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Page added on March 16, 2012
Jeffrey Sachs: Population Controller?
In a March 1 op-ed in the Washington Post Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs made his pitch to be the next president of the World Bank promising to “lead the bank into a new era of problem-solving.” John Cavanaugh and Robin Broad have laid out a raft of righteous concerns about Sachs’s candidacy. The “solutions” Sachs proposes to poverty, they point out, can be summed up in the not very-new words: “aid” and “trade.” As if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s Sachs’s other favorite problem solver: population control. That’s taking us to a new era, alright: right back to the nineteenth century of Thomas Malthus.
Sachs presented five Reith lectures titled “Bursting at the Seams” in 2007. He reiterated the main points on population in an op-ed for CNN last October, to greet the globe’s seven-billionth inhabitant. “How can we enjoy sustainable development on a very crowded planet?” Asks Sachs. Two ways: the first requires a change of technologies and more global cooperation, he writes. The second is the stabilization of the global population. Developed world birth rates are down, he says, “The reduction of fertility rates should be encouraged in the poorer countries as well. Rapid and wholly voluntary reductions of fertility have been and can be achieved in poor countries.”
Given the options, Sachs’s same-old pro-privatization development policies will be greeted as enlightened, none so more than his position on “reducing fertility.” He’s not promoting mandatory sterilization, after all, and he’s in tune with a growing crowd that’s recycling old population myths for the new save-the-planet context. But smart people have been working for decades to delink poverty from population. At the 1994 UN Conference on Population and Development world leaders pressed by women’s groups agreed. As Radhika Balakrishnan, feminist economist, director of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers puts it, “how population behaves is more important than how it grows.”
Given global distribution and consumption patterns, one of Jeffrey Sachs’s children in the United States, for example, probably destroys more of the planet’s resources in a day than your average small African village.
At the Reith lectures, Sachs made clear that he won’t be proposing problem solving that affects his own ilk’s consumption habits. Quizzed about Western greed, he shot back: “I do not believe that the solution to this problem is a massive cutback of our consumption levels or our living standards. “ So it’s back to poor women and their kids.
Around the world, high-level women leaders including former presidents Michelle Bachelet (of Chile) and Mary Robinson (of Ireland) have launched an initiative to focus global attention on women’s expertise and leadership as regards Climate Change and development. Sachs’s focus on women as the “problem” takes us in exactly the opposite direction.
The sad thing is, thousands of genuine development experts were in town the week that Jeff Sachs’s Washington Post piece appeared. As he was basking in the media glow, they were enjoying no money media attention at all at the United Nations’ fifty-sixth Commission on the Status of Women.
MADRE convened a panel of sister organizations—represented by women whom executive director Yifat Susskind introduced as the “world’s foremost rural development experts.” Decide for yourself.
I had a chance to talk with Fatima Ahmed, director of Zenab for Women and Development in Sudan and Rose Cunningham, director of Wangki Tangni, an indigenous women’s group in Nicaragua. (I really, really encourage you to watch this video.)
Asked about the challenges they face, Ahmed and Cunningham talked about climate change, but they talked much more about soil erosion and deforestation driven by rapacious corporations. Top of their list of concerns were war, discrimination and the destruction of indigenous knowledge. Population comes up only in discussion of their communities’ tendency to share and—shock—help those in trouble. Afterall, development isn’t only about profits and resources, said Cunningham. “It’s also about people and animals.
Putting people first? Now that would really be a new era. How about a woman from the global South for World Bank president?
6 Comments on "Jeffrey Sachs: Population Controller?"
kervennic on Fri, 16th Mar 2012 11:48 pm
Who has made this contribution, there is no source.
It is not because Jeffrey sachs is an idiot that we have to follow his standard.
Overpopulation is an issue connected to western world industrial colonialism. Before, there was low density compare to europe in all these countries except for few naturally high food productive places.
If you fight western consummerism and not global overpopulation you solve no more the issue than if you try to solve overpopulation without solving mass industrialisation:
– Fast growing population are not bound to remain passively poor and they do join consumerism in mass, they provide the fresh blood of the global economy.
