8
Building a “Consensus”
for Cairo and Beyond
The “consensus” the UNFPA began to create in Mexico City pushed full steam ahead toward Cairo, scene of the 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), and beyond.1 “Consensus” now rolls off the lips of populationists with the same ease as a common greeting. It is considered so pervasive and all-encompassing that only so-called extremists would opt to stay out.
As the result of feminist pressure, the consensus has broadened to incorporate many women’s health and empowerment concerns—to this extent, it represents progress. But it has many drawbacks and contradictions as well. It legitimizes population control at a particularly dangerous moment in world history, when economic, political, and cultural instability is intensifying the search for scapegoats, and fascism is once again on the rise, including a new environmental variant.
The population consensus derives from the New World Order politics of obscuring differences in pursuit of a universal free trade model. The underlying logic assumes that if globalization and the free market are good, then population growth perforce has to be bad, for there is no way advanced capitalism and rampant consumerism can deliver all the goods to all the people and “sustain” both the natural environment and the grossly inequitable distribution of wealth. The best way to shrink the numbers of the poor, reduce the labor supply in a capital-intensive era, and protect the environment is to limit births. Never mind that population growth rates are coming down in virtually every area of the globe already—they must come down much faster.
The consensus puts forward an integrated approach to reducing birth rates, reminiscent of the 1970s. The US State Department describes it as a
broad agreement that development and family planning can work separately to slow population growth, but that they work most effectively when pursued together. There is also increasing recognition that population growth is part of a constellation of factors that can cause environmental degradation. And it is widely acknowledged that family planning should be provided as part of broader primary and reproductive health initiatives, and that population policy should encompass economic opportunity for women, and elimination of legal and social barriers to gender equity.2
To this the World Bank adds that interventions “which are responsive to individual needs and aspirations” are more effective in lowering fertility than programs “driven by top-down demographic targets.”3
At the same time that the consensus has taken hold in liberal circles, religious fundamentalism and the antiabortion movement are extending their tentacles in every possible direction. For example, the US-based Human Life International now has offices in 18 countries.4 These forces are taking advantage of the deep cultural malaise generated by economic and political upheavals, the religion of consumerism, and the homogenizing power of corporate media. Viewed against the fundamentalist backdrop on which women’s subordination is writ large and clear, the population consensus appears progressive, and some aspects of it undoubtedly are. Appearances can also be deceptive, however, as the following sections reveal.
Empowering All Women—And No Poor Men?
The consensus focus on women is the culmination of several decades of increased attention to the role of “women in development” as the result of the convergence of a number of separate currents in the 1970s. First was the growth of feminism in the West and among sections of the educated elite in the Third World. As a new generation of young, upwardly mobile women entered the professions, a few trickled into the field of international development. They began to ask what was happening to “invisible” Third World women and to direct attention toward a previously neglected population. Their efforts helped to identify the problem, although they did not always provide a clear vision of the solution.
Second, as growing numbers of women joined the global assembly line taking low-wage jobs with multinational corporations, they became strategically important to the international economy. Integrating women into industrialization was proving very profitable indeed.
Then, demographic research yielded the information that enhancing women’s status was an important key to fertility decline. The population community took heed, integrating family planning programs with women’s income generation activities and credit schemes. Unfortunately, many of these programs reinforced women’s traditional roles as housewives, bakers, and handicraft makers; proved unprofitable; or made participation contingent on contraceptive use. The basic problem with the income generation approach is that women not only need income, but economic and political power, and challenging the status quo within the family and the community is not a priority.
Such challenges are a priority of many grassroots women’s groups all over the world, however, who have loosely coalesced into national and international networks pressing for more fundamental changes. By the late 1980s their collective voices could no longer be ignored. The population establishment took heed again. The education and empowerment of women became high on the consensus agenda, at least rhetorically.
There are a number of problematic aspects to the renewed focus on women and its role in making the consensus more palatable to the public.
First, gender has become a way for population agencies to bypass politically sensitive issues of class, race, and inequalities between developed and developing countries. Everyone, it seems, is for empowering poor women these days—but not for empowering poor or marginalized men. But many poor men are also “losers” in the development process.
A study in a rural area of western Kenya found that poor men were suffering a serious loss of identity because they could not fulfill their economic obligations to the family due to a lack of decent work. Male activities legitimizing their role as heads of household were also disappearing. Many turned to alcoholism and domestic violence in despair. Although women were the victims of that violence, they still had a stronger sense of identity within both the household and the community—psychologically at least, they were better off.5
Clearly, poor men need to be empowered too, but not in the traditional, patriarchal sense. They need education, remunerative work, community, and a sense of opportunity and hope. There are also limits to how empowered women can be if their partners are not, and vice versa—they share the same house, after all, the same economic system.
Beyond a few reforms suggested here and there, transforming economic relations is not central to the consensus agenda. Instead, educating girls is now the main strategy for empowering women. While educating girls is a laudable goal in and of itself, it is also politically safer than advocating other forms of empowerment, such as letting women organize independent trade unions in free trade zones or on plantations. The chief reason population agencies support education for girls is that it is strongly correlated with lower birth rates. If the opposite were true, would population agencies still want girls to be educated?
A more cynical observer might also see the education of girls as a way to incorporate more women into the low-wage, insecure service sector, where most new jobs are being created and where some degree of literacy is required. This is not so far-fetched, given the population establishment’s instrumentalist approach toward women’s participation in the labor force. For example, a “promising intervention” proposed by the World Bank is “opening up job opportunities for women in occupations that are competitive with child-rearing (e.g., factory or office jobs rather than farm jobs).”6 Better that she slave ten hours in the factory than grow food on her own plot of land?
This instrumentalist approach extends to the environmental arena as well. The UNFPA puts Women at the very center of its Population, Environment, and Development triangle: Enhancing their status is viewed as the key to reducing population growth, which in turn is the major cause of poverty and environmental degradation. Women are not only expected to solve environmental problems by lowering their fertility, but by being trained to act as “resource managers.” But for most poor women, it is greater power over resources which is required, not better management expertise alone. Moreover, in many peasant societies poor women—and men—have long known how to manage environmental resources, though these skills have often been undermined by land dispossession and the spread of corporate agriculture.
The UNFPA views management as a modern phenomenon, however: “Women who are able to manage their environment, instead of simply reacting to it, are likely to be better educated (literate) and have the ability to make decisions about the key aspects of their life.”7 Notwithstanding the value of literacy, it is patronizing to assume that illiterate peasant women simply “react” to their environment. An illiterate peasant woman in Bangladesh, for example, is likely to be a far better manager of environmental resources than a college-educated professional in New York. The latter probably generates more non-recyclable waste in a week than the former does in her entire lifetime.
This brings us to the last point. In many population publications women are presented as an undifferentiated mass which needs to be empowered, with little recognition of the many differences between them—poor or rich, rural or urban, Black or white—which in turn impact on their survival and reproductive strategies. Although one can find common agendas among the world’s women (for example, most women would probably support an end to domestic violence and forced prostitution), there are also major political differences between them, which include perspectives on population. How many poor women of color, for example, support the position of many rich, white women environmentalists that high fertility is the main cause of the environmental crisis? There is no consensus here, even by the wildest stretch of the imagination.
The same holds true for men. In the population consensus poor men’s oppression, while scarcely mentioned, is also not linked in any way to rich men. In a new twist on male bonding, the corporate executive and the landless laborer are both just “men,” in the same way that Imelda Marcos and a poor Filipina plantation worker are just “women.”
Quality of Care and Reproductive Health: Hitting the Bottom Line
As the result of feminist pressure, there have been several important attempts to reform the family planning field in the last decade. The first was the articulation of the “user perspective” by Judith Bruce of the Population Council. Bruce argued that the individual’s perspective and experience, rather than being viewed as “discretionary and dispensable items,” should be the determining factors in family planning programs.8 In the late 1980s the user perspective evolved into what is called the “quality of care” approach.
The quality of care approach essentially argues that better quality services—through wider choice of methods, full disclosure of information, technical competence, and respectful interpersonal relations, for example—should be the organizing principle of family planning programs. Not only will high-quality programs better meet clients’ needs than ones focused on narrow demographic targets, but they are likely to lead to greater sustained contraceptive use and hence faster falls in fertility.9 Although many population agencies have embraced quality of care as their motto, it has been harder to translate the theory into practice. In the absence of a functioning health care system, it is difficult, if not impossible, to have a decent family planning program with adequate screening and follow-up. And concurrently with quality of care came a new generation of easily abusable, long-acting contraceptives, such as Norplant, which captured the imagination of demographically driven population programs. Who needs quality when a drug easily stuck in a woman’s arm is effective for five years?
Now reformers are calling for family planning to be part of broader sexual and reproductive health services, a position endorsed by the consensus, at least on paper. The reproductive and sexual health approach maintains that family planning, including safe abortion, should be part of a wide array of services. These include pregnancy care (prenatal and postnatal care, safe delivery, nutrition, and child health), STD prevention and treatment, basic gynecological care (screening for breast and cervical cancer), sexuality and gender education, and referral systems for other health problems. It argues that those who want to control population growth should focus more on the “demand” side, creating the economic and social conditions under which people will voluntarily want fewer children, while the “supply” side—family planning within reproductive and sexual health services—should advance people’s health and basic rights.10
The sexual and reproductive health approach has much to commend it, and is a big step forward. However, there are a number of stumbling blocks in the way of its implementation. These include:
Narrow Interpretations. Population agencies for whom demographic objectives remain paramount will strive to provide the minimum acceptable amount of sexual and reproductive health care in their programs. For example, in suggesting a transitional strategy for the next ten to fifteen years called the “1994 strategy,” Anrudh Jain and Judith Bruce of the Population Council propose that family planning programs “pay attention to those aspects of reproductive health that interact directly with the avoidance of unwanted fertility.” Their list is limited to safe abortion, treatment of pre-existing conditions which would make particular contraceptive methods unhealthful, and treatment of contraceptive side effects.11 The World Bank does not consider quality of care measures necessary to implement in “emergent settings,” poor countries “which have the strongest interest in speeding up the transition to lower fertility.” The implicit message is that they simply do not have the time or money to worry about quality. The Bank recommends it only for “transitional settings” where poor quality in existing programs can act as a brake on contraceptive acceptance and hence demographic effectiveness.12 In other words, the Bank is still prepared to set countries off on the wrong foot because of narrow population reduction goals. If quality is not an issue from the very beginning, it is very difficult to implement later on.
The Attack on Basic Health. The larger—and often unspoken—issue is how a broad sexual and reproductive health approach can be achieved in the context of deteriorating health conditions and services. The World Bank’s structural adjustment assault on health in the 1980s has had a devastating impact in many countries, especially in Africa. Public systems have been dismantled in favor of privatization and the imposition of user fees. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been encouraged to take up the slack, as if they could ever provide all the needed services to poor people.13 The strategy has in fact proved such a disaster that the World Bank in 1993 adopted a new approach. It now recommends a two-tier system, private comprehensive health services for the rich, and a publicly financed “essential clinical package” for the poor.14
Not surprisingly, the clinical package recommended for low-income countries is extremely limited: prenatal and delivery care, family planning services, management of the sick child, treatment of tuberculosis, and case management of sexually transmitted diseases. According to health researcher Meredeth Turshen,
This clinical package reduces women’s health care to services during childbirth, showing once again that women are valued only for their reproductive role. Governments will subsidize family planning services, but, because little money is intended for physician services (or the training of nurses and midwives in these tasks), women will receive contraceptives without medical supervision. . . . Sick children are the main beneficiaries of this clinical package, in keeping with the assumptions that families will limit the number of births only after child mortality falls, and that mothers are more likely to accept family planning from health services that care for their sick children.15
The World Bank is now developing an “essential package of women’s health services,” which so far looks much the same.16
Like an arsonist’s fire, structural adjustment burnt public health systems to the ground, and they are now being reassembled from the ashes from only the cheapest materials and with population control at their foundation. The consensus accepts this situation as a given—it is hard to imagine how successful a sexual and reproductive health approach can be in this context.
In addition to privatizing and restricting health care, the other limiting factor is that ill health is caused mainly by poverty. It takes more than health services to cure malnutrition, which weakens immune systems, or to ensure clean drinking water. It takes economic and environmental measures which directly benefit the poor. Ultimately, any strategy which aims to improve women’s sexual and reproductive health must address these underlying issues. No chronically malnourished woman will ever have acceptable reproductive health.
The danger is that the reproductive and sexual health approach will increasingly be defined as a technocratic intervention rather than as part of a more dynamic process of social change. The international women’s health movement is currently divided between those who are willing to promote the approach within a population consensus framework and those who insist it be pursued independent of demographic objectives. While the former strategy may be politically pragmatic in the short run, in the long run it may backfire as population agencies squeeze sexual and reproductive health into smaller and smaller “cost-effective” packages à la World Bank.
Funding Priorities. Already, there is controversy over how much money should go to family planning, and how much to sexual and reproductive health. In the first draft of the UN Program of Action for the Cairo conference, family planning was slated to receive $10.2 billion in the year 2000, reproductive health care only $1.2 billion. As a result of pressure from women’s groups and progressive governments, the latter figure was increased to $5 billion.17 Though this is an improvement, family planning still has a two-to-one advantage over reproductive health.
Are NGOs The Way to Go?
A vital part of the consensus is the incorporation of more nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), into population programs. Greater reliance on NGOs is common in other areas of development and stems from a number of causes. On the positive side, NGOs often, but by no means always, have a better record of working at the community level—they can be more responsive to local needs than government bureaucracies with strong vested interests. Progressive NGOs can organize and mobilize exploited groups, such as poor women and landless laborers, to gain greater economic and political power.
On the negative side, NGOs have frequently been used as a weak substitute for public services eroded under structural adjustment, as mentioned above. They can also offer a “grassroots” legitimacy to organizations such as AID and the World Bank, who are striving to improve their image. In some cases, they have been employed as a tool of counterinsurgency, to provide intelligence about radical political movements and diffuse social discontent.
In reality, there is wide variation among NGOs; their effectiveness and commitment to the poor are dependent on their social base, leadership, and funding sources. They are neither inherently progressive nor a good substitute for government.
Pouring money into NGOs for population work could have a number of undesirable effects. First, it could skew their work away from the provision of other needed services and organizing activities. This is already happening in India, where activists are watching AID population money corrupt the NGO health sector. In the state of Uttar Pradesh alone, AID is planning to fund 100 NGOs to provide family planning services in villages as part of a big push to lower the fertility rate.18
AID is also turning its eyes toward environmental NGOs in a new initiative “that will draw upon the advocacy skills and networks that environmental groups employ in their efforts to build ‘grassroots’ awareness around the issue of population and family planning.”19 One can easily imagine a situation in which environmental NGOs cannot get funding for critical work against corporate logging, for example, but money is readily available for spreading propaganda to local populations about the need to reduce their numbers to save the trees.
There are already a number of environmental groups, based primarily in the United States, who have joined the population bandwagon and gravy train. They are playing a vital role in orchestrating the consensus and spreading population paranoia.
Making Waves
The US environmental movement has long been influenced by Malthusian thinking. This stems in part from the American wilderness preservation ethic, which views human civilization as essentially hostile to nature. The wilderness ethic is the product of a unique history and geography—many US conservationists are ignorant of other cultures where densely populated peasant communities have developed a complex and symbiotic relationship with their environments.20
In the late 1960s Malthusian undercurrents in the environmental movement rose to the surface with the first big wave of population paranoia. In 1968 the Sierra Club published Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, and in 1974 hired its first population program director. The National Audubon Society launched its own program in 1979. In 1981 Audubon sponsored a national conference on population, which became the springboard for the Global Tomorrow Coalition. The Coalition, a network of over 100 population and environmental groups, was the first major effort to bring these two constituencies together.21 It presaged and helped to generate the second wave of population paranoia at the end of the 1980s.
This second wave arose for a number of reasons. With the end of the Cold War, fear of nuclear annihilation waned and (white) public anxiety was free to focus on other threats to security. Overpopulation was already widely perceived as the other dangerous “bomb” or “explosion,” thanks to Paul Ehrlich and colleagues.
The end of the Cold War also created space for policymakers to address other pressing but neglected problems facing humanity, with environmental destruction high on the list. On the positive side this could bring greater international cooperation in the environmental field. On the negative side elites are defining and appropriating environmental concerns in such a way as to leave their power intact.
The old military-industrial complex is giving way to a new environmental-industrial one. It is composed of Northern leaders, the scientific establishment (many previously employed by the military), the World Bank through its management of the Global Environment Facility, and transnational corporations—with various NGOs included to lend legitimacy.22 Ironically, the very institutions which contributed most to creating the environmental crisis are planning to resolve it. Population control is one of their tools.
Thus, both in the public consciousness (or lack thereof) and at the highest levels of power, population and the environment have become inextricably linked.
One by one, many mainstream environmental organizations, especially in the United States, have been swept up in the second wave. Their renewed embrace of population reflects the largely white middle- and upper-class composition of both their leadership and constituencies (the upper ranks of these organizations are male-dominated as well), their failure to address the environmental concerns of poor communities and people of color, and a mistaken belief during the Reagan years that by defending population control they were defending reproductive rights. Outside the mainstream there is a much more broad-based and dynamic movement of social justice ecology which is not Malthusian.23
In addition to expanded efforts by the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) launched a full-scale population program in 1990. Many other groups are also involving themselves more deeply in population, for example, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Cousteau Society, the Worldwatch Institute, and the World Resources Institute, though some are more Malthusian than others.24 Thousands of dollars have been spent by Audubon alone on the production of slick population propaganda, and rarely a day goes by when the mail does not bring the liberal US citizen a scare message about overpopulation from one group or another. The only consolation is that now one can recycle the paper these messages are printed on.
Scientific associations are also embracing the population and environment cause, giving it an “expert” stamp of approval, despite the fact that many physical scientists have little knowledge of social science and the complexity and variability of demographic dynamics.
Though most of these organizations fall within the liberal tradition, population environmentalism also has a fascistic wing that is gaining credibility through such “respectable” intellectual figures as US biologist Garrett Hardin and British public health pioneer Maurice King. Hardin was the initial architect of “lifeboat ethics”—the belief that the earth is now a lifeboat in which there is not enough food to go around. The solution is to not let the poor and starving on board: “What happens if you share space in a lifeboat?” Hardin asks. “The boat is swamped, and everyone drowns. Complete justice, complete catastrophe.”25
More recently, in an infamous piece in the British medical journal the Lancet, Maurice King recommended that where there is unsustainable population pressure on the environment, public health systems should not promote such “de-sustaining” simple methods for saving lives as oral rehydration for diarrhea “since they increase the man years of human misery, ultimately from starvation.” He calls this genocidal philosophy “health in a sustainable ecosystem.” Instead of responding with an indictment, the Lancet ran an editorial entitled, “Nothing is unthinkable.”26 In fact, King has become a popular speaker at academic conferences on population and the environment.
In their desire to save the wilderness and shun “anthropocentrism,” many deep ecologists, especially in the United States, have also displayed gross insensitivity to poor communities, in some cases even welcoming AIDS as a check on population growth.27 Well-known US poet Gary Snyder has called for a 90 percent reduction in human populations to restore the wilderness.28
Neo-Nazi penetration of the environmental movement is also occurring in Europe and the United States, with population control part of the white supremacist “environmental” agenda. This agenda also includes a racist assault on immigrants, which overlaps with the anti-immigration stance of a number of environmental groups.29
At the same time the Far Right, notably the Ku Klux Klan, has also made inroads into the antiabortion movement.30 On many different fronts, neo-fascism is a force to be reckoned with. (See Box: The Hydra at Home.)
