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Is colombia overpopulated- Population Growth and Internal Migration in Colombia | RAND
Twenty years ago, farmers looked out at the tropical woodlands and savannahs of Uganda and saw endless virgin territory. A young man, upon starting a family, would clear a patch of wilderness near where he was raised and plant his own fields of sorghum, millet, groundnut, plantains, or cassava.
Now, after decades of unprecedented population growth, the land is running out. In southern Uganda, as in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, farm communities are bumping up against one another and against dry lands, mountains, and rain forests. Pockets of arable land can still be found, but only in malaria-ridden hinterlands where nobody wants to live.
Africans will never be able to grow enough food for themselves, Sachs argues in his latest book, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet , unless they start having fewer babies. Subsistence farmers in sub-Saharan Africa today raise an average of six children, which is causing the populations of some nations to double every 20 years.
Few of these farmers are able to feed their children properly, let alone afford their education. Children thus grow up desperately poor and have huge families of their own. Shrinking farm plots add yet another burden: Food production on a per-capita basis is declining and malnutrition is worsening, which means that children are likely to grow up even less healthy and less productive.
The prospect of giving poor people contraceptives so they can lift themselves out of poverty might not seem particularly controversial, aside from the opposition that might be expected from some religious conservatives. Yet Sachs is the first mainstream economist in decades to formally propose this idea. Since the s, family planning programs have been promoted strictly as a human right, not as a way to kick-start economic development. The days of promoting birth control purely as a way to empower women, however, may be ending.
Still, many population experts wonder: Is the marriage bed really the place to address economic and environmental problems? Is it even possible to manage people as numbers while respecting them as human beings? Joel E. Cohen, a Columbia demographer, is an expert on population growth and environmental sustainability.
He cringes at the term overpopulation. A report published in April by the UN Population Division concludes that high birthrates are hampering economic development across sub-Saharan Africa, mainly by limiting per-capita investments in education and health care. Columbia economist Xavier Sala-i-Martin has shown that high birthrates typically stunt economic development.
The UN report also states that population pressure is worsening food and water shortages in the region. Environmental concerns also are real: rain forests in sub-Saharan Africa and in South America are being destroyed primarily by subsistence farming, according to NASA data, and deforestation is reducing local rainfall and exacerbating global climate change.
Cohen says we then may ignore political factors that contribute to these problems. For instance, agriculture subsidies in rich nations contribute to hunger by driving down farm incomes in the developing world; and African governments are famous for mismanaging food and water supplies. Cohen agrees with Sachs that international family-planning programs are underfunded.
But he says that family planning should continue to be promoted — both to Western donors and to government officials in developing countries — strictly as a human right. Might this cause the West to back away from other aid obligations, or inspire poor countries to implement coercive methods of population control? Cohen hesitates. Sachs insists that we speak clearly about population pressures.
The problem of dwindling farmland in sub-Saharan Africa, he says, is insurmountable without a major effort to slow population growth. As arable land in Africa has vanished, Sachs explains in Common Wealth , farmers have abandoned land-management techniques they used previously to sustain the long-term fertility of their fields, such as allowing one of the fields to lie fallow each season.
Three-quarters of all arable land in sub-Saharan Africa today is severely depleted of nutrients because it has been overused, according to a recent study by the International Center for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development.
Until a few years ago, most were food exporters. He and colleagues at the Earth Institute, as part of the United Nations Millennium Villages project, which Sachs initiated, are helping the governments of a dozen nations in Africa introduce modern farm technologies. He says that countries in sub-Saharan Africa now must spend huge portions of their budgets providing basic services, which leaves little money for the type of agricultural investment that Malawi is making in its fertilizer program.
Back in the s, the populations of many poor countries in Asia, Latin America, and North Africa were growing as rapidly as the populations in sub-Saharan African countries are today. International health programs had gone into former colonies in these areas following World War II with antibiotic drugs, vaccines, and pesticides, which lowered mortality rates dramatically. Farmers in poor countries had always had lots of babies: They needed to, in order to ensure that at least one son grew up to work their fields and to take care of them in their old age.
The problem was that while more of their children were surviving, rural people retained a cultural proclivity for huge families. Furthermore, they had little or no access to modern birth control, so they ended up with even more kids than they would have otherwise chosen.
Population growth soon was outpacing food production, especially in Asia, causing Western officials to fear that widespread famine would destabilize the continent, Columbia history professor Matthew Connelly explains in his latest book, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population. President Lyndon B. Johnson and his advisers viewed the situation through a lens of Cold War—inspired paranoia: Johnson, speaking to U. So in the late s, the U. In reality, American and British economists and demographers had designed these programs to slow population growth by nearly any means necessary, according to Connelly.
South Asian countries with caste systems were willing to push family planning most aggressively, Connelly writes, because many ruling-class Hindus feared social unrest among the hungry lower castes. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka implanted in women a type of intrauterine contraceptive device that was proven to cause infections and the rupturing of the uterine wall. Couples in all of these countries lost medical, housing, and education benefits for having more than a designated number of children.
