| SAPLER Population Trust | |
| Splendidly Alive People Within Limited Environmental Resources | |
SAPLER believes that there really is something we ought to be debating. However, our point of view has been consistently ignored in the 'Summary of Replies to the Green Paper' and subsequent documents.
THE DEBATE: Should South Africa spend additional funds on 'Universal Development' or should we be spending this money very specifically on reaching every South African with the means to plan a family?
UNIVERSAL DEVELOPMENT
versus
UNIVERSAL FAMILY PLANNING
Our point of view is of course that the one is possible and the other is not. We already have departments of water and education and agriculture which are doing their specific types of 'development'. What is the point of having a 'Department of Population' which is simply there to remind everyone that 'Development' would in some sort of general way make people 'want' to have fewer children?
The government will say, 'But we are committed to development.' Yes, well, so are we. But not as 'a way of limiting the population'.
So perhaps the debate should be, What is the best method of limiting the population - in order for good development and the elimination of poverty to be brought about? UNIVERSAL DEVELOPMENT? OR UNIVERSAL FAMILY PLANNING?'
'Undeveloped' People want Family Planning
The intellectual idea behind our White Paper on Population is that 'developed' people 'want' fewer babies.
In Africa today, people are either 'undeveloped' - but would use family planning if offered - or 'developed' and already using it.
GETTING FAMILY PLANNING TO EVERYONE IS A THING WE CAN REALLY DO AND IT WOULD PLAY A MAJOR ROLE IN MAKING EVERY OTHER ASPECT OF DEVELOPMENT WORK.
It is a complete tragedy that the money spent by the South African taxpayer on endless versions of a basically flawed idea has not been spent on an excellent family planning outreach.
We hear of aid money lying around for want of a clear goal. But getting mobiles with friendly nurses to every corner of South Africa is specific and cost-effective and would have immediate benefits for individual mothers and children, at the same time as serving the larger goal of reaching everyone with excellent education and good nutrition and so on and so on.
In the Executive Summary at the beginning of the White Paper on Population there is this paragraph:
Past policies aimed at addressing population issues focused on. fertility reduction, restricted population movement and controlled settlement patterns. Through the new population policy the Government acknowledges the current international development paradigm which places the population at the centre of development as its driving force and ultimate beneficiary.
The first sentence, by linking 'fertility reduction' with 'restricted population movement and controlled settlement patterns' aims to link anyone advocating fertility reduction' to those who were involved with the other two.
The second sentence completely changes the meaning of the word 'population' from a concern with population growth and population limitation to simply meaning 'the people'.
If we really want to get rid of poverty we must spend our money well - prioritise and think clearly, and not get lost in nice-sounding abstractions.
Demography is a descriptive discipline. It describes people being born, dying and moving around.
Those who want 'development' to be the answer to population growth try to make demography into a natural science, a predictive science. They treat people as if they are molecules: shake them up and such and such a result will be achieved.
But demography has never predicted anything. There are too many variables: history, culture, religion, ideology, fashion, on the one hand, and change of circumstances on the other.
'Development', meaning technological innovation, has always meant a growth in population, not a decline: agriculture, the industrial revolution, and finally public health, have all meant that more people have been able to be fed and kept alive.
Unfortunately this has always eventually led to shortages - of topsoil, water and fuel in particular - and therefore people have done two things:
1. The stronger and/or less scrupulous have taken land from the weaker.
2. People have moved to new territory.
The concept of rapid population growth being a problem to the development of the poorest people in the world is very well understood by children and by the rural poor.
At a children's party there are ten coolies on the table and ten guests have been invited. Each child gets a cookie. But supposing twenty children come and there are still only ten cookies on the table? Any ten-year old could tell you what would happen.
On the TV programme, 'Beckett's Trek', a group of people who had been moved during the apartheid era had now been back at their original territory for three years or so - yet were not thriving. Everyone had views on why not. Finally the camera focused on a very old man who said, 'It's because we are now more.'
In the 1960s everyone understood 'population' in this very simple way. 'The Population Bomb' by Paul Ehrlich, an honorary trustee of SAPLER, was published in 1968.
Karate Province in India and Mauritius are two places which benefited from this very simple understanding of population. This has been described in other SAPLER newsletters. Both places were very poor indeed and both now thrive, in spite of different poetical philosophies.