Forging a Coalition for Rio
The growing identity of interest between the population establishment and the environmental mainstream was evident in their joint planning for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), or Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June 1992.
Among their initiatives were the circulation and signing of a “Priority Statement on Population” within the population and environment communities. It states, “Because of its pervasive and detrimental impact on global ecological systems, population growth threatens to overwhelm any possible gains made in improving living conditions.”31 As of 1994 Zero Population Growth is still distributing this statement in its mass mailings to US citizens, despite the continued opposition of many feminists.
Another joint effort was the formation of the Campaign on Population and the Environment (COPE) in 1990. COPE was a collaborative effort of the Audubon Society, the National Wildlife Federation, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Population Action International, and the Sierra Club. Its major objective was “to expand public awareness of the link between population growth, environmental degradation and the resulting human suffering, and to translate this into public policy.”32
US groups have also been very active in influencing international environmental organizations, such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), also known as the World Conservation Union, a large and diverse consortium of both governmental organizations and NGOs. After more than a decade of pressure, Audubon claims credit for getting IUCN to embrace population as a key concern in its 1990 General Assembly.33
The ultimate example of the merger between the population establishment and the environmental mainstream was the transformation of the International Planned Parenthood Federation’s (IPPF’s) once autonomous magazine People into an inter-agency venture called People and the Planet, sponsored by the IPPF, the UNFPA, and the IUCN, in partnership with a host of other population and environment groups. The first issue of the magazine, designed for the Earth Summit, promoted the standard women, population, and environment consensus. And, lest feminists should have objected, a concluding essay by UNICEF’s Peter Adamson reminded them that family planning is the key to their empowerment, and furthermore, to the salvation of the world:
Family planning could bring more benefits to more people at less cost than any other single “technology” now available to the human race. . . . These benefits alone would be sufficient to justify the claim of “family planning for all” to a special priority in a new world order. But it would, of course, also help to resolve one of the other great problems on the human agenda—the problem of rapid population growth.34
Despite their extensive preparations, the population/environment lobby did not meet with much success in Rio. The groundwork for challenging them had also been laid in advance.
In formal inter-governmental negotiations, many Southern nations had refused to put population on the UNCED agenda because it would divert attention from Northern responsibility for the environmental crisis.35 At the same time the nongovernmental Women’s Action Agenda 21, endorsed by 1,500 activists from around the world, condemned the idea “that women’s fertility rates (euphemistically called population pressures) are to blame” for environmental degradation.36
The population/environment lobby portrayed the women’s actions as playing into the hands of the Catholic Church, which wanted to avoid all mention of contraception and abortion in the Rio deliberations.37 But feminist activists at Rio vigorously opposed the Vatican. The NGO Treaty on Population and Environment they drafted strongly supports women’s access to safe, voluntary contraception and abortion as basic rights—but not as tools of population control.38 Feminist activists identified structural adjustment, militarism, and wasteful and unjust production and consumption patterns as the key culprits in environmental degradation, not overpopulation. Representatives of the population/environment lobby found themselves outnumbered and isolated.
Coming out of Rio in defeat, the population/environment lobby had to rethink its strategy in order to secure victory in Cairo. Many members began to pay more attention to women’s rights. While for some this represented a genuine change of attitude, for others it was an opportunistic decision.
The “have your cake and eat it too” syndrome also exists—the belief that you can support women’s rights on the one hand and still maintain that overpopulation is a major, or the major, cause of the environmental crisis on the other. The Sierra Club, for example, continues in 1994 to pass out its tree diagram which shows overpopulation as the root system of all major environmental ills plaguing the planet.
Such images and analyses, rather than advancing women’s rights, perpetuate the notion that women’s fertility is to blame, and do nothing to challenge the status quo distribution of wealth and power. Without that challenge, calls for women’s rights ring hollow and end up being just another rallying cry for more US international population aid.
The Hydra at Home
In the United States the end of the century is beginning to have eerie parallels with the beginning, when nativism and eugenics became powerful social forces. The country is witnessing a resurgence of elite fear which seeks biological explanations and solutions for deep-rooted social and economic distress. Many politicians and technocrats are seeking scapegoats in the body politic and in the bodies of the poor, particularly poor women of color. The multi-headed Hydra is rearing its ugly heads. Slash one off, and two more seem to grow back in its place.
Judicial and legislative initiatives for mandatory contraception are one of the Hydra’s heads—poor women have been sentenced to Norplant, and in some states women on welfare are denied additional benefits if they have another child (see Chapter 11). Adolescent pregnancy is considered an “epidemic,” when in fact rates of teenage pregnancy have been declining every year since 1960.1
Another head is the crackdown on immigrants. In the new consensus thinking, the population dislocations caused by free trade, war, and maldevelopment create the need for much stricter immigration controls, not a closer look at economic and political priorities. The liberal gospel of free trade goes hand in hand with a conservative siege mentality.
