Elephant in the greenhouse part I

Concern over humankind’s rate of growth is not a recent phenomenon. Pessimists and optimists have been wrestling with it for centuries. Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) re-ignited debate in 1798 with his controversial first book:  An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects The Future Improvement of Society.   

Malthus argued the rate of human population growth would stall progress towards a more “perfectible” society:

The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the Earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, if unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetic ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.

For him, this Principle was a law of Nature, divinely imposed to ensure virtuous behaviour. The greatest obstacle to social progress and ‘human happiness’ was humankind’s awesome procreative power, its tendency to grow faster than the means of subsistence – or what  today could be called a country’s rate of socio-economic development or ‘improvement’.

Such heresy attracted a firestorm of abuse from many of his contemporaries - especially Enlightenment revolutionaries – and continues to this day. The French epithet ‘malthusien’ became one of the worst insults of the time. Karl Marx and his followers were unhappy with him too.

Many still see him at best as an apologist for global social inequality and injustice. Others claim his disciples support coercive state control of population growth and reject UN Resolution XVIII that:

[...] couples have a basic human right to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of their children and a right to adequate education and information in this respect. (1968 Tehran Conference on Human Rights)

With two centuries of hindsight, it is clear there were flaws in his Principle. Malthus did not expect science to have such a dramatic impact on agricultural productivity, health and society, or modern birth control. Yet in one important sense he was right. He drew attention to some factors that influence it humakind’s rate of growth. With the prospect of a global population of at least 11 billion by 2100 – about 11 times what it was when he wrote his firstEssay – perhaps it is time for a revaluation.

Since the UN’s creation in 1945, there have been only three meetings devoted solely to population issues: Bucharest (1974), Mexico City (1984) and Cairo (1994).

At Bucharest, a group of LDCs attacked the Draft Plan of Action. They insisted it stress socio-economic development – not family planning or population control – arguing that only a ‘new international economic order’ would solve the population problem.

While the more developed countries (MDCs) recognised a relationship between fertility and wealth, they favoured trying to limit growth with social welfare policies. Wealth redistribution was too controversial an issue for a demographic conference. The US, one of the initiators of the 1974 World Population Year, dismissed the attack as ‘polemics and ideological statements’.  LDC economies, it argued, must be improved by new wealth creation – not by redistributed wealth from MDCs.

According to the UN archives: