Experts warn: populate and perish

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Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Broadcast: 05/11/2009

Reporter: Ticky Fullerton

As climate change and resource pressures become key global issues, some experts are warning that population control is essential.


LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: In 1935, Prime Minister Billy Hughes gave his famous advice to Australia: populate or perish.

Seventy-five years on it's a different world, with the global population set to hit seven billion early in 2012 and nine billion in 2050.

Only last month Australia's population forecast for the same period was revised upwards by 20 per cent to 35 million.

The Prime Minister says he's all for it - even though some international experts are warning about growing resource pressures.

Shortly we'll talk with Britain's chief scientist, professor John Beddington, but first this report from Lateline's Ticky Fullerton.

TICKY FULLERTON, REPORTER: Every year mother earth welcomes over 110 million more babies.

SIR CRISPIN TICKELL, OPTIMUM POPULATION TRUST: It's a biological phenomenon with considerably sinister overtones, because supposing that we were monkeys or birds or caterpillars or something like that and we had a multiplication at that rate, we'd be scared stupid. But because it's us we relax about it and think it's unimportant.

TICKY FULLERTON: Sir Crispin Tickell speaks for the Optimum Population Trust, a British-based think-tank warning of dire consequences of human proliferation. The trust boasts other powerful voices, including a man who became a household name back in 1968 with his book, The Population Bomb.

PROF. PAUL EHRLICH, AUTHOR, THE DOMINANT ANIMAL: It's quite clear that on a permanent basis we cannot support 3.7 billion people. In fact, that's somewhere between three and seven times more people on the planet can permanently support.

TICKY FULLERTON: Paul Ehrlich's predictions of mass starvation did not come true. But now at 81, he's adamant that world leaders are avoiding the most serious threat.

PROF. PAUL EHRLICH: And the problem is that the Al Gores and so on of the world, actually refuse to look at what are the really inconvenient truths. What are the inconvenient truths? There's a mal-distribution of power. We have a population problem. When you look at the Inconvenient Truth movie, the solutions at the end are all brick in the toilet-type solutions. That is, the sort of thing that, if we did every single one of them as well as we could it would delay the collapse of our civilisation by maybe 10 hours.

TICKY FULLERTON: Global population exploded after World War II from two billion, to today's nearly seven billion. 90 per cent of the growth from developing regions least able to cope, like Kenya.

FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT 2007: There are thought to be more than 120,000 homeless children in Nairobi.

TICKY FULLERTON: From 1950 to 2000, Kenya's population grew five-fold to 30 million. And projections for 2050 have recently been revised upwards from 44 million made in 2002, to 85 million.

Refugee pressures will be one of many miserable consequences, according to Sir Crispin.

SIR CRISPIN TICKELL: The increases in human migration that would flow from increased population is a major issue and countries are going to be keen to resist migrants from overseas.

TICKY FULLERTON: So dire are their predictions, the Optimum Population Trust doesn't believe there will be anything like the forecast nine billion people on earth by the end of the century.

STEVEN MOSHER, PRESIDENT, POPULATION RESEARCH INSTITUTE: Great increases in hunger, the high likelihood of nuclear war, much bigger problems with plagues than we're having now with the H1N1 flu virus and a general deterioration in the standard of living of everybody, and many, many more premature deaths.

TICKY FULLERTON: If there's even a chance that these predictions are right, then where is the media and where are our world leaders engaging in the population debate? And why is it that so many leaders accept nine billion people as inevitable, preferring to focus on issues like climate change.

SIR CRISPIN TICKELL: I think they're frightened of offending somebody, whether it be the Pope or the conventional wisdom in one or two places, they're still a bit shy about raising this issue.

TICKY FULLERTON: Pope Power is big in the Third World. In March, Pope Benedict warned against condom use in Africa, even suggested it would worsen the AIDS problem. In July he condemned all development funding linked to birth control.