In what one activist calls “border-patrol ecology,” a number of population and environment groups are fomenting dangerous resentment of immigrants, and targeting immigrant women’s fertility.2 In the Sierra Club sympathizers of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) have been pressing for anti-immigrant policies, leading to important internal struggles within the organization.3 FAIR receives substantial funding from the Pioneer Fund, whose original founder advocated sending Blacks back to Africa and supported the work of Nazi eugenicists. The Pioneer Fund still finances most major eugenics research in North America.4 The Population-Environment Balance group and Carrying Capacity Network (CCN) are also spreading anti-immigration hysteria within the environmental community, including trying to pit African Americans against Hispanic and Asian immigrants. A recent Carrying Capacity newsletter states that in California, “There is reason to believe illegal immigrants are moving into the state in order to wrest immigration and social service benefits. As increasing numbers of women from Mexico, China and other areas of the world come to the United States for the purpose of giving birth on U.S. soil, the United States has every right to consider some fundamental changes.”5
These groups are spreading the false information that immigrants are a net drain on the economy, when in fact serious studies show they are clearly a net asset.6 Governor Pete Wilson of California has called for a constitutional amendment to deny citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants, and police state measures such as mandatory ID cards are being advocated by other anti-immigration spokesmen. As this book goes to press, there is a referendum initiative in California to deny undocumented workers access to health care, except for emergency services, and to refuse their children public schooling.
Genetic determinism is also on the rise. As research on human genes flourishes, partly because of the profitable tie-in with the biotechnology business, the US popular press is carrying more articles about how alcoholism, criminality, and other socially deviant behaviors may be genetically based. The implicit or explicit assumption is that these defects could become potentially avoidable through fetal genetic screening and/or denying those affected the right of reproduction. The complex interaction between genetic traits and the individual’s social and economic environment is once again being grossly oversimplified, as it was in the heyday of eugenics.7
Population control also has a punitive crime control variant. Rather than address the underlying causes of crime—poverty and lack of opportunity—the government plans to put a hundred thousand more police on the streets and build more prisons. The death penalty is coming back in style, and a “three strikes and you’re out” law means incarceration for life for those sentenced to three felonies, even if they include things like selling marijuana. The United States already has one of the highest per capita prison populations in the world.
Manufacturing Consent
In the aftermath of Rio, a group of powerful actors from the population/environment lobby launched a campaign to sell the population consensus to the US public and government leaders. The way this campaign has been carefully orchestrated and heavily financed is a classic example of “manufacturing consent”39 through manipulation of the media and buying institutional allegiances.
The four main players are the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Global Stewardship Initiative; the US State Department through the office of Timothy Wirth, Undersecretary for Global Affairs; the UNFPA; and Ted Turner of the powerful Turner Broadcasting System, producer of Cable News Network (CNN), and his wife, former movie star Jane Fonda. The Pew Charitable Trusts, a private foundation based in Philadelphia, is the largest environmental grantmaker in the United States and thus yields tremendous power within the environmental movement. Along with several other big funders, Pew has been accused of trying to set the agenda for the movement, rather than simply providing the financial fuel to keep it going.40 Population is one of Pew’s top priorities, organized through its Global Stewardship Initiative.
Although the Pew Initiative’s White Paper lists “population growth and unsustainable patterns of consumption” as its two challenges, population growth is by far its major concern. Among Pew’s explicit goals are to “forge consensus” and “to increase public understanding of, and commitment to act on, population and consumption challenges.” Its targeted constituencies in the United States are environmental organizations, religious communities, and international affairs and foreign policy specialists.41
Thanks to over $13 million in funding from Pew, the population/environment lobby churned out massive amounts of campaign material in advance of the Cairo conference. The Pew Initiative itself hired three opinion research firms to gauge public understanding of the connections between population, environment, and consumption so as to “mobilize Americans” on these issues.
The researchers found that the public generally did not feel strongly about population growth or see it as a “personal threat.” Their conclusion: An “emotional component” is needed to kindle population paranoia. Those interviewed complained that they had already been overexposed to “images of stark misery, such as starving children.” Although the study notes that these images may in fact “work,” it recommends finding “more current, targeted visual devices.” One strategy is to build on people’s pessimism about the future: “For women, particularly, relating the problems of excess population growth to children’s future offers possibilities.”42
Pew and the Turner Foundation also sponsored “high visibility” Clinton-style town meetings on population around the country, featuring Timothy Wirth of the State Department, and organized through the US Network for Cairo, a broad coalition of NGOs also funded by Pew. While critics of US policy participated in the town meetings, the main aim was to build an even broader constituency for population and immigration control, and in particular to draw in the African-American community. “The choice of site of the mid-Atlantic meeting, Morgan State College, a historic Black college, may have provided some encouragement to minority participation,” reported Pew’s Global Stewardship newsletter.43
Opening with footage of starving children in Africa, CNN coverage of the Atlanta town meeting made short shrift of critics while devoting generous air time to Malthusian alarmists, including Jane Fonda, who is also the UNFPA’s “Goodwill Ambassador.” Fonda attributed the collapse of two ancient Native American communities to overpopulation.
