Memo to Attenborough: Capitalism, not human beings, is the earth’s 'plague'

TV naturalist Sir David Attenborough’s programmes are usually fascinating and informative but when it comes to his views on population control, he is talking rubbish. Reactionary rubbish at that.

“Human beings are a plague on the earth,” Attenborough says in an interview with the Radio Times. If we don’t limit “the frightening explosion in human numbers, the natural world will do it for us”.

Attenborough (president of the Malthusian Optimum Population Trust) calls for urgent measures to cut population growth in developing countries: “We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that’s what’s happening. Too many people there. They can’t support themselves…”

But Ethiopia is actually a classic example of why this is absolute nonsense. If the calories grown in Ethiopia stayed in Ethiopia then there would be no problem feeding the whole population. But the government’s economic plan is dependent on forcing its own citizens off the land and handing it over to global agribusiness to grow crops for export.

Ethiopia has had a consistently high annual growth in GDP throughout the last two decades. In 2011, it was 7%, compared to an overall global growth rate of 3.9% in the same year, and most of this expansion is accounted for by agriculture.

The government has a 10-year plan to double the size of the economy, and this means doubling industrial agriculture and agricultural products such as refined sugar and leather. This is to be achieved by selling or leasing millions of acres of land to global agri-businesses.

The removal of a planned total of 1.5 million rural families to new "model" villages in four regions, including approximately 45,000 households in Gambella province, is well underway. Claims that people are going voluntarily and that jobs and services are waiting for them are a pack of lies.

One group of refugees from Gambella is taking legal action against the British Department for International Development. Britain is one of the biggest contributors to the Protection of Basic Services (PBS) programme which pays for corrupt officials and soldiers and infrastructure for the clearances.

The legal action, undertaken by British law firm Leigh Day, is being launched from the world’s biggest refugee camp at Dadaab in northern Kenya where Ethiopians fled after reaching the “model villages” to find there was nothing there.

The World Bank endorses the Ethiopian government’s desire to get people out of what it calls “overpopulated rural settings”, but it admits that in spite of all this recent growth “the absolute number of poor is almost the same as 15 years ago and a significant proportion of the population remains just above the poverty line and vulnerable to shocks”.

It is true that population of Ethiopia is growing at around 2.1% per year, but that rate of growth is slowing. The fertility rate, i.e. the average number of births per woman, is still relatively high at 5.7, but this is also slowing. The rate of births always increases when early deaths from wars, disease or famine increases. It slows when things are more stable but it takes time for that social change to take hold.

As more and more land is cleared of people or of trees and jungle, and subjected to the intensive farming practices of the global chemical corporations, so desertification and greenhouse gas emissions will continue to increase. Famine and hunger also rises, as we have seen.

If there was a fair distribution of food, care and support, health and education in Ethiopia and all the countries of the world, and if the people owned the land they farm, there would be no problem feeding people. This approach would also protect the eco-system because it would be sustainable.

People are not the problem, Sir David, global capitalism and its relentless drive for “growth” is. I hope you will be making a programme about that soon!

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Give a warm welcome to the 7 billionth human

The 7-billionth human, who will be born in the next few days, may get a warm welcome from its family, but there are plenty around who see its arrival as a disaster.

Pessimistic environmentalists who see no alternative to capitalism and profit-driven growth, argue that more people equals more consumption equals more climate change and eco-destruction. They share 19^th views popularised by the Rev Thomas Malthus.

The truth is more complex. Areas of the world where consumption is highest, for example, are those where the birth rate is medium (the USA and United Kingdom) to low (Germany, Italy, France). If lower consumption were the goal, a forced one-child policy in the United States would do it.

Population growth - where the number of births outstrips the number of deaths - is dependent on each woman replacing herself with a daughter. In China, a chain of events has been put in train by the violent elimination of hundreds of thousands of girls that could, over the longer term, lead to a population collapse. In parts of India it is the same. China is already classified as a low-population growth country, India as “intermediate”.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has set out three future scenarios for growth - low, medium and high. Taking the medium variant as the most likely, they show that by 2100, only the population of high-fertility countries would still be increasing.

The populations of both the low-fertility countries - which include China, Russia, Brazil and the United States – and the intermediate-fertility countries – which include India and the United Kingdom – would be declining at a rate of approximately 0.3% per year. In high-fertility countries, the rate of increase would be 0.5% per year. These are mainly countries in Africa and some parts of Asia.

A small improvement in living standards and social conditions, giving women greater control of their own reproduction, would transform the situation and bring stabilisation quickly. As UNFPA explains: "Small differences in fertility levels sustained over long periods have a major impact on the future population."

