| SAPLER Population Trust | |
| Splendidly Alive People Within Limited Environmental Resources | |
Part VII: University and Immediacy
We are being told by the departments of health and housing that all they can do is to make a start. In the area of family planning this would be both unnecessary and disastrous. Mauritius did not wait. We can reach everyone in South Africa and we can do it soon.
EnviroFeature - Reach Every South African
Anne Cluver Weinberg,
SAPLER, P 0 Box 51446,
Raedene 2124
When the world finally wakes up to the fact that the party is over, we will have to change. We can either change in the direction of powerfully armed groups taking over the few good remaining resources, or we can learn to problem-solve within our limits and all live not 'extravagantly luxurious' lives but 'splendidly alive' ones.
In thinking of our limits I find it helpful to think of islands. Not only have and plant life been extinguished on islands in distant time, but so too has Man.
Jonathan Kingdom, in his book, Self-made man and his undoing, writes: 'On most islands the sharp drop in resources meant a corresponding decline in population and the agents of that decline were often cruel. For some there was migration, for others starvation or cannibalism and warfare but most likely of all was poor health, disease and many deaths.
The stone Meal statues on barren Easter Island stand witness to the abundant energies of new colonists on a once-forested subtropical island. 'Their solitude on windswept steppelike slopes speaks of the consequences.'
Things not only go wrong on islands. but they can be seen going wrong. Mauritius may have achieved Zero Population Growth (ZPG) ten years ago partly because everyone sees the problems. Imagine four islands all relatively poor and on which populations have been growing too fast in relation to their resources. These islands are cut off from easy emigration by wild seas.
On each of these islands arrives a plane. bringing donor support. 'Me islanders are allowed to choose the kind of support they wish to have, but the amount of money the donors are prepared to spend is strictly limited. The first island chooses to spend its donor money on contraception for all'.
The second island is very impressed by the fifteen methods of contraception now available. We must have all fifteen methods for our people' they say. 'Everyone needs choice'. But the money is limited and the fifteen methods can only be offered to one r of the women.
The third island opts for 'literacy and housing', and soon everyone on this island lives in a brick house with a tile roof, and all the islanders have learnt to read and write.
The fourth island opts for 'development'. They have been shown ah the things money can buy - watches, radios, jewellery, fine clothes, etc. They will all be given jobs. Soon they are busy chopping down the forests and cattle are introduced for beef production.
Anyone who reads EnviroTeach knows that only the first island v\rid survive. They still have their resources, and they now have ZPG and so they can live within these resources. The second island fell for the dogma of the Planned Parenthood Association of South Africa.
In opting for,a perfect service'. they ensured that the majority of le did not get any family planning help at all. Planned Parenthood has one outreach project in Natal - but that's it! Unless they can give all fifteen methods and full counselling by experts, they will not give anything at ad. Even Dr Nafis Sadik, Executive Director of UNFPA, now talks about 'all developing countries having access to a full range of modem, safe and effective family planning services'.
On a dying planet. just as on those dying islands. this may just not be possible. This 'full range of methods' is a very recent luxury. In the 1950's I was offered only one method - and accepted it with much gratitude!
We are in a very strange situation in Africa, where the demand for family planning services has far outstripped the supply. Every newspaper from Malawi to Cape Town advocates 'environmental and population awareness', yet women who are suffering and dying and who want some form of family planning are not getting it.
The International Planned Parenthood Association did a survey in Africa some years ago which showed that 50 % of women regretted their last baby, and 75 % of women would like to prevent another one.
In South Africa there are estimated to be 200 000 illegal abortions a year. 4000 women are admitted to Baragwanath after Illegal abortions. 'These women wished very strongly not to have babies There must surely be at least another 200 000 women who have unwanted pregnancies but who do not have the courage to go for an illegal abortion.
'Development is the only answer'. Indeed! Well, two of my islands are now dead after talking the development route.
EnviroFeature
It's a nice fuzzy apple-pie word, which no-one bothers to define. I hear it used by extreme free-marketers who think that industrial growth will solve all problems, and by extreme socialists who want to built houses for everyone! But look at Venda, 'they say , 'Venda has no development and a very high population growth rate.'
There seems to me to be a fundamental error in this development' thesis. Countries or areas which have very 'high development' tend to be those who are doing very well. They have high everything. Their highly educated women have plenty of jobs to choose from. If the country as a whole is doing well then there is also surplus money for social services and these include family planning services.
The Population Development People tell me that research has shown the factors which lead to fertility decline: women's education, jobs, etc. They tell me how they are addressing these factors.
In the meantime I go out to Middelburg and find that all this has been stood on its head, for Middelburg the Nompilos, who have no education at all, are bringing down the birthrate very rapidly among their uneducated, jobless friends (See p 6).
In the book African Laughter, Doris Lessing writes about a degraded rural school. 7he headmaster is corrupt; the pupils are bored and disillusioned. So the teenage girls, and of whom are in high school and all of whom can read and write - are all pregnant!
It sometimes happens that, all sorts of other things been equal, women's education leads to population decline so Church ladies encouraged by the PDP are starting literacy classes, believing that they are thereby going to reduce the birthrate!
I am not knocking literacy classes.
SAPLER stands for: Splendidly Alive People within limited Environmental Resources.
