Population: the Awkward Truth

By EUGENE LINDEN

Why do Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles tend to have more children than impoverished peasants living in Mexico City? The answer helps explain why the international community has so far failed to slow the population explosion, and why it will probably fail again this fall when delegates from 180 nations meet in Cairo to address the issue. But first a little background.

Twenty years ago in Bucharest, the United Nations World Population Conference produced a wish list of things governments might do to get a grip on population: improve the status of women, expand access to health care, alleviate poverty. With the notable exception of Africa, the world has made progress in these areas: infant mortality has declined, as has the percentage of people who live in abject poverty, and the Green Revolution has improved the diet of hundreds of millions of people.

Despite this progress, the global population situation is far more dire than it was back then. In 1974 the world had roughly 3.9 billion people and was growing by 80 million a year. Since then the world's population has grown nearly 1.7 billion, and it now increases 90 million annually. Today the Green Revolution falters, ecosystems are badly degraded and fresh-water supplies continue to shrink. It is open to question whether the world can feed the 3 billion to 5 billion mouths that will be added during the next 50 years.Refugees produced by population pressures in Africa and Asia already threaten to destabilize nations.

And so delegates from 180 nations will meet in Cairo for another go at the population problem. Advocacy groups and bureaucrats alike trumpet this conference as a breakthrough because it will focus on women's issues. In U.N.-speak, however, that translates into a catalog of desiderata ranging from appeals to eliminate sexual stereotypes to calls for men to do more housework -- nice-sounding proposals that are irrelevant to population control in many of the traditional cultures of the Third World.

In fact, this effort is unlikely to be any more effective than the agenda that came out of Bucharest 20 years ago. Reason: the principal assumption underlying decades of efforts to halt the population explosion turns out to be questionable at best. This is the "demographic transition," the notion that people will have fewer children as their sense of well-being increases. It has been embraced by such strange bedfellows as the Reagan Administration and Vice President Al Gore because it offers the bland assurance that a nation can achieve the aims of family planning in the course of economic development.

Trouble is, it often turns out that people have more children as their sense of well-being increases, particularly when technological advance or government largesse give them the idea that the old limits no longer apply. So argues Vanderbilt University anthropologist Virginia Abernethy and a growing cohort of critics. In Kenya, for instance, total fertility rose from 7.5 live births per woman in the mid-1950s to 8.12 in the 1960s and '70s even as infant mortality declined and incomes rose.

Conversely, it seems that countries often show a dramatic drop in their birthrate not because of prosperity but because of a decrease in people's sense of well-being. For instance, a study of Nigerian communities revealed that bad economic times in recent years caused young Yoruba families to turn to contraception even though infant mortality was rising -- a development that directly contradicts conventional wisdom about the demographic transition.

This is not to argue that poverty is the way to control population, but to point out that policymakers, in their eagerness to embrace a politically correct approach to a sensitive issue, frequently ignore what determines family size. This brings us back to the question of the Mexican mothers.

Conventional wisdom holds that poor women in Mexico City should have more children than their counterparts in the U.S. who have better health care and a higher standard of living. But peasant families tend to have two or three children in Mexico City, while those who immigrate to the U.S. average four or five children. In crowded Mexico City each child imposes steep costs on a family, while in the U.S. welfare payments and other social safety nets buffer those costs. These skewed incentives convey similar signals to poor young women in America's inner cities, who in many cases see no reason to defer having children.

Delegates going to Cairo should keep these subtle signals in mind and scale back their ambitions to reform the world as they formulate their action plan. Government programs that subsidize jobs or housing can spur population growth ( by giving people false confidence in the future, while a tiny loan that enables a woman in Bangladesh to buy a sewing machine to start a business may give her an incentive to limit the number of children she bears. Such empowerment is more achievable in the developing world than paid maternal leave, day care and other high-minded calls that characterize population summits.

Finally, 120 million couples who would like to limit their family size still lack easy access to contraception. We must help them get it. Promoting the use of condoms also helps impede the spread of aids. If governments continue to fiddle while human numbers explode, it becomes ever more likely the horsemen of famine, disease and anarchy will have their day.