The social problems of an ageing population are already being felt across Europe and most acutely in Italy and Germany, where there are simply not enough young people working to generate tax revenue to pay for pensions for the older generation - or even to look after them.

“Young people hold the key to the future, with the potential to transform the global political landscape and to propel economies through their creativity and capacities for innovation,” said UNFPA executive director Dr Babatunde Osotimehin. “We should be investing in the health and education of our youth. This would yield enormous returns in economic growth and development for generations to come.”

Of course, the exact opposite is happening. Capitalism in crisis is creating a disaster for the new generation.

There are 1.8 billion young people between the ages of 10 and 24. More than 75 million of those aged between 15-24 are unemployed, whilst around 250 million aged under 13 are working, often full-time, when they should be in education. A million young people are out of work in Britain, the highest total ever.

“With planning and the right investments in people now — to empower them to make choices that are not only good for themselves, but also for our global commons—our world of 7 billion can have thriving sustainable cities, productive labour forces that fuel economies, and youth populations that contribute to the well-being of their societies," says the UNFPA.

The desire of young people for just such a transformation is driving the global uprising. They see that they cannot look to the existing system to deliver a future. It can only be achieved by eliminating the crisis-ridden capitalist system, replacing it with a society based on respect for life, consumption for need not profit, and protection of the planet's ecology.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Population scare a 'convenient lie'

With effective international governmental action to tackle climate change well and truly off the agenda, perhaps it is no accident that attempts are under way to make global population levels a central issue once again.

The thinking, as always, is that there are too many people on the planet for “sustainable development” as well as concerns about the “impacts” of growing populations on resources. At least that is how the Royal Society, Britain’s self-appointed national academy of science, wants us to see the issue.

It has announced an inquiry into population levels that has a real ring of the late 18th century about it. The cleric-turned-economist Thomas Malthus then predicted that humanity would grow faster than the food supply. This “principle”, claimed Malthus, was "one of the causes that have hitherto impeded the progress of mankind towards happiness".

Modern supporters of variations of Malthus’s notions are on the panel. They include Jonathan Porritt, former government chief environmental adviser and head of the Sustainable Development Commission, and naturalist and film-maker David Attenborough, who is a leading light in the disturbing Optimum Population Trust (OPT).

The OPT’s Roger Martin believes that people have to live “within the limits of the place we inhabit” while its website claims that population growth is “rapidly destabilising our climate and destroying the natural world on which we depend for future life”. Britain’s “optimum” population is put at 30 million – under half its present size.

The whole argument is muddle-headed and is based on accepting how capitalist society functions (or, in many instances, does not) as an eternal, natural law. Even a glance at the figures since Malthus disproves his assertion. In 1800, at the beginning of the industrial revolution, there were about a 1 billion people, which rose to 1.7 billion by 1900.

By 2000, it had quadrupled to 6 billion during a century of advances in public health, technology, food production and cheaper energy sources. In other words, the world’s population grew because there was a potential and capacity for it to survive. Absolute numbers continue to grow and projections are for a total of 8.3 billion by 2030. But the percentage rate of increase is falling. In many countries, a declining birth-rate points to an eventual fall in absolute numbers.

The biologist and writer Colin Tudge fiercely disputes the Malthusian argument, insisting that the failure to feed the present population is a result of feeding half of all staple crops to livestock, and then wasting about a third of what we do produce. “We already produce enough for nine billion, if only we used it properly. And we don't need to be vegetarian. Cattle and sheep do best on grass and browse, and there is plenty of those,” he insists.

As Tudge suggests, the real issues are about how food is produced, distributed and sold as well as how natural resources are used. The Royal Society, as an establishment institution, won’t question the framework of capitalist society. Instead, it wants us to accept that we cannot reach beyond the present, or conceive of another way of organising society. A truly anti-scientific approach if there ever was one.

Global society has indeed reached a “limit” - one that actually prevents us from establishing a conscious, sustainable self-relationship with nature. The limit is to be found in a capitalist society’s social relations that commodify everything and alienates producers from the fruits of their labour and the world around them.

For the last word, I can do no better than cite Tudge again: “For governments and corporations, Malthusian gloom is not an inconvenient truth but an all-too convenient lie. We are still told from on high that even to keep pace with human numbers we need to double food supply in the next few decades – so we need more big-time industrial farming with hi-tech inputs. There is no reason for this – except that it's profitable, and would maintain the political status quo. The future is indeed promising; but if we want to gather its fruits, then we need to find a very different way of running our affairs.”

Paul Feldman

Communications editor