Other media efforts included the ICPD Global Media Project, with the backing of Jimmy Carter, which aired television ads about the Cairo conference on CNN International and other networks, a Pew campaign to place op-eds promoting population control by prominent people in newspapers, and the publicizing of a Pew-sponsored poll which “proved” that the US electorate considers “rapid world population growth a serious problem,” rating it on a par with world hunger, the spread of nuclear weapons, and global environmental threats. The poll also found that “Americans”—that all-encompassing term used to obscure differences—believe it is “appropriate and desirable” for the United States to be involved in slowing global population growth. The pollsters released their findings at the United Nations during the preparatory meetings for Cairo.44
Meanwhile, in the collective psyche of the national security establishment, population growth is now becoming the great scapegoat and enemy, a substitute for the Evil Empire. A 1992 study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warned that population growth threatens “international stability” and called for “a multilateral effort to drastically expand family planning services.”45 A widely cited article by Thomas Homer-Dixon, Jeffrey Boutwell, and George Rathjens identifies rapidly expanding populations as a major factor in growing resource scarcities which are “contributing to violent conflicts in many parts of the developing world.”46 In 1994, Undersecretary of State Timothy Wirth drew on this analysis, identifying population growth as a major cause of the political conflicts in Rwanda, Haiti, and even the Mexican state of Chiapas.
In the pages of respectable journals, racist metaphors are acceptable again, as the concept of “noble savage” gives way to that of postmodern barbarian. In an Atlantic Monthly article on the “coming anarchy” caused by population growth and resource depletion, Robert Kaplan sensationalizes Homer-Dixon’s work. He likens poor West African children to ants—their older brothers and fathers (and poor, nonwhite males in general) are “re-primitivized” men who find liberation in violence, since their natural aggression has not been “tranquilized” by the civilizing influences of the Western Enlightenment and middle-class existence. Fomenting fear of immigrants, he warns of the “surging populations” who will cross all borders.47
This article, despite its implicit and explicit racism, has captured the liberal imagination, even that of President Clinton himself. The night before a high-level special forum on population cosponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, the Turner Foundation, the Pew Global Stewardship Initiative, and Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, Clinton delivered an introductory speech in which he began by thanking Ted Turner and Jane Fonda.
He recalled how when he was in Atlanta for a global press conference, he “got a handwritten note from Jane Fonda that said, well, you did a pretty good job on that, but don’t forget about population.” He had also received Kaplan’s article somewhere along the way. “I was so gripped by many things that were in that article,” he said, “and by the more academic treatment of the same subject by Professor Homer-Dixon. . . . You have to say, if you look at the numbers, you must reduce the rate of population growth.”48
To his credit, Clinton also mentioned a number of other factors which he believed were impeding sustainable development, and argued against any one “silver bullet” approach. But the fact that he took Kaplan’s article seriously and was so publicly beholden to Turner and Fonda showed just how powerful the forces behind the consensus are.
It is as if CNN and Pew were a shadow government, and public officials and mainstream environmentalists shadow puppets in a well-staged play.
An Excerpt from The Statement of the Government of Eritrea
In the case of Africa in particular, it is debatable whether reduced population growth will mitigate its marginalization in the global economic order and accelerate its development. Africa enjoys, on the whole, considerable comparative advantages in terms of territorial expanse and natural endowments. Its population density—even taking into account current rates of fertility—is and will remain low in relative terms for the foreseeable future. The appalling poverty and deprivation that stalk the continent are not certainly due to overpopulation and they will not be eradicated if family planning were to be introduced through attractive palliatives and public education programmes and practiced by 60-65% of the population (the target figure) instead of the current rate of 10-15%. The scourge of ethnic conflicts, massive internal and external population displacement and widespread deprivation will not be healed by the most prudent and comprehensive demographic policy.
In the event, what is required is a much bolder and holistic approach that addresses and tackles the real causes of underdevelopment. Existing imbalances in the terms of international trade must be adjusted to promote rapid and sustainable development in the countries that are lagging behind and in which the economic gap is widening. Technological transfer must be encouraged particularly in the critical productive sectors rather than on few areas—such as those for producing generic drugs—apparently selected because they promote the agenda of demographic management. The effectiveness and scale of external assistance must be increased substanstantially to extricate these countries from perennial dependence and help them stand on their feet. We believe that the donor community is uniquely placed to meet this challenge at this opportune moment.
Furthermore, it is a matter of historical reality that population stabilization is likely to be achieved as a byproduct of rather than an antecedent to overall development. Entrenched cultural and social barriers to family planning can only be dispelled in proportion to societal progress in all aspects of life. The various programmes associated with family planning, and, especially the social safety nets for the elderly, public education programmes for adolescents, empowerment of women, etc. cannot be implemented on a sustainable basis from external funding. Internal development would be essential and indeed a prerequisite for an undertaking of this scale. In brief, the answer does not lie in a compartmentalised and piecemeal approach but on a comprehensive and innovative approach to the crucial issue of development in the Third World.
