guttmacher Institute paper, more than 40 percent of recent births were unwanted in all Latin American countries except Guatemala (where the number was 29 percent), as well as in the African nations of Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, and Togo. The actual number of unwanted pregnancies is even higher, since it includes those that end in abortion.
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Seims said that in some ways contraceptive access is worse now than it was when she entered the field in 1979. “In the last year I have visited clinics in major capital cities, including places like Jo’burg [Johannesburg] and Nairobi, and they don’t have the full array of methods,” she said. “If the situation is dire in Nairobi, what on earth is it like in Kisumu and Mombassa and these other towns that are growing very rapidly?” When she entered the field, she said, “[USAID] was vibrant and strong and in the middle of things.” Working for the agency in Senegal, she could get whatever she needed. The Centers for Disease Control was skilled in managing supplies and logistics. “Those resources aren’t available anymore,” she said. “They’ve been allowed to deteriorate as the politics have become so much worse over time.”

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reinvestment in such resources would pay multiple dividends. If the danger of overpopulation turns out to be overstated, programs to educate girls and give women choices about their family size would still advance the causes of social justice, public health, and human development.

In a perfect world the prospect of Malthusian doom would not be required to make international institutions take women’s needs seriously. Still, it is heartening to see so many areas where the interests of feminists, environmentalists, economists, and development bureaucrats overlap. They coincide because there is no force for good on the planet as powerful as the liberation of women.

There are also few things as radical. The history of our species is, by and large, a history of male domination. The subordination of women, and their reduction to their reproductive function, has been such a constant that it can appear somehow normal and right, while the upending of old roles seems to cause a disorientating chaos. All over the planet people are reacting to the confusing, bumptious world wrought by globalization by clinging ever more tightly to tradition, or to the illusion of tradition. Emancipated women become a symbol of everything maddening and unmooring about modernity. To tame them seems a first step to taming an unruly world.

But the oppression of women doesn’t create order; it creates profound social deformities. It is universal the way violence is universal; both are atavisms that successful societies must contain and transcend. Liberty, ultimately, is something women in every society will have to win for themselves. It cannot be bequeathed by donors or mandated by treaties or courts. It can, however, be either supported or thwarted by international forces, which is why we all share some responsibility, some stake. Women’s rights alone will not solve our massive problems, but none of them can be solved unless women are free.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Throughout the writing of this book, so many people all over the world helped me in so many crucial ways. Indeed, in trying to thank them here, I’m slightly terrified that I’m going to unintentionally leave out people who are deserving of my profuse and public gratitude. Nevertheless, here goes:

Thank you, first of all, to the extraordinary women in Latin America, Africa, India, Europe, and the United States who shared the intimate details of their lives with me and who astonished and inspired me with their strength. Thank you particularly to Manju Rani, whose name doesn’t appear in this book but who did much to help me understand the situation of women in Haryana, as well as to Sunita Rajput, Lydia Mungherera, Esther Kalule, and Agnes Pareyio, Anne K., and Alicja Tysiąc.

Thank you to the many experts and activists who were so generous with their time, insights, and contacts, including, in no particular order, Frances Kissling, Marta María Blandón, Manmohan Sharma, Eunice Brookman-Amissah, Adrienne Germain, Joan Dunlop, Rei Ravenholt, Sandra Kabir, Nafis Sadik, Saba Kidanemariam, Stirling Scruggs, Ranjana Kumari, Hellen Masama, Sanda Ojiambo, Ligia Altamirano, Ena Singh, Agnieszka Graff, Marianne Møllmann, Kirsten Sherk, Abubakar Dungus, Sharon Camp, Elizabeth Westley, Ravinder Kaur, Ellen Chesler, Wanda Nowicka, Saroj Pachauri, Malcolm Potts, Puneet Bedi, John Bongaarts, Taina Bien-Aimé, Steven Sinding, Sara Seims, Antonie DeJong, Karen Kampwirth, and Wendy Chavkin. Thank you also to my virtual colleagues, the members of the WAM! listserv, who constantly came through with leads, advice, and encouragement.

Thank you to my friends and relatives who read various sections of the manuscript and offered enormously helpful suggestions, including Cassi Feldman, Rick Perlstein, Beth Frederick, and my father, Gerald Goldberg.

Thank you to my amazing on-the-ground fixers and translators—really colleagues and coreporters—including Eliette Cabezas, Anne Christian Largaespada Fredersdorff, Shaikh Azizur Rahman, and Dominika Suwik. Thank you to Nicole Lisa for her work translating documents, and to my friend Jessica Heyman for translating e-mails.