School of Medicine, University of Leeds, 5 Ashwood Villas, Leeds, LS6 2EJ, UK. E-mail: m.h.king{at}leeds.ac.uk
Under the Banyan Tree: A Population Scientist's Odyssey. Sheldon J Segal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 242, £22.95 (HB). ISBN: 0-19-515456-8.
This book sees educating girls as the panacea for the world's population problemsand so it might have been, had there been time! It takes its title from a group of Indian schoolgirls whom the writer saw scribbling on their slates in the shade of a banyan tree. It forgets that ancient Indian proverb Nothing grows under the banyan tree. What now so urgently needs to grow there is an approach to population control that is effective when a community is already demographically trapped and when it is too late for the fertility lowering effect of female education to be the major method, because the time it needs to work has already been lost. A community is demographically trapped when it has exceeded the carrying capacity of its fragile ecosystem, and when it has no new land to migrate to, and when its economy produces too few exports to exchange for food and other essentials. It is also trapped if, because its population is increasing, it is expected to be in this unhappy state before long. The end results of entrapment are the direct poverty, stunting, starvation, and population-driven violence, as in Malawi1 and Rwanda,2 and, if we are to believe Figures 1 and 2, in much of the rest of Africa also.
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In 1979 Segal was told by the then Minister of Science and Technology in China, Fang Yi, that China's one child per couple policy is a sacrifice that present Chinese make for future generations. He says nothing about the importance of this sacrifice for other communities which are similarly trapped. The difference is that China, with its millennia of civilization, was well set for the rapid economic take-off which has been so useful for disentrapment and which has so greatly assisted its one-child policies. Meanwhile, Malawi, for example, the entrapment basket-case, is less than a hundred years out of the Iron Age, and is much less fortunate. China was also fortunate in being culturally independent, and thus not subject to the population policy lockstep4 which keeps demographic entrapment, and the measures that are needed to combat it, firmly taboo.
The unhappy necessity for one-child families has an important corollary. If the South has to reduce its fertility to avoid starvation and violence (as in Rwanda), the North will be expected to reduce its resource consumption and live sustainable lifestyles. It would therefore make good political sense for the US, which dominates demography, to try to keep demographic entrapment taboo for as long as it can, so as to minimize further criticism of its excessive resource consumption. It should thus be no surprise that Sheldon Segal, who is from the US, is meticulous in his political correctness and continues to enforce the population policy lockstep. The consequences of this would not be so grave if it affected only one or two countries. Unfortunately, Figure X suggests that there may be many more.
Segal tells us that:
...instead of amplifying discussions on population matters, the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994 had a dampening effect on the level of dialogue. Important population problems faded from the radar screen of public concern.
However, he does not tell us that this dampening was intended, nor how it took place. McIntosh and Finkle5 are much more illuminating; they note that ...historically, the State Department has considered population in the light of US and global security..., and also that ... once formed, the US position [in Cairo] was advanced with determination and skill through every available channel....5 Every available channel, included advising the then editor of the Lancet, Robin Fox, that my paper, then entitled A one-child world had better not be published.6 In Cairo I was interviewed by the CIA.
No wonder then that after the Cairo conference, Segal notes that a new and pejorative term appearedthe demographic imperative, implying that any concern with the consequences of rapid population growth is now out of datean extraordinary conclusion in view of Figure X.
Segal confesses to being merely surprised that although Japan offered to host the decennial UN population conference that was expected in 2004, it has now been abandoned. Unless it is reinstated, the regular series of population conferences that started in Bucharest in 1974 will have ended. He surely knows why is it has been abandonedif it is the purpose of the US to keep the global population debate at the lowest possible ebb, and demographic entrapment taboo, why fund a conference that might discuss it?
The refusal to discuss entrapment as a consequence of the population policy lockstep is a determinant of starvation and violence of the greatest possible magnitude. It is a political determinant, so it needs a political response. That response is beyond the scope of this review, so see Genu robustum.. in http://www.leeds.ac.uk./demographic.disentrapment. See also Mola G et al.1
Since taboos are not consciously logical, we should not be surprised to find that they have illogical edges. Thus, although Segal is blind to the problems of local communities exceeding the carrying capacities of their ecosystems, he is worried by the same thing happening to the world as a whole. He observes that with 6 billion of us now on the planet, habitable land and resources are finite, and that sooner or later high birth rates will have to fallhe doesn't say that if they don't, death rates will rise. He reminds us that to maintain even present nutritional levels, food production will have to double by 2030, with yields per hectare that are not maintaining their robust growth of the recent past. The peak of grain producing area was reached in 1981. It has since fallen almost 10% and will decline further as marginal lands under cultivation become unusable. Grain land per person has fallen almost 50% in the last 20 years, a continuing trend that has become evident since 1950. Nutrients that took scores of years to accumulate in rich soil can be lost in one season of cultivation. Overall, the ploughshare seems to have been even more destructive than the sword.
By failing to disaggregate his data, and by throwing China in with Middle Africa, he comforts us by observing that, whereas less than 10% of couples used family planning in the 1960s, in 2000 nearly 60% of them did. He forgets that, in a third of countries in Middle Africa, fertility has not even begun to fall.7
Segal sees the world from the ease of the Villa Serbellonithat Rockefeller mansion on the shores of Lake Como. He describes his book as an odyssey. It is an eyewitness account of what actually happened in the early years of family planning research, by the only biomedical scientist to have received a UN Population Award. It is scholarly. We learn that Rhesus monkeys seldom have the luxury of a menstrual period, and that Colonial America had a total fertility rate of 8. We are told that, so impressed is a former Indian Minister of Health with the effect of population growth on poverty that, whereas in 1974 he used to argue that Development is the best contraceptive, he now argues that Contraception is the best development.
It should now be clear why Segal would like to reopen the dialogue on the scientific issues related to populationbut not on population itself!
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2 André C, Platteau J-P. Land relations under unbearable stress: Rwanda caught in a Malthusian trap. Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation 1998;34:147.[CrossRef]
3 King M. Go for 1-kid families or the [population] bomb will hit Uganda. The Monitor Newspaper, Kampala Uganda, 7 December 1996.
4 King MH. The US Department of State is Policing the Population Policy Lockstep. BMJ 1999;319:9981001.
5 McIntosh CA, Finkle JL. The Cairo Conference on Population and Development: A new paradigm. Population and Development Review 1995;21:22360.[ISI]
6 King MH, Elliott C, Hellberg H, Lilford R, Martin J, Rock E. Does demographic entrapment question the 2-child paradigm? Health Policy Plann 1995;10:37683.[ISI]
7 Guengant J-P, May JF. Impact of the proximate determinants on the future course of fertility in sub-Saharan Africa. Workshop on Prospects for Fertility Decline in High Fertility Countries. 7 November 2001. New York: UN Population Division.
8 UN Population Division. Charting the Progress of Populations. 17 November 2002. New York: UN Population Division.
9 UN Population Division. Long-range world population projections: based on the 1998 revision. New York: UN Population Division, 2002.
10 Byerlee D, Eicher CK. Africa's Emerging Maize Revolution. Boulder USA, London: Rienner, 1997.