When local health officials balked at implementing aggressive programs, the U. Around the same time, police rounded up at gunpoint all of the men in the Indian village of Uttawar and forced them to get vasectomies. International family-planning programs, which by this time had spread throughout Latin America and North Africa, gradually abandoned coercive methods over the next few years.
The population control movement would have one last gasp, though, when UNFPA and Planned Parenthood helped China launch its draconian one-child policy in By the late s, the UNFPA and Planned Parenthood had cleaned up their programs so that medical workers on the ground no longer were expected to lower birthrates.
Clinicians now concentrated on helping women make informed choices about their sex lives and childbearing. If family planning executives discussed the prospect of slowing population growth in public, Connelly says, it was only as an ancillary benefit of giving women more control over their bodies.
The economic benefits of slowing population growth, though, were apparent: as birthrates plummeted in most of the developing world, prosperity and modernization typically arrived. The governments of many countries in Asia and Latin America, now that they had proportionately fewer poor people to care for, could afford to invest in industry and modern agricultural methods, which boosted grain production percent in some nations between the s and the s.
Connelly, in Fatal Misconception , makes the controversial argument that family planning programs have received too much credit for declining birthrates, and hence for development; see sidebar to the left. Across the developing world, birthrates declined where family planners provided a range of safe contraceptives and taught people the benefits of limiting their family size — not only where they bribed people to be sterilized or threatened tax penalties.
Yet, just as family planning programs were beginning to define a new humanitarian mission, funding stagnated. Sub-Saharan Africa is home to most women who lack access to birth control today in part because family planning programs arrived to the region late, in the s, when the money had already begun to dry up, say family planning executives.
Family planning came to Africa late, they say, because international health programs, with their ensuing population boom, had arrived late, too. Today, UN-backed family-planning programs operate in nearly all developing countries. If the UNFPA were better funded, say its proponents, birth control would be more available in rural Africa as well as in many Muslim and Catholic countries, where Western family planners must work hard to educate local leaders about the benefits of reproductive health services.
How to raise the money? Advocates for family planning are doing a lot of soul-searching these days. Many leaders in the NGO community believe that family planning organizations would be better financed if they once again promoted their work as a way to slow population growth, says Suzanne Petroni, a researcher who monitors funding for reproductive health programs at the Summit Foundation, a Washington, D.
Particularly tempting to some family planners, Petroni says, is the prospect of exploiting public concerns about global warming. The sales pitch would go something like this: if we limit the number of people on earth, we limit the number of carbon footprints. Sachs validates this logic in Common Wealth , warning that decades from now, when the crowded nations of sub-Saharan Africa modernize — and Sachs is optimistic that they will modernize eventually — energy consumption on the continent will skyrocket.
This debate within the aid community is contentious because there remains distrust between feminists and some older environmentalists who backed the original population-control movement.
He was convinced in writing Fatal Misconception , he says, that family planning programs that aim to lower birthrates are bound to commit abuses. He found, for instance, that crimes occurred in the s and s even when Western family planners tried to operate their programs ethically: medical workers in several South Asian countries strong-armed patients into accepting sterilizations because they thought that lowering birthrates was good for their own careers, and family planning programs inevitably devoted more resources to sterilization procedures and to abortions than to follow-up care.
Lynn Freedman, a Columbia public health professor and an attorney who is an expert on population issues, concurs. Family planning programs must, and will, remain voluntary, he believes.
The greater moral danger today, Sachs argues, is that large numbers of women will continue to want for birth control, and populations will continue to grow rapidly in sub-Saharan Africa and in places like Haiti, Bolivia, Venezuela, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Myanmar, in part because Western scholars and aid workers insist on tiptoeing around the subject of overpopulation for fear of being seen as insensitive to the abuses of the past.
In Common Wealth , Sachs even advances the term population control, which has long been considered impolitic among scholars, because he says he wants to break the taboo. Fatal Misconception was among the most controversial scholarly monographs of , not just because Connelly calls out early family planners as xenophobic and racist, however. Relying on UN data, Connelly notes that China, for instance, reduced the number of children per woman from 6.
In Brazil, where little effort was made to encourage family planning, the numbers fell from 6. Connelly lists half a dozen such examples to make his point. How could people have managed to have fewer babies without contraception? The same way they did in earlyth-century Europe, where birthrates plummeted a full century before modern birth control became available, Connelly says: They used traditional forms of birth control like the rhythm method.
They soldiered on, he says, because of institutional inertia. Sinding claims that about 50 percent of birthrate declines in poor countries are attributable to family planning programs. Columbia called T. Paul Schultz, a Yale economics professor who has spent his career studying birthrate dynamics. This subject invites confusion, he says, because no long-term controlled studies have ever been conducted.
The dearth of data, Schultz says, allows both advocates and opponents of family planning to cherry-pick statistics. Columbia alumni entrepreneurs are at the forefront of a booming industry. A recent Columbia study reveals major racial disparities in access to clean public water. With suicide rates at historic highs, Columbia researchers are training ordinary people to save lives.
General Data Protection Regulation. Columbia University Privacy Notice. As numbers soar, scholars revisit a thorny debate. David J. Summer Alex Nabaum.
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