By 'Population' they understood 'Population Growth'.
Today we have strange and meaningless ideas like 'Population Activities'. 'The United Nations Fund for Population Activities'. A 'Population Activity' is an activity which is supposed to make people 'want' to have fewer children.
In our White Paper we have 'Population Concerns'. This simply seems to mean: 'Concerns about people'.
I sometimes feel like one of those Xhosa women must have felt who correctly saw that killing all the cattle would not drive the white people into the sea. No one believed them.
The first time I met SAPLER trustee, Zanele Mfono, we were having lunch in Pretoria and she said, 'We have a saying in the Transkei, 'There will be no end to Nongqawoses.'
This is said in exasperation when someone gets hooked on a fanciful solution to some problem. Nongqawose was the young woman who saw in a vision that if the Xhosa killed their cattle the whites would be driven into the sea. So, in spite of some objecting voices, the cattle were killed. And the Xhosa people starved.
And now we have a new myth which most people believe: Development will limit the population.
A Business Day reporter was confused by SAPLER's opposition to the government's White Paper on Population. He phoned Pretoria. A spokesman said. 'It's based on the Cairo Document.'
When I saw this 1994 document I phoned the Population Department. 'This is a step backwards,' I said.
The woman was shocked.
'But 150 nations have signed the document!' she said.
I thought: She has not been brought up on 'The Emperor's New Clothes'.
The representatives who signed the Cairo Document were diplomats. Of course they signed it.
In the Hans Christian Andersen story, two swindlers tell the Emperor that they will make him the most marvelous clothes for the forthcoming procession. They then pretend to be making clothes, ordering all the most expensive cloths and threads and appearing to work.
They had told the Emperor that to stupid people these clothes would appear to be invisible. No one wanted to be thought stupid, so everyone pretended to see the clothes, including the Emperor.
On the day of the procession the Emperor strode forth, quite naked.
'But he has no clothes on!' says a small boy. The boy's father agreed, and gradually all the people started whispering that the Emperor had no clothes on.
The Cairo Document and all the documents that have followed it are naked. They don't even pretend to be about the problem of population growth. They don't state the problem clearly and they don't describe ways in which the problem has been solved in other countries.
Here is Joel E. Cohen in his book, How Many people Can the Earth Support? talking about the Cairo Document:
By one count the final Programme of Action offered more than one thousand recommendations. Only a handful of the recommendations dealt with the desirability and means of reducing fertility and slowing population growth. The remaining recommendations urged governments to improve almost every aspect of human well-being, but specified no priorities. There was something for almost everybody in the final report's mix of dream and sermon, of wish and prayer.
And it is this document on which our own White Paper is based:
DO EVERYTHING FOR EVERYBODY
While the vast wish-list of 'things we should do' was being discussed at the main Cairo Conference on Population, we at the non-governmental (NGO) conference were attending lectures on many issues, such as environment and family planning.
Every lunchtime there was a high powered lecture in the large indoor tennis-court. (Our conference was in an Olympic stadium.)
This was the only place where the truth about population growth was being told. It was chilling, devastating. The lecturer sat at a small table on the tennis court, with a microphone.
The grimmest lecture was 'Population and Conflict' by Thomas Homer-Dixon. Here's a quote:
The Philippines offers a good illustration of ecological marginalisation. Unequal access to rich agricultural lowlands combines with population growth to cause migration to easily degraded upland areas; erosion and deforestation contribute to the economic hardship that spurs insurgency and rebellion.
These lectures were organized by the International Union for the Scientific Study of Populations (IUSSP).
How did the Development Myth begin?
In another tennis court lecture Paul Demeny described how the development myth began.
But first he described the utterly simple proposal which was brought to the Bucharest international Population Conference in 1974.
The writers of this proposal felt that population growth was either blocking or grievously slowing economic development. They knew there was an unmet need for family planning and believed it could easily be met.
'Here was, then, a coherent strategy for slowing population growth, a strategy that could be plausibly translated into concrete, budgetable action.
'Not only would the financial costs of the resulting family planning programmes be low; such programmes would simultaneously benefit their individual clients, who would receive a welcome service, and confer a macroeconomic advantage on society as a whole, since slower aggregate demographic growth would speed development.'