We believe in quality lives for everyone in everyone having houses and education and happiness - and in the earth continuing to give us water and topsoil and air. But this is a different issue from rapidly reaching all women with family planning in a situation where high education and jobs for all are not immediate option.
SAPLER has a project called RESA - Reach Every South African. At the seen by the people doing the work, and moment this is still at its investigative stage and we are wide open to suggestions.
I like the idea of a non-medical project such as that which Peter Dodds initiated in Zimbabwe. This empowers local uneducated rural women, both in that it gives them jobs and in that it gives them control over their own fertility (See pp. 7-9). We have to account for all women in South Africa. We have to have an absolutely reliable supply scheme. All workers in the scheme have to be highly motivated.
Who would pay? We hear all the time of donors wanting to give money that will not be wasted. Maximum accountability and excellent results will bring the funds in.
It has been the experience of organisations such as Marie Stopes International that once family planning is introduced into an area, people will start to use it. If, after all this provision is available, people are still having too many children for the resources of the country then we can introduce population education alongside the provision. By then these same people will hopefully have been reached by other helpers offering sustainable agriculture, so they will appreciate the issues.
The winner of the recent schools debate on environment and population, at which Dr Motlana and I were judges, was Bongani Bingwa, of Suncrest high School. He made the point that communal farming schemes would be seen by the people doing the work, and so environmental improvements would not be an abstract thing.
John Ledger, of the Endangered Wildlife Trust, has also spoken to rural environmental schemes which are well understood by the people in the area. Maryna Clarke's Primary Health Care Literate' even when they cannot read and write.
So what we need now is 'contraception literate' grassroots people to fill in the many gaps left in South Africa's provision of family planning services.
By all means let us think holistically - let us for instance appreciate the role which can be played by ecological management. But when it comes to acting, let us each do what is appropriate in the circumstances.
Then we will see some development!
The following information on Mauritius is taken from People and the Planet Vol.3, No.3 1994.
In 1960 Professor Titmuss of the London School of Economics arrived in Mauritius to produce a report on social policies. What he found was sheer misery.
Before his arrival one of the worst cyclones of the century had ravaged this poor sugar island and aggravated the tremendous social and economic problems of its multi-ethnic population.
Despite the immediate concerns of poverty, health and inequality, the Titmuss report singled out the very rapid population growth of more than 3% per year as the greatest problem of this island with a population of 650 000.
A political consensus was reached that family planning was a national priority and it was supported by all religious groups, including the majority Hindu community, the Islamic community and the influential Roman Catholic Church.
By distinguishing between the objective need for family planning on the one hand, and the use of specific methods on the other, the Roman Catholic Church did not object to the government efforts and founded its own programme offering strictly natural methods.
The Mauritius population stopped growing at one million and has had zero population growth (ZPG) ever since. The reduction in fertility started before there was any economic growth - in fact during a stagnant economy and an declining per capita income.
During the 1960s about half the decline was due to a reduction in marital fertility; the other half resulted from increasing ages at marriage. Other aspects of social development, including an emphasis on female education, accompanied the family planning programme.
The original report tackled all aspects of possible development - tourism, industry and agriculture - with a tremendous emphasis on sustainability.
The result of all this is an educated population within an environment which is not deteriorating.
Dr N.J. van Rensburg states that one of the greatest problems faced by most family planning programmes throughout the world is that governments hesitate to intervene in good time in what is in fact the greatest threat to their people - the population explosion. Because ally only begin to take action when it is almost too late. This quotation from Lord Caradon's address in Tokyo in 1970 is also significant.
"First I take the issue of political responsibility. My experience as a politician is that you have to speak loudly to political leaders if you are to attract their attention.
"Any politician who claims to give leadership but who does not face up to the population problem, who does not take up a strong and definite position on it and who does not state an effective policy for this solution, is an impostor.
"I ask myself why we in Jamaica, where I was governor, were for so long so blind to the danger that rapid population growth would sweep away all our efforts to achieve economic development. Population control was an awkward, controversial and unpopular subject.
We took the line of least resistance. To invest, build and plant, those were our obsessions. We went fast, faster, thinking we were going ahead - but we were, in fact, running away from the real problem.
"The monster was not only gaining upon us; it caught up . No sooner had we built a new school than it was too small. It was not mainly a matter of how many children could be crowded in, but hoe many had to be shut out.
No sooner had we built a new hospital than there were 2,4 people waiting for every bed. Every agricultural project we started increased the clamour for more land settlement. New industries paying higher wages showed up the gulf between the favoured few and the discontented rest.
"Then the dreadful drift to the slums of our cities began where thousands of men, women and children lived in conditions of urban squalor, gained momentum.
"We see something like this going on in almost every developing country in the world.
"It finally dawned on us that if dealing with the problem of population was left too late, then all our economic and political achievements would be swept away like sand castles before the advancing tide."
Can South African political leaders also learn a clear lesson from experience?
Every year we put off tackling population growth in a direct way is a year lost to the RDP.
From the Jordaan book
"I have heard many men talk intelligently, even brilliantly about something, only to prove helpless when it comes to acting on what they believe. This need to act in time may point to the harshest single dilemma in our society. With many crucial problems, if action is delayed until its need is apparent to everyone it will be too late. To be evident to all, a danger must be top of us - out of hand in fact."
Bernard Baruch, adviser to presidents.