– Those who do not join the oil fuelled economy etensively start nonetheless to reach very high densities and without having large access to oil, they cannot afford eco conservation. The picture of Haiti and its ruined ecosystem is extreme but rather common: in third world country the toll of overpopulation is already obvious whereas it is hidden by oil use in our western country. In the end without wood in these countries you are bond to starve: we do not eat rice raw.
When oil will be gone, all forests will be cut in europe and US in a matter of 10 years or less., unless population collapses faster.
Actually those who think that overpopulation is merely a racist concern pointed at non western people are just being polemical: the concern is identical or even higher concerning netherlands, england or germany and all the countries that today import massively their food or which crop are 70´-80 % due to chemical fertilizer and oil products. These people have clearly no future.
This is clearly a lie to say we can go on conssumming in this fashion, but this is one also to pretend that without the actual oil powered economy we will be able to sustain ourselves without huge sacrifices and environemental damages.
There was no corporations in the middle east and man managed to turn it into a desert centuries ago, it would be useful to assess the exact damage of local use of wood and international economy before saying that once we remove international economy pressure (which i advocate 100 %), those people will be safe with the wood that is left.
I have doubts.
christian philip on Sat, 17th Mar 2012 12:45 am
you are a smart kervennic….and yet even u need to be told that it is too late for anything by a homeless failure like miself….enjoy cannibalism now, luckies!…should be tasty…
BillT on Sat, 17th Mar 2012 1:24 am
Well, we should start to cut population growth in the Us first. Since that 4% of the world population uses 30% of the world’s resources, a cut in population to about 14% or 50,000,000 people would be about right. Or we can cut the consumption of the 315 million Americans by 86% and accomplish the same thing. I think that is the direction the sheep are being driven at this time by their corporate masters. Wages are falling and purchasing power is dropping. A real inflation rate of 10%+ is a start.
As for cutting the population in other ‘poor’ countries. Good Luck! Here in the Philippines, population 90 million plus, and with a land mass the size of Florida, the Catholic Church is fighting family planning with every thing it has, even threatening the President of the country with Excommunication if he supports it.
SilentRunning on Sat, 17th Mar 2012 3:27 am
Population control is inevitable – the only question is: Will we do it humanely or let be cruel, vicious and inhumanely.
Organizations like the Catholic Church may not mean it, but they are ultimately fighting on the side of cruelty, viciousness and inhumanity.
Kenz300 on Sat, 17th Mar 2012 6:03 am
Every country currently solves its population and resource imbalance by exporting its people.
Every country needs to develop a plan to balance their own population, water, food, oil, resources and jobs. Endless population growth is not sustainable.
Andy on Sun, 18th Mar 2012 11:53 pm
This is Laura flanders blurb on Jeffery Sachs. She is correct that do not need a Neoliberal Chicago school extremist at World Bank.
But the population issue is a serious one and she omitted several facts so that the gullible readers were misled.
Asia and Africa are suffering from 730 million and 360 million births every decade. This kind of population explosion is catastrophic. There are already severe water and food shortages in Asia and Africa. China is diverting rivers from Tibet, Central Asia and North Asia for its water supply and agriculture.
Population explosion cannot be summed up in a catchy phrase “how population behaves is more important than how it grows” by elite professors who feed off middle class resources like parasites.
Has Balakrishnan changed her behavior? What is the square footage of her office? What is the square footage of her house? Has she gotten rid of her car and uses public transport? Has she forgone having kids to curb her consumption? Or is she a shameless hypocrite who teaches and preaches but does not practice?
Before quoting her Flanders did not do an Audit of Balakrishnan’s behavior before permitting her to lecture others. I looked at her picture and she needs to consume less calories and donate 90% of her wealth, not just salary, to charities in Africa. That will be a good start in changing “behavior”.
Population growth in Asia and Africa cannot be rubbished away and Flanders did not cite unsustainable “annual births” of these continents.
Look at Korea-Japan-Taiwan. They have attained advanced fertility of <1.3 children/woman. Now they are more self-reliant in food, energy and minerals. China and Thailand have also made some progress, but rest of Asia is still multiplying ad infinitum with severe water shortages.