—Cairo, 1994
Cairo: A Victory for Women?
At the same time that the consensus has been carefully orchestrated, the need to draw women into the process has created some political space for maneuver. The drafting of the UN Program of Action for Cairo was much more democratic than in the past, with a major role played by women’s coalitions such as the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) and the Third World women’s network, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN). A number of prominent feminists were appointed to government delegations, including that of the United States. As a result, the Program of Action contains many strong articulations of a women’s rights perspective.
Predictably the Vatican, in an unholy alliance with conservative Islamic forces, opposed any reference, no matter how veiled, to abortion, and weakened passages on reproductive and sexual rights. The abortion war dominated the conference, drawing attention away from critiques of the population consensus by Third World women’s groups and more progressive governments. (See Box: Statement of the Government of Eritrea, for an alternative voice.) The attention paid to abortion thus served the interests of the population establishment, as it did in Mexico in 1984. The worse the Vatican acted, the better the establishment looked. The final document contains mixed messages on abortion. “In no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning,” it reads. Then further on: “In circumstances in which abortion is not against the law, such abortion should be safe. In all cases, women should have access to quality services for the management of complications arising from abortion.”
The document accepts the current population and development paradigm as a given, offering no substantive critique of the “free market” economic model or its impact on poor women. It only weakly criticizes poorly designed structural adjustment programs, the debt burden, and unequal terms of trade. Redistribution is out; instead, according to the Program of Action, the emphasis should be on “sustained economic growth within the context of sustainable development.” To the extent that this vague formulation is defined, it seems to mean population stabilization, strategic temporary labor migration to suit the needs of multinational firms, and further incorporation of peasants and pastoralists into agricultural commodity markets.
In regard to coercion, the document states that coercion has no part to play in family planning programs, though it falls short of calling for the abolition of incentive and disincentive schemes, instead encouraging governments not to use them. Except for the monitoring of abuses, it does not set forth any institutional mechanisms which would apply sanctions to governments and organizations which employ coercive, abusive, or unsafe family planning methods.
Nevertheless, the document does represent a shift away from targets and incentives to other ways of promoting family planning. It strongly supports the use of a multiplicity of media channels in population information, education, and communication (IEC) activities “from the most intimate levels of interpersonal communication to formal school curricula, from traditional folk arts to modern mass entertainment, and from seminars for local community leaders to coverage of global issues by the national and international news media.” Hard core coercion is out; the soft sell strategy is in.
The Program of Action also urges the greater use of NGOs in population and development programs and calls for incorporating population concerns “in all relevant national development strategies, plans, policies, and actions.” It also calls for building “political commitment” among national leaders. What will this mean in practice? The kind of national “commitment” to population control one finds in Indonesia?
And what will increased commitment mean on the part of the international donors? According to the document, there is a “strong consensus” on the need for the international community to increase financial assistance to population programs. Will more money for population mean less money for other vital human needs? Although the document supports the direction of more national and international funds to “social development,” population could receive a disproportionate share of those funds.49 There was very little discussion at the conference of how programs would actually be financed. What the future brings will depend on how the consensus is translated into concrete population policies, which will no doubt differ from country to country. While women’s empowerment will be an accepted rhetorical norm, there is little time for complacency. Women may have won some ground, but the terrain of struggle is shifting, requiring new strategies.
Aside from fighting against narrow interpretations of reproductive health (e.g., Norplant promotion with a few STD tests thrown in), coercion, contraceptive abuse, and the antiabortion movement, activists will have to take IEC programs much more seriously than they have in the past. If the new population strategy makes good its commitment to truly voluntary family planning services, without targets or incentives, then it will have to generate demand through different channels. Female literacy and empowerment, as well as reductions in child mortality, are being set forward as the social reforms necessary to increase demand for smaller families.50 But these reforms will most likely founder on harsh economic and political realities that the population and development establishments have so far proved unwilling to confront.
Instead, in the absence of real social transformation, the emphasis will probably be on “motivational efforts” to sell the idea of small families. Many of these messages will push the consumer model: With fewer children, you can buy more and degrade the environment less, which of course is a doubtful proposition. Social marketing of contraceptives, rather than the establishment of comprehensive health services, will continue to be the priority.
When birth rates come down, IEC programs will claim victory, although they probably would have come down anyway—the trend worldwide is toward smaller families, for a host of complex reasons (see Chapter 15).
For the Western public IEC programs will mean an intensified ideological onslaught, linking population growth with political and environmental crises, with television the preferred means. Though the main purpose of the campaigns will be to build support for international population assistance, the other agenda will be population control over the domestic poor and increasingly restrictive immigration policies. Though sugar-coated with the language of women’s rights, the consensus may help to breed racism and fear.
While feminists may find some space within the consensus to negotiate for higher-quality contraceptive, abortion, and health services and increased access to economic and educational resources, the real political space will remain outside, in an alliance with progressive development agencies, social justice environmentalists, and antiracism organizers. In the New World Order not only reproductive rights are at stake, but basic economic survival and political freedoms.