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Population Control

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 10 months ago

From: Dave Finnigan

To: ClimateConcern@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2007 3:16:00 PM

Subject: CCG

Population Control - What has worked and why

 

Population control is feasible, but we need to look at the successes and failures of the past for guidance. Following is my story as a public health practitioner and a student of demography. Once I get your responses I'll give you my considered thoughts on where we go next.

From 1967 to 1976, I was fortunate to work as a consultant in two countries where the governments used voluntary programs and succeeded in drastically reducing population growth with some measure of assistance from the international community. These were South Korea and Taiwan (although Taiwan is not literally a country, but a province of China). Our achievement is best measured by the Total Fertility Rate or Live births per average woman in her reproductive lifetime. In South Korea and Taiwan we took the TFR from above 4, which implies doubling every 23 years, to 2, which is replacement level, in a generation. In each country it is now well below replacement level. We did this through massive intervention as I will explain below. I then worked in one country where we failed miserably to achieve the desired fertility reductions, the Philippines, and I can tell you why we failed. The picture is not pretty.

 

In each country I served formally as the Information, Education and Communication Consultant to the Ministry of Health, Family Planning Division. In each country I also served informally as a consultant to the Ministry of Education, where I helped with curriculum design. We succeeded in Korea and Taiwan because there was a strong government push for reduced fertility and we were able to communicate this mind-set to every citizen, including school children and young adults, grown-ups of child-bearing age, and elders. Everyone could look around their peninsula or island and say, "This is enough."

 

In Korea and Taiwan there was first a trust in centralized government and in the top down process of distributing government largesse. This is an artifact of the Confucian system of respect for the hierarchy. The central government, the provincial government, the county and township and village governments were all saying the same thing. There was no organized opposition from any religious organization and there was no ethnic minority saying, "we are being outbred." Children were surviving at an unprecedented rate, and economies were in transition as people left the countryside where child labor was a plus, for the city where children were a financial burden. Education was free through middle school and everyone stayed in school as long as the family could afford.

 

The message was clear and repeated in road signs, in pamphlets, in curriculum and on radio and TV - "Girls and Boys are Equal, Two is Enough!" This was a really powerful and shocking statement, putting the word "Girls" in front of "Boys" and saying something so patently unsupported by historical observation, that two children would be enough. The shocking statements were explained by government officials and university professors and other respected leaders telling the media that in the new era you did not need 3 or 4 boys to continue the family name, and to bring the family into the modern era, that improvements in health care and opportunities for education made the two child family viable, and that the land and the economy could support those two children, but not three or more. There were no restrictions against birth control or abortion in either country.

After my success in Korea and Taiwan I was identified as a person who could help other countries through the demographic transition, and I was invited by the Philippine government to serve in a similar advisory capacity, from 1971. Upon arrival in the Philippines I was asked by Dr. Conrado Lorenzo, Director of the Population Commission (PopCom) to report on how the experience of Korea and Taiwan might help the Philippines.

 

Unstated in this request was the implicit understanding that there was about $50,000,000 in immediately available foreign aid that could be gotten to support a plan that would have the same effect in the Philippines as we had in Korea and Taiwan. He wanted to train doctors and open clinics.

 

My report to the Population Commission was not well received. In the Philippines I was able to find 13 factors that mitigated against any such success. The government of Ferdinand Marcos was not universally trusted at every level. There were over 100

separate languages that were coded by the Census Bureau and many of these linguistic subgoups were afraid of being "outbred" by the others, particularly the politically dominant Tagalogs, who were not the numerical majority.

 

The Catholic Church was against the program, as was the most vociferous non-Catholic sect, the Iglesia ni Cristo, which was afraid of being outbred by the Catholics. Child mortality was high, health care was poor in the rural areas and the city slums, the gap between the rich and the poor was growing, there were few alternative roles for women besides wife and mother, and everyone had a relative in the US or knew someone who had a relative in the US, so they felt there was a place to send their excess children.

 

There was little access to any birth control except the rhythm method, and abortion was absolutely illegal. The PopCom clinics did prescribe pills and insert IUDs but th Church fought this movement through their Responsible Parenthood Council. Free education stopped before 6th grade for most, illiteracy was rampant, rural development was underfunded meaning no lights in the village, there was no adequate social welfare system to help those who did not have large families to support destitute citizens, basically life was a lottery and the more tickets you bought (children) the more likely you were to succeed.

Most telling were the responses in Knowledge, Attitude and Practice surveys in the three countries. In Korea and Taiwan most people automatically listed the keys to success in the following order:

 

1. Hard work

2. Education

3. Contacts (mostly school alumni)

4. Family

5. Luck

 

Filipinos usually ranked the steps to success in the following order:

 

1. Luck

2. Family

3. Contacts (mostly under the table or overseas)

4. Education

5. Hard work

 

My report concluded that until the society changed in every way, money sunk into family planning programs would be entirely wasted. That was not what the Popcom wanted to hear, and I was marginalized after that report came out.

 

In the mid 1960s when I started work in Asia, South Korea and the Philippines had about the same population, about 30,000,000 and had about the same per capita income, around $1,200 per year.

According to the Population Reference Bureau South Korea in mid 2006 had a

population of 48,500,000 and a per capita GDP of $21,800, and a TFR of 1.1, implying a population that will eventually fall by 2050 to 42,000,000, a population size which we may assume can be sustained at a high level of economic and social development indefinitely. South Korea has become a Developed Country.

The Philippines in mid 2006 had a population of 86,000,000 and a per capita GDP of

$5,000, which is very poorly distributed, a TFR of 3.8, implying a population that will rise by 2050 to 142,000,000. The Philippines has become, in my estimation, a "Never to be Developed Country."

 

Ross, your statement on China was incorrect. China has succeeded brilliantly in reducing fertility in a single generation through the One Child policy. Any growth we have seen is through the momentum built up because of the size of the child-bearing cohort when the policy was introduced. Even if a billion people only have a billion children, that is 2 billion people. China's TFR is now 1.6. Their population is now 1,300,000,000 and will not go > much over 1,400,000,000 by mid-century. They are riding the boom of decreased dependency ratio. In the long term it is the dependency ratio that will determine a country's fate, since every added dependent above one or two is a drain on the family and on society. China is already importing Filipinos and Vietnamese to work in their factories.

 

With this information as a basis, can we begin to talk about effective means for solving the ongoing world population crisis? According to Population Reference Bureau the Less Developed World (without China) has a 2006 population of 4,028,000,000, growing at a TFR of 3.4, with a projection in 2050 of 6,545,000,000. That is 2,507,000,000 added mouths to feed in a world that is growing less food, catching less fish, increasing the size of deserts, losing entire fresh water sources, depleting ground water, becoming far more polluted and on the brink of swift ecological decline through global warming.

 

Population is still the number one problem on Earth, since all other problems stem from the fact that there are just too many of us humans, and everyone wants the American lifestyle. As Paul Ehrlich and Kingsley Davis said, "Nature will take care of that problem in time."

So how do we proceed?

 

Dave Finnigan

 

posted to ClimateConcern

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