But it was at that Bucharest conference that the mysterious change took over the minds of men and women:
'After nearly two weeks of often acrimonious debate, the Plan finally adopted was an extensively rewritten document. The key point that embodied the essence of the changes, repeatedly stressed throughout the text, was that "Population" and "development" must be "integrated".
Perhaps the myth arose from the late twentieth century's accumulated guilt of Westerners who had plundered foreign lands, together with the resentment of Third World people who believed that if the West were made to feel guilty enough then massive general development aid would be given to the Third World.
What Dr Karan Singh said then - and says now
In 1974 Dr Singh coined the phrase, 'Development is the best contraceptive'. He now regrets this and urges governments, NG0s and pharmaceutical companies to meet the challenges of the unmet need for family planning.
Why is the Fertility Rate dropping?
I, who am accused of 'thinking only of numbers', am in fact a writer, interested in individual people. Since becoming involved with population in 1990 I have asked many many low-income people about family decisions.
After some general chat I ask the person how many children there were in the family he or she was born into:
'We were eight children.'
'And how many children do you have?'
'TWO,'
'Do you want more?'
'One more perhaps.'
'Why so few?'
'Things are too expensive.'
Last year I employed Maria for two mornings a week. This was her only job. After she had worked for me for two weeks she burst into tears one morning in the kitchen.
She was pregnant. Her boyfriend had beaten her up the night before.
He said the baby could not possibly be his.
We talked through all her options. She was 29 years old and had a ten-year-old daughter who lived with Maria's mother and went to a good local school.
Maria's mother was a domestic worker. There was no possibility of taking in Maria and a new baby. Maria's only other support person was an aunt. We went to visit this aunt. The aunt was furious with Maria.
'Why didn't you prevent?'
'I thought I couldn't have any more babies.'
It turned out that Maria had been on the Depo Provero injection. When she had stopped a few years before, thinking she should have another baby, she had not conceived one. She had concluded that it was not possible for her to fall pregnant again.
Maria had no relatives in the country who could take this baby in. Her aunt was also a domestic worker and she was not even allowed overnight guests.
Abortion was not yet legal. Maria went to Marie Stopes and had an abortion there.
Westerners, like humans anywhere at any time, are first of all interested in their own welfare: themselves, their families, their communities, their nations.
.However, all humans have an oceanic, ideological side to them which can be tapped. It is most often tapped when things have already gone very badly wrong; so we get pop concerts for the starving in Ethiopia.
Sometimes, though, we have forward-looking, holistic doctors like my father, Professor Eustace Cluver, who wrote Public Health in South Africa, the first textbook on the subject. (SAPLER trustee, Professor Harry Seftel, was his most enthusiastic pupil.)
Unfortunately these public health doctors couldn't see far enough. They did not foresee the population explosion. They prevented children getting ill and dying, but could not later Prevent the resulting adults from suffering from malnutrition and being short of land.
What is happening now is that the great-grandchildren of the people my dad saved are absolutely desperate for jobs and land - and have discovered family planning.
Peggy is an elderly domestic worker. She grew up on a farm with her grandmother. The farmer had a lot of land and was generous, so he gave Peggy's grandmother four fields on which she could grow four different products. These were sold at a roadside store. Peggy's grandmother had eight children - there was plenty of food, and plenty of space to add another room to her house.
I said to Peggy recently, 'Well now, it's the New South Africa! You can get your grandmother's land back!' 'Oh no! It's Verwoerdburg.' It was already Verwoerdburg by the time Peggy's husband had left her with one child, so she had no more children. Yet even with this one child this family is in trouble.
The child, a son, was in love at the end of the struggle, when it was bliss to be alive and life was wonderful and without problems. They conceived a baby. Peggy's son stuck to his girlfriend and his son, but neither of them could find a job. I visited them, and found another baby lying on the bed.
Conceived when the pills had been left at the mother-in-law's place.
Two children under two. They moved from Peggy's house to the mother-in-law's house whenever the children became too much for the grandparents to bear. Back and forth, back and forth.
The children are now four and two. Peggy's daughter-in-law is now on the injection. She is not going to take any more chances. Neither of the young people has ever had a full-time job. They do this and that.