PROF. PAUL EHRLICH: The actions of the hierarchy in trying to prevent discussion of it, in trying to prevent the dissemination of birth control information in trying to keep women having compulsory pregnancies instead of access to abortion and so on has a big affect on politicians.

TICKY FULLERTON: Not far from Capitol Hill is one such influential force. The Population Research Institute - the PRI - has a network of pro-life groups in over 30 countries. Its goal is to expose the myth of over-population.

STEVEN MOSHER: What population growth? Europe is dying. Canada is dying, the United State's population continues to increase because of immigration from other countries. Remember this: that the food and agriculture organisation based in Rome, part of the UN system says that with current agricultural technology we can feed 14 billion people. We will never get to 14 billion.

TICKY FULLERTON: Steven Mosher has given evidence in Congress and appeared on many US talk shows.

STEVEN MOSHER: I have seen first-hand what happens when governments take over control of fertility in a country. I was in China when the one child policy began. I witnessed the forced abortion of women at seven, eight, nine months of pregnancy. And I suspect that if Professor Ehrlich had been with me in the operating room and saw these forced abortions, that he might feel a little bit differently about his population-control proposals.

SIR CRISPIN TICKELL: Had the Chinese not introduced their one family, one child policy there would be something like 400 million more Chinese than there are today.

PRI CAMPAIGN VIDEO: This is the sterilisation procedure 215,000 Peruvian women were forced to undergo.

TICKY FULLERTON: Thanks in part to the PRI's campaigning the body charged with world population policy, the United Nations, is itself pretty impotent.

PRI CAMPAIGN VIDEO: The United States has been accused of helping fund the program.

TICKY FULLERTON: Since 1984, US funding for all United Nations-related aid groups offering abortion was cut off by all three Republican presidents after UN support was linked to government sterilisation programs.

This year has brought change. Barack Obama has restored funding to the UN, and significantly, one former world leader has spoken out on population.

BILL CLINTON, FMR US PRESIDENT: There is really one full-proof way to slow the world's population growth, in a way that will not violate the values of any religion, and that is to dramatically accelerate our efforts to put every single girl in the world in school.

TICKY FULLERTON: Research presented this month to the UN supports educating women as the key to population restraint and it's the many message of the Optimum Population Trust, which does not support forced population control.

SIR CRISPIN TICKNELL: Where women have the same rights and the rest as men, and where they have control over their own bodies, then you find the population very rapidly gets into balance, and you see this very well illustrated in India.

ARCHIVE FOOTAGE, 1994: Women in this predominantly Christian state are better educated and have more rights than elsewhere.

TICKY FULLERTON: Ironically the best example of such female empowerment is fundamentalist Iran, now the condom capital of the Middle East.

FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT, 2000: For those veiled women are on the frontline, countering a threat to the very existence of the Islamic Republic. A population explosion.

TICKY FULLERTON: The PRI supports education, but argues its poverty not populations destroying the environment, and Stephen Mosher claims the United Nations population fund still has a much tougher agenda.

STEVEN MOSHER: How can they on the one hand claim to espouse choice and on the other hand instruct governments that they have a population problem, that they must do something about the problem and, "Here, we'll give you the means to reduce the fertility among your people."

TICKY FULLERTON: The biggest concern now for Paul Ehrlich is a surprise forecast population growth in western countries like Australia and the United States.

PROF. PAUL EHRLICH: The problem isn't too many poor babies, it's too many rich babies. They are the ones putting huge pressure on life support systems, so there should be gigantic penalties on rich people for having too many children.

TICKY FULLERTON: Father of nine children, Steven Mosher is unrepentant.

STEVEN MOSHER: Children have an economic value. Every child born in the United States will contribute over his or her life-time about two thirds of a million dollars to the economy more than they will consume. That is, they'll leave America a better place.

TICKY FULLERTON: As America's environmental footprint grows and the population clock ticks away, expect little talk of population at Copenhagen in December.

Ticky Fullerton, Lateline.

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Experts warn: populate and perish

Experts warn: populate and perish

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