I have told this story because there are not only more people in South Africa, there is less land and fewer jobs. These two young people have not stopped at two because they want to save the environment, nor because they are 'developed'. Simply because they are desperate.
What answers do the Cairo Document or the White Paper have for them? None.
And for the children?
One recent phenomenon described by demographers is that people who leave the countryside and come into town have fewer children. In particular the rich West has a very low birthrate. Therefore - and therefore and therefore ...
What about rich people who have had a high birthrate? What about America after the Second World War, the richest country the world had ever known? A baby boom!
What about Kenya, the most successful African nation after Independence? Rich, educated women liked to have large families and had an average of eight, all of whom tended to survive.
What about Venezuela, where in the highest social group it was fashionable to have six children?
And now what about poor people who choose to have small families?
We relatively poor exiles in London in the 1960s chose to have two, one or none. We had no relatives and no child-minders, and we were all having children at the same time, so we could not help each other. My husband and I lived in one room with our baby.
Exactly the same social group here in South Africa were having four, five and even seven children. Women had not really got interested in having careers yet, they had servants to help with the children ... so why not?
'I had another two because I was bored,' says my cousin.
In Cairo the desired family norm is four - too many for their environment, with its negligible rainfall and its polluted river.
In Mexico City women from a particular social group who were very ' poor had an average of two children. Some of that same social group moved to California, were put on Welfare Benefits and then had an average of five children.
Children are nice. Sex is nice. There are thousands of reasons why people have children.
Some Western women are very feminist and either have no children at all or have one child very late. They expect everyone else to copy them.
At a clinic outside Krugersdorp where very careful records have been kept, women who are now getting free maternity care are having more children. They feel optimistic. Children are more fun than most jobs.
A liberal friend of mine, a farmer's wife, runs a crèche for the children of the avo packers. She gives these children three meals a day, The women who do the packing do it in a very noisy atmosphere where they cannot have conversations. No wonder they take time off from time to time to have babies!
The main fault of the White Paper is that terms are never defined. The first sentence states, 'Population, development and the environment are intricately interrelated.' This is so vague that it is absolutely meaningless.
Factory development damages the environment. Permaculture - with its aim of 'maximum food from minimum land in the same place for ever - sustains the environment. Israeli desert reclamation improves the environment.
What relationship do these types of development have with population growth? For decades there has been trench gardening and fuel-tree planting. If there is no family planning clinic and no encouragement to limit families, the families in these schemes often grow.
Founder SAPLER trustee and demographer, Beryl Unterhalter, visited the Valley Trust (trench gardening pioneers) in the late 1980s. She walked up into the hills behind the Trust and found a woman with five small children, all malnourished. Her husband worked in Durban, she and her small children were too weak to dig trenches for gardens ... and no one had suggested family planning.
The Israelis who reclaim deserts have large families to fight the Arabs ... and so on.
The only type of 'development' that leads to smaller families is industrial development, in those areas where houses are not provided. People have poor accommodation - and if they know about family planning, they use it. Infrastructure does not catch up, there is easy access to cafes with their unhealthy, tempting foods, drugs abound, sexual diseases spread - all that. But yes, fewer children.
One glaring error is that no one asks, 'WHAT IS A SMALL FAMILY?' People might easily go from ten children to four children when conditions improve and the children stay alive. But four children is far too many if we are aiming at developing the nation in the sense of eliminating poverty and deprivation.
A lot of the White Paper is statistics about people. Most of a is well known. A lot of it is poorly based - which the White Paper admits.
But without a clear understanding and thinking through of concepts, 'better statistics' are a waste of time.
Our family planning mobiles, and our youth education schemes can collect facts and figures as they go. Our young school educators in Winterveldt are now keeping records of how many girls get pregnant. In fact the effect of having these educators in schools seems to be that teenage pregnancy drops to near zero.
So why not do what works, and do it now? There are do-able things which have immediate positive effects. LET'S DO THEM
Multi-factorial: This is a good, academic-sounding, ask-no-questions word. But what does it mean? It means that humans have lots of different reasons for their behaviour.
'International thinking now recognizes ..': This means nothing at all, as the quotes in this newsletter from actual thinkers show. Remember too our quote from Scientific American of December 1993 about how poor people have started